A block from the house where I grew up, a steep dirt road descended from our street into an empty field. Each winter, after the first heavy snow, every kid in the neighborhood dragged their Flexible Flyers and Slide-a-boggans to the top of that road.
One year, we built a ramp at the bottom of the hill. It was only a couple feet high, but to us it seemed like an Olympic ski jump. That moment of airborne exhilaration more than made up for the rough landing that inevitably followed. That is, until my brother Ron landed on his face instead of his sled.
I suppose, as his big brother, I should have walked him home. But we were having a really good time. And besides, it always looks like more blood than it really is when it spreads out in the snow like that.
Ron worked hard to sustain his tears until he got home, so our mom would be sufficiently impressed by his wounds. But when she saw him she just told him he deserved it for doing something so stupid.
That story has endured in our family as an example of my parents' preference for correction over comforting. But lately, I've come to see it as more than that. My parents believed that a life lesson doesn't arrive on a silver spoon. More often than not, it punches you in the face – and if your nose gets bloody, so much the better. Lesson learned.
Every child has to learn out how to tolerate reasonable risk, how to avoid excessive risk, and how to know the difference. To do that, they need to experience risk first-hand. As the saying goes, good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. But most parents want only to protect their kids from risk, not expose them. How much protection is enough?
In 1985, we answered that question in a courtroom. That's the year the Chicago Park District paid 9.5 million dollars to the family of a toddler who fell from a 12-foot slide. The upshot of that case, and others like it, has been to regulate playgrounds so closely that every one in America has the same basic features with the exact same specifications.
In Europe, they had a different answer. In 1931, a Danish landscape architect noted that children often preferred abandoned lots to playgrounds. He proposed the creation of "junk playgrounds" where children would have the raw materials to imagine, construct and create a reality of their own. After the war, his ideas spawned the adventure playground movement.
Today, there are about a thousand adventure playgrounds all over Europe. They are monitored by trained adults to prevent truly dangerous situations, but they are largely free of parents, who just drop their kids off and leave. The areas are fenced, but usually include natural settings like forests, creeks and fields. They contain materials and tools for constructing makeshift buildings, and old furniture to fill them with. Some even include fire pits where children unleash their inner pyromaniacs.
I'll bet your head is about to explode right now. Creeks? Construction tools? FIRE PITS?!!!! Is there a Med-Evac team standing by? But the accident rate at these parks is significantly lower than at conventional playgrounds. One park reported that out of 15,000 kids who visited them in their first four months of operation, only 0.014 percent sustained injuries of any kind, and most were just minor scrapes and bruises.
Unfortunately, fear of liability has made adventure playgrounds rare in the U.S. At last count, there were only four: three in California, and one right near Seattle on Mercer Island. But the point is, you don't even have to leave your neighborhood to bring adventure to your kids. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
1. Let them wander. Teach them to cross a busy road and ride a bike safely. Let them master their street, their block, their neighborhood and beyond.
2. Let them build. Teach them to use a hammer. Then a saw. Give them some scrap lumber and some nails. Watch castles rise.
3. Let them cook. Teach them to use a knife, and a stove. Let them cook dinner once a month – making anything they want.
4. Let them take things apart. An old radio. An old vacuum cleaner. Let them dissect it to see how it works, then put it back together again.
5. Let them go wild. Take them to the woods. To a stream. To an overgrown vacant lot. Let them explore places where they never know exactly what they'll find.
6. Just let them be. Give them time without structure and without adults. They may be confused at first, or fearful, or just plain bored. Good. Boredom is the mother of invention.
Maybe it's time to let kids be kids again. After all, there's an adventure playground waiting for them just outside their door. I think it's called "the world."
