Reasonable risks are good for children

When I was a boy, I and my friends wandered the neighborhood unsupervised. We walked to school and didn’t worry about strangers. We had a tree house and built forts; we used our imagination to play various games.

Now that seems like a different world from today. I rarely see children playing outside in our neighborhood. And if they do, it’s usually in their own yard.

No, I’m not just being nostalgic. This change in our culture has unhealthy consequences for our children. An article in The Atlantic (April) addresses this reality and calls for change.

In “Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone,” Hanna Rosin points out that when kids face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and conquer them alone, this builds self-confidence and courage.

She quotes Joe Frost, a safety crusader whose influence brought drastic changes to playgrounds in the ’80s but has now become concerned that we’ve gone too far. Adults have come to the mistaken view “that children must somehow be sheltered from all risks of injury,” Frost writes, but “in the real world, life is filled with risks—financial, physical, emotional, social—and reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development.”

There has been a drastic change in parents’ supervision of children. Rosin refers to a U.K. study that showed that “in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower.”

Parents routinely tell their children never to talk to strangers, “even though all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago,” Rosin writes.

In fact, overall, crimes against children have been declining. One exception is family abduction. “The explosion in divorce in the ’70s meant many more custody wars and many more children being smuggled away by one or the other of the parents,” Rosin writes.

Ellen Sandseter, a professor of early-childhood education in Norway, published a paper in 2011 on children’s risky play. She concluded that children “have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement,” at least in their minds.

She identifies six kinds of risky play: (1) exploring heights, (2) handling dangerous tools, (3) being near dangerous elements, (4) rough-and-tumble play, (5) speed and (6) exploring on one’s own.

The last one, she says, is the most important: “When they are left alone and can take full responsibility for their actions, and the consequences of their decisions, it’s a thrilling experience.” And they gain self-confidence.

She writes that “our fear of children being harmed,” mostly in minor ways, “may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

Today, writes Rosin, “failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent.” And this has resulted in a “continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways,” according to psychologist Peter Gray.

In an essay called “The Play Deficit,” Gray chronicles the fallout from the loss of the old childhood culture: depression, narcissism and a decline in empathy, “a familiar list of the usual ills attributed to Millennials.”

Rosin concludes: “We can no more create the perfect environment for our children than we can create perfect children. To believe otherwise is a delusion, and a harmful one.”

Fear breeds fear. Raising children without phobias may require letting them play without parental supervision, letting them experience the thrill of reasonable risks.