We Survived Play in the Good Old Days

The picture showed a family riding bikes, all wearing helmets and safety gear. Poor things, they’ll never know the freedom of zipping downhill, hair whipping around their faces, wondering if they will wipe out at the bottom of the ravine. All part of growing up in the good old days.

I feel sorry for today’s protected generation. It’s not their fault that parents try to shelter them from harm. But we have to wonder, in seeking to protect our offspring, if we robbed them of experiences that turned us old geezers into survivors.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his recent book The Anxious Generation, stresses the importance of allowing children a certain amount of risk-taking behavior to prepare them for adult risks like applying for their first job or asking someone out on a date. Or even driving an over-the-road big rig (my addition to his list).

According to Haidt, an insightful experiment occurred in the 1980s, when scientists created a closed artificial ecosystem to prepare people for living in outer space. All the inhabitants' food, water, and oxygen were produced within the artificial system.

One notable failure of this experiment was what happened to the trees they planted. Before reaching maturity, the trees fell over. Why? Scientists failed to recognize that trees need the stress of wind tugging at them to make the roots dig down into the soil, thus stabilizing them.

In the same way, children need a certain amount of risk-taking to develop healthy mental and emotional systems. Risks like climbing trees, jumping bikes over a ramp, climbing a rope to the top of the gym.

Psychologist Haidt asserts that a certain amount of risk-taking enables a child to process frustrations. Even minor accidents - especially when adults aren't around to panic - give children the stamina to get up, brush themselves off, and try again.

Why not let kids slide down the stair rail, climb on top of the monkey bars, swing high into the air? The Boomer generation did these things when our parents told us to go outside and play. Perhaps we got away with it because our parents were busy inside.

And yes, I hear sighs from parents of the kids who visit the ER so often they know staff members on a first-name basis. Every family has one child like this.

Our parents believed in letting us become tough. In fact, we had our own set of risk-taking equipment.

Remember jumping out of these?

Take, for instance, the typical playground swings in our generation. They had incredibly long chains that would enable us to dangle, spin around, twist, and jump from such heights that we sported skinned knees if we landed wrong. But I don’t remember anyone actually breaking bones doing that. It was all part of the childhood rite of passage. No one worried too much about our safety; we just survived somehow. And we had fun doing it.

Riding bikes? If we had shown up in our neighborhood wearing helmets, we would have been laughed at and called sissies. Even the girls. Helmets were for rich people’s pale, soft kids.

Farm kids survived more than that. We rode in the back of pickup trucks, no safety equipment needed. Sitting on the wheel bump inside the truck bed traveling 20 miles per hour on a country road—or dangling our feet as we sat on the open tailgate--we never thought much about danger. We were having too much fun.

Hayrides? Yes, we had them. Not on close-sided wagons, mind you; we dangled our feet as we sat on flat hay wagons, pulled by (gasp) open tractors. Sometimes a teenage boy, eager to impress his date, would jump off and run alongside the wagon for a few yards, then jump back on. If our parents worried, they never told us. I think they were having too much fun.

Ever see pictures of playground slides in the good old days? Extra tall, hot, metal slides. We loved them. No sides to enclose the metal steps, either. They weren’t for the faint-hearted. And we landed in gravel or dirt at the bottom. Somehow, we survived.

Then there was the merry-go-round, king of all kid-slinging, arm-breaking, concussion-causing playground equipment. Kids migrated to those things like June bugs around porch lights. Once the first graders had been catapulted off by smart-alec fifth grade boys, we learned to grab the bars and huddle in the middle.

We can’t forget old-fashioned teeter-totters. (I couldn't find a picture of the wooden ones, like our school had.) If a kid who was heavier than you were, sat opposite and put you in the air, and then jumped off—you learned not to cross your feet underneath before you landed.

Yes, kids today are missing out on a whole lot of excitement in the name of safety. I feel sorry for them as they navigate the world in safety helmets and padded equipment.

Children would benefit from setting aside electronic devices that keep them in a virtual world, and going outside instead. Otherwise, how will they learn playground challenges that make them tough survivors in the real world?

Your turn. Any thoughts on how you played in the good old days? Tell us about it in the comments box below.