It appears that we have a majority of our leaders and parents making sure our kids are growing up overly safe. It appears to be creating disastrous results. Charles Sykes, author of "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School" says that colleges across the country now require permits or permission slips for undergraduate pranks. (What the Bradley "kids" did was not a prank, but a sheer act of possible drunken stupidity. There is a difference).
In Cincinnati, te nannies who run the Little League have decided to ban chatter on the diamond. The league president explained: "If the catcher is saying, Swing, batter, swing and the poor kid is swinging at everything ,he feels bad and may turn to the catcher and get mad". Wow. I remember playing baseball with a team from Danvers and the opposition catcher from a team in Peoria kept saying "he's going to hit you with the nest pitch" and on the next pitch I hit a triple accounting for 2 of our 4 runs. I'm proud to still have the newspaper article. Self-esteem? Sure, I accomplished something.
A Colorado Springs Elementary School is one of the latest to ban "tag" on its playground. Running will be allowed as long as there is no chasing. It wasn't administration but parents who "complained that they'd been chased and harassed against their will". Other schools have already banned swings, teeter-totters, crawl tubes and sandboxes and even hugs. Wonder how these wimps reacted when they saw all the hugging of Olympic kids by their coaches and the young kids and some older particpants hugging each other. Maybe these wimps were the ones protesting outside the arena.
In some schools free play has been replaced by organized adult-supervised activities in order to protect children from spontaneous outburst of creativity.
One California school district worried about bullying, violence, self-esteem and lawsuits so they banned tag, cops and robbers touch football and every activity that involved bodily contact.
Childhood-or at least the fun part of it-is falling victim to a potent stew of psychobabble, litigation and overwrought protectiveness. In North Carolin principals in at least eight schools, worried about how kids would cope with summer heat, wanted to raise large canopies and shelters over playgrounds.
Ride to schoolo. Don't walk, it's too dangerous. ABC warned that playgrounds had GERMS! Maybe that's why our MOMS told us to wash our hands. However, kids, washing your hands will not prevent you from spreading a social disease usually contracted by those particpating in the wrong "sport".
In the mid nineties, I put on summer tennis for what I called at risk kids. One recreation supervisor called her kids off the court saying 80% temperature was too hot to play tennis. Another said she didn't want her kids walking from the social center to the tennis courts. I asked if that was the attitude they would display if working for their liveyhood on a hot day? Or playing on the school team on a hot day? She said, these are just kids. Oh.
We are paying for this "wimppyness" by producing a segment of society that doesn't want to work and get up a sweat.
When I eventually turned my program over to the PPD, I showed up one day at John Gwynn tennis courts to find the park instructor with a bucket of balls hitting to thirty five kids with one racket, one at a time. I asked why the one racket was being passed hand to hand when I had given the park over 40 rackets. The park "instructor" told me she was told to make sure no one got hurt. She also complained why she had to do this even though she was being paid??
Phillip K. Howard, a lawyer and writer; Chairman of Common Good, a non-profit, nonpartisan legal reform coalition, wrote "Why Safe Kids Are Becoming Fat Kids", stating "just when we thought playgrounds were accident-proof--no more merry-go-rounds, high slides, jungle gyms, seesaws, or pretty much anything that's fun--it turns out that safety itself can be dangerous. A recent heat wave in New York caused safety matting to get hot calling for an immediate outrage, "Playgrounds should be designed with canopies. How many burn cases will it take before before the city wakes up and acts", said Betsy Gotbaum, the cities public advocate.
Good grief!
I quote Howard, "The harmful effects of our nations safety obsession ripple out into society. One in six children in America is obese. (Other studies show it is higher especially here in Peoria) According to the Center for Disease Control, this problem would basically cure itself if children were engaged in informal outdoor activities that used to be normal. But how do we lure children off the sofa. One key attraction is risk.
Risk is fun, at least the moderate risks that were common in prior generations. America unfortunately is going in the opposite direction. Exercise in schools is carefully programmed, when it exists at all. Running is banned at recess in many schools, sliding into a base is banned in most Little Leagues. Sledding and high diving are banned. Kids are not learning how to manage risk".
Summing up Mr. Howard, "Someone on behalf of society must be authorized to make choices between safety and the trad-offs of risk. Courts must honor these decisions. Otherwise, the pious accusations of safety fanatics, empowered by the nearly universal fear of being sued, will guarantee a cultural downwards toward the lowest common denominator. A little common sense goes a long way".
Competition such as we just witnessed at the Olympics, show that many Americans are not wimps and not afraid to take calculated risks. As Mr. Sykes says, "Competitive sports,(and competetion in general) shape a nations character. Unless we plan, of course, to go to war against an enemy who also values non-competitive, risk-free, self esteem building play activities for its young".
I fear that our young do take extreme risks; drug abuse, alcohol abuse, violence, sexual aggression, bullying, stealing thinking they won't get caught, shirking responsibility, avoiding honest work and competition at all costs. No wonder we have so many "chatterers" trying to get us to lose the war against terrorism. They never learned to compete and win and lose with some element of good graces.
They are too busy teaching and building "self-esteem". (Let me clarify my interpretation of self_esteem. Self-esteem is achieved by doing something worth while and a benefit to others as well as oneself). It's not achieved by giving ever body a trophy for just showing up.
We are at great risk of becoming a nation of welfare for all, absolute safety in all endeavors, pacifists retreating from aggressive and threatening fundamentalists who believe we will "give in" and compromise for fear of our immediate and individual safety. Yes, there are plenty of places and times to compromise but not with someone avowed to kill all non-believers.
The performance of our athletes in China gives me hope that my generation who read and pretended to be like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, will not give in to the likes of Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden, both who voted against Immigration Bill 1348 that would have made English America's official language. It was Obama who said we should all learn Spanish, which some of us should and will, but should have said all Hispanics who plan to live here must learn English, the official language of our country.
Remember, Biden said that Obama didn't have the experience to be President and Obama said that people like Biden have been in Washington too long.
Is there still hope that this country will not become a country of socialists, populists and pacifists? I believe there are leaders perhaps not in the political arena who are heeding the "wake up" warning bells of past generations.
Read "Adult Supervision" by Charles Sykes; 11/08/07, WSJ, and read "Why Safe Kids Are Becoming Fat Kids"; Phillip Howard, 8/13/08, WSJ who I quote extensively in this blog.
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