Posted on 10/26/2013 8:35:29 AM PDT by bigbob
Last weekend I was on a soft foam playground with my little girl, and I reflected on how different things were when I was a kid, shortly after dinosaurs roamed the earth. Playgrounds then were asphalt-covered, jagged-edged death traps for kids, but we didn’t know any differently and our parents weren’t freaked out about it. I vividly remember once hanging upside down from monkey bars and dropping onto concrete directly on my head (now that I think about it, that hit probably explains quite a bit about me). It’s a wonder that my generation survived childhood. What concerns me today is that my daughter’s generation will grow up so coddled that it won’t survive adulthood.
One New Hampshire elementary school has banned the game of tag during recess, because the contact is potentially harmful. “We want them running, we want them jumping and releasing the energy, but just in a safe way,” said principal Patricia Beaulieu. “They’re allowed to play soccer… basketball, there’s jump ropes, there’s different balls they can play with, different foursquare games out there.”
A middle school in Port Washington, New York recently banned footballs, soccer balls, baseballs and lacrosse balls on its playgrounds, because those “hard” balls are potentially injurious. Seriously? Theoretically, anything – or nothing – can be potentially injurious. A kid could break a wrist just by falling awkwardly. I support the idea of switching out dangerous playground asphalt for a bouncy, foamy substitute; but are we really helping our children by restricting their sporting activity to the bland safety of pitching Nerf balls underhanded?
In that same paranoid vein, the Postal Service announced it was scrapping a line of stamps depicting children in various forms of play such as skipping rope, walking and jogging, dribbling a basketball, etc. The reason? It received “concerns” from the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition over apparently “unsafe” acts shown on three of the stamps: a cannonball dive into a pool, skateboarding without kneepads, and a headstand without a helmet (somehow they overlooked the horrifying images of a batter without a helmet, a girl teetering one-legged on a slippery rock, and a soccer player without kneepads). Apparently the Council feared the stamps would inspire kids to perform potentially dangerous acts – as if youngsters these days even know what a stamp is.
And then there are the senseless extremes of politically correct, anti-gun hysteria, in which schoolchildren all over the country are being suspended, labeled a “terrorist threat,” and even required to undergo psychiatric evaluation – not for bringing weapons to school, but for even pretending to play with guns or gesturing like a gun with index finger and thumb. One seven-year-old was suspended because he accidentally shaped a breakfast pastry to resemble a gun, according to his teacher, who was literally reduced to tears by the trauma.
We now aggressively confront bullying, which is a positive thing – except that children who physically defend themselves from bullies are being punished as well, as if self-defense is equally reprehensible. Sometimes in the real world, the only thing bullies understand is a dose of their own medicine, and our children need to be ready for this reality and to grasp the moral distinction.
“It’s really about [children] being healthy and their well-being,” said the New Hampshire elementary school principal Beaulieu. I think not. I believe that all this is about lawsuit avoidance and an intentional effort to mold American children into risk-averse, compliant, helpless pacifists that can be easily controlled by the state. Whatever the reason, we are creating a generation of wimps.
By contrast, let’s examine childrearing in history’s most aggressive warrior culture, ancient Sparta. If a Spartan baby didn’t start out life fit enough, it was abandoned to die. Soldiers took boys from their mothers at age 7 and housed them in a dormitory to begin their training as a ruthless killing force. They endured harsh physical discipline, and learned to endure pain and survive deprivation. Sparta needed strong mothers to produce strong warriors, so girls too were removed from the home at 7 and trained in wrestling, gymnastics, fighting, and endurance.
Not a parenting strategy I recommend. But in our overprotective zeal to create ultra-safe environments and to brainwash the bold, competitive, independent American spirit out of impressionable young generations, we are creating citizens who will be unable to handle adversity or defend themselves on a personal or national level. Sure, there is some relief in knowing that my children will grow up on playgrounds that aren’t simply concussions waiting to happen; but I want them mentally and physically prepared for life’s inevitable scrapes and bruises, and fearless enough to take down bullies without Daddy’s help.
Don’t forget fags in the military and gender neutral uniforms.
I long for the pre-Tailhook years!
I agree, we are crippling our children. They will be totally unable to handle life. In trying to help, we are destroying them. We coddle their bodies, we make them dependent and unable to deal with the hardships that life sends their way.
You don’t need a camp to do that. You just need parents. Lots of kids do have such parents, unfortunately their numbers are small.
They are not raising little wusses and neither are we.
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I grew up playing all sorts of contact sports with lots of kids older (and bigger) than me. I was well prepared to play football in high school. My coach marveled at my toughness. lol
No, a generation of wimps is raising a generation of totally clueless pussies.
They used to call those Boy Scout Camps.
I imagine many out there have the same fond memories of ‘stuff that would get us killed’ or ‘poke out an eye’.
Judo is excellent defense against bullies.
Our playground was hard-packed Pennsylvania clay, though most of the time we were running around in the woods. You know, swinging on vines that more often than not broke dropping us (if we were lucky) into a creek, or onto exposed shale...
Other toys? Anything round, any kind of ball be it baseball, football, kickball... My friends and I would make up some game that involved possessing and moving the ball amid tackling and running... Pads? Never wore them. Helmets? Not until I started riding - a motorcycle.
I survived with all my parts intact. Yes there were a couple of trips to docs for strained this, dislocated that... It happened to all of us. Builds character. Without it, the author is right - builds wimps.
I LOVED dodgeball! Never got hurt so badly that I couldn’t pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again. And I am a girl ; )
Classic. I thought of that Cosby routine as well.
“The monkey bars came in, we lost 124 kids in one day....”
We called that game “Smear the Queer”. I don’t know why.
Yes. And if someone tripped us up, we didn’t want to murder them. We would just trip them up the next time. Many of our youth are growing up without a conscience. But that is their example, now sitting in the White House.
These foam and blow-up plastic playgrounds are harboring zillions & quadrillions of bacteria of all kinds. The blow-up slides, etc. are blown up, scads of kids play on them; then they’re deflated, stored, taken out again and rented out the next time - and repeat until they, thankfully, wear out. I doubt they’re ever cleaned adequately.
Trouble is these wimps grow up to be lawyers. Perpetuating the whine.
Great picture.
I raised 5 kids in the 60s and 70s.
There were so many split chins and that type of injury I started treating them myself. I could apply a butterfly bandage with the best of them and if there was a scar there was a scar.
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I remember a cold morning at a particularly nasty first grade game of dodge ball on the asphalt playground when one kid got beamed square in the face. He just lay there, small puddle of blood beneath his face. All the kids were gathered around him. Nothing was said until one kid broke the silence and gave voice to what we were all thinking...”he’s dead.”
In a minute or two a teacher came out with tissue in her hand, cleaned off his face and wadded up some of the tissue and put it in his nose to stop the bleeding. “Bloody nose- easy to get, easy to get rid of” she said, and the kid was back in the game.
Simpler times.
And today parents make their kids live in plastic bubbles, out of fear of germs.....Thus, the immune systems are never allowed to fully develop, which may explain why today there are so many weird allergies that kids develop.
This is as good an example of how dangerous life used to be, as I have ever seen.
Just look at the first 30 seconds of this 1906 filming of a main street in San Francisco, these are just people in daily life in the city, but it looks like a scene from some kind of futuristic death game to reduce the population.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdvRNdGlgzY
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