When we were young......

DeletedUser

Since this forum (at least the people I interact with here) tends to skew older and many of you have kids I wanted to pose this. (actually I wanted to find a short paragraph that somebody e-mailed me a long time ago but I can't find it) Many of the things that we used to do/take for granted as kids are now banned in some schools (tag, dodgeball) because they cause "mental anguish" or "psychological scarring". Also many of the (granted some of them were hairbrained) activities have become bubble wrapped or disappeared; you need twelve tons of protective gear to ride a bike, sledding downhill headfirst or on flexible flyers (remember them?), when's the last time you saw a kid climb a tree?
So the question is are we being over protective of the younger set?
 

DeletedUser1105

Yes definately.

I agree that some things have changed for the better. For example, that softer flooring they put at childrens parks is much better than the tarmac that I used to scrape my knees on. But taking away the monkey bars because they are dangerous (as my local council did) is ridiculous.

I remember a game being banned whilst I was in primary school (circa 1996) called British Bulldog. For those not familiar, you had to run from one side of the playground to the other whilst the person who was 'on' had to catch you before you got there. If you got caught, you were also 'on'. This was banned because someone fell over and broke their arm. Ridiculous, I think.

I can understand the need for greater security and making things safer, but I definately think that kids need to be allowed to explore and experiment and find out about the world around them for themselves. If they climb a tree and fall off, then it's their own fault and they will have learned a valuable lesson.
 

DeletedUser

I used to take peanut butter sandwiches to school for lunch.
On the drive with the family to the cottage my brother and I would freely jump around the back of the station wagon the whole 2 hours.
I got a skateboard for my 6th birthday and a wood burning kit for my 9th. Had a bike of some form as long as I can remember and never had a helmet or padding (got stitches twice from wiping out and was back riding the next day - against my mother's wishes, lol)
 

DeletedUser

sdjx22 said:
I remember a game being banned whilst I was in primary school (circa 1996) called British Bulldog. For those not familiar, you had to run from one side of the playground to the other whilst the person who was 'on' had to catch you before you got there. If you got caught, you were also 'on'. This was banned because someone fell over and broke their arm. Ridiculous, I think.
Click to expand...

Heh, I remember that, it was banned just because it was violent (?) at my primary.

I think we are extremely over protective, even to the extent that teaching competition is bad, and that you shouldn't aim to be the winner but enjoy taking part.
 

DeletedUser

Yes & No.

I used to climb like nobody's business (made some school records). Would swing from here to there, climb the tree and from there I would jump onto the bars some 20 feet in the air. Some of the things I did could have killed me, but I was a kid and didn't think about the risk. Never even crossed my mind that had I ever fallen, I would have landed on concrete. As to monkey bars, I was all over them. But, I do recall one girl falling off of them when she was hanging upside down, and she ended up partly paralyzed, so there is logic in being concerned.

In some things they have gotten a bit overprotective, and sometimes the motivation is based on avoiding lawsuits, but the mere existence of X-games gives evidence that kids are still out there taking major risks, and parents are out there encouraging them to do so.
 

DeletedUser

Personally I encourage my children to eat a huge lunch, pick up a pair of scissors, then run as fast as they can straight into the swimming pool. Then again, I also encourage them to 'keep their face like that' in the hopes it will stick.

Everything is about lawsuits these days as Hellstromm pointed out. The schools don't fear for the safety of the children, they fear for the safety of their pocketbook first and foremost.

We have definitely become overprotective of our children. When I say 'we' I mean society as a whole. If I don't care that my kids don't ride helmets when they are riding their bikes then I don't see why the state should care either. It's not as if I'm teaching them to handle venomous snakes (which is done in some very odd churches but they get away with it because of freedom of religion).
 
nashy19

nashy19

Nashy (as himself)
sdjx22 said:
I remember a game being banned whilst I was in primary school (circa 1996) called British Bulldog. For those not familiar, you had to run from one side of the playground to the other whilst the person who was 'on' had to catch you before you got there. If you got caught, you were also 'on'. This was banned because someone fell over and broke their arm. Ridiculous, I think.
Click to expand...

Yeah we do this in Britain (of course). One year we got the whole school onto the rugby field to play it and played the whole pitch, with the two oldest years in the center.

I did fall from the monkey bars once, but these one's where triple the normal height and in the woods as part of a little adventure park.
 
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