It is safe to say that our obsession with safety is slowly squeezing all the juice out of kids' (and parents') life.
By certain people's standards, I should currently be purging a long sentence in prison. This week, Margaret Wente mentioned the craziest story about this South Carolina mom in prison for letting her 9-year old daughter play alone in the park across the street from her workplace. Margaret quoted Lenore Skenazy, who first wrote about this tragedy in her column for Hit & Run blog.
From overprotected to overweighted
"Today, the number of children age 9 to 13 playing outside, unsupervised, in any given week, is 6 percent. That's ridiculously close to zero." This is one of the stats Lenore comes up with in another great article she just wrote to raise red flags on the way well-meaning parents are misplacing their fear and focusing on the wrong thing: From Overprotected to Overweight. I'm passing it on because we need to start making more noise than the fearmongers if we want to stop this kind of insanity that sucks the fun our of life.
Lenoe Skenazy is my favourite no-nonsense blogger, the mom who became an overnight sensation for blogging about letting her own 9-year old take the New York subway home, alone. The resulting hateful wave of self-righteousness strangers all over the U.S. drove her to write Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry).
If we better understand where our fears come from, we are better equiped to fight them and quietly brush off any person who feels it in their right to scrutinize how other people live their life.
We've got to make an effort to remember all the freedom we had when we were a child. It obviously didn't kill us! And we need to keep reminding us that it is statistically untrue that today's urban life is more dangerous. (Read Lenore's article to get some facts.) We believe so because medias have been feeding us with so many freak tales that we think they happen all the time.
If we applied the logic of our fear of someone kidnapping our kids to all realms of life, we would raise them like they do in cow farms: keeping our little ones in an indoor cage (to avoid car accidents, skin cancer, drowning, etc), feeding them pureed food (so they don't shoke, don't suffer from their allergies, and get all the nutriants), preventing them from socializing with the others (to avoid bullying, frustrations, heart aches, sexually transmitted deceases, drugs and pregnancy). Come to think of it, it would protect our little ones from the ultimate stressful situation: being a parent in the 21st century!
For fun suggestions on where to play outside, go to www.torontofunplaces.com to check Nature's Call, Playgrounds and Water Fun sections on my website www.torontofunplaces.com. Enjoy!
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