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.

How do digital immigrants deal with young digital natives?

In 2001, education and technology writer Marc Prensky popularized the term digital natives to describe the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games and other technologies. (The rest of us are digital immigrants, struggling to understand.)

In her article “The Touch-Screen Generation” in The Atlantic (April), Hanna Rosin writes about how young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. She asks, “Should parents recoil or rejoice?”

In 1999, Rosin writes, the American Academy of Pediatrics discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, “citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for ‘direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers.’ ” In 2006, 90 percent of parents said their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Yet in its updated policy in 2011, the AAP “largely took the same approach it took in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids,” writes Rosin.

What are parents to do? Well, Rosin is one, with three children “who are all fans of the touch screen.” But when she talks with people (also parents of young children) who help develop interactive media for children, she finds them more restrictive than she is about their children using technology.

Rosin describes “the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children.” Parents are afraid that if they don’t use the new technology just right, “their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.”

Rosin asks, How do small children actually experience electronic media, and what does that experience do to their development?

Because much of the recent technology is new, most of the research in this area concerns toddlers’ interaction with television. Researchers eventually identified certain rules that promote engagement: “stories have to be linear and easy to follow, cuts and time lapses have to be used very sparingly, and language has to be pared down and repeated.”

Now researchers are beginning to study toddlers’ use of iPads to see what they can learn and if they can transfer what they learn to the real world. They ask further, “What effect does interactivity have on learning? What role do familiar characters play in children’s learning from iPads?”

Rosin wondered if too many apps developed for children emphasized education over play. Then she came across apps designed by a Swedish game studio named Toca Boca.

In 2011, the studio’s founders, Emil Ovemar and Björn Jeffery, launched Toca Tea Party. “The game is not all that different from a real tea party,” writes Rosin. It’s not overtly educational, and there’s no winning and no reward. “The game is either very boring or terrifically exciting, depending on what you make of it,” she writes. For kids, the game is fun every time, “because it’s dependent entirely on imagination.”

Rosin notes that “every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people.” However, despite “legitimate broader questions about how American children spend their time,” parents have to decide for themselves.

Rosin decided to let her young son have access to an iPad for six months. “After about 10 days, the iPad fell out of his rotation, just like every toy does.” It was just one more tool.

We digital immigrants will continue to struggle with our digital natives.