On Playgrounds and Boys and Childhood

It was so nice out this morning that I got up early and decided to take a walk at the playground up the hill from our house. (Our area is so hilly that only a marathoner could walk with ease so I head up to the playground where it is level for walking.) Will grabbed his bike and came along. At the playground he said, “Mom, they’ve just ruined childhood.” Startled, I asked what he meant. He gestured toward the bright primary colored playground equipment set up on several inches of rubbery material, the new standard in child safety. “When I was a kid (he’s 11, almost 12) we had that very high slide at that park by our old house, remember? And we had swings. This park doesn’t even have them. They took them out.”

“What do you mean this park doesn’t have them? There are swings right over—” I stopped because where I pointed there were no swings. They had been replaced recently with some sort of wheel thingy that kids could turn for entertainment. I realized in shock that they had removed the swings completely. “They’ve been changing everything to make it SAFER,” Will pointed out. “The slides are plastic and two feet high now. There’s nothing kids can do here.”

I remember hours on swings as a child. If you really got going, it was the closest thing to flying. All that energy expended also kept us thin as rails. No obesity problems that I can remember among my friends. Think of the children who will never know what swinging high into the sky is like. It’s sad.

Times have changed, and health and safety experts have made sure that any element of childhood that contains any risk at all is completely removed. In this litigious age, schools and playgrounds don’t want the liability issues. Kids are safer, but in the end I wonder if they are really better off. I say this particularly regarding boys. Here’s what 19th Century boys’ adventure author R. M. Ballantyne said about boyhood:

Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system…. They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession….

—R.M. Ballantyne, The Gorilla Hunters

Well, a man’s career today seems to be sitting on a couch with a remote control while drinking beer. So, in that sense, I suppose the poofter playgrounds of today are actually an ideal training ground for today’s American manhood. But I think it’s too bad.

Safety is not unimportant. My husband had a terrible bike accident that could have fractured his skull if he hadn’t been wearing a helmet. But how far are we prepared to go to limit risk in life? There’s risk in anything we do as humans. We can’t save our children from every abrasion, every bruise, every injury in life, no matter how much we would like to as mothers. Particularly for sons, I think it is extremely unhealthy to keep them in a bubble. I see boys like that who are 11, 12 years old who break into tears at a stubbed toe and go running home to mama. Surely there’s a middle ground between emotionally repressing young boys and telling them never to cry and allowing total emotional incontinence that never requires them to be manly when something goes wrong or they are in pain. Fathers are key in this area in helping boys learn self-control and expecting them to not burst into tears at the slightest difficulty. Physical challenges are key to developing self-confidence in boys. They don’t get enough of them in American suburbia.

Last summer, Will was building ramps to jump with his bike. His father helped him set them up so they wouldn’t be wobbly and he proceeded to do some magnificent (mother heart-stopping) jumps with his bicycle. His dad set some limits for obvious reasons, but it was the challenge that got Will excited. Before long, some teenage boys even drifted down from up the block where they had been lounging languidly with their iPods on the front porch. Then they had to try the jumps. It was a guy thing, and it was a big hit. In the age of video games, non-play playgrounds, Internet and television, parents have to fight back and send the kids outside. Left to their own devices, they’ll find things to do and they’ll be the stronger for it.

P.S. If you’re looking for some non-effeminized boys’ historical fiction that highlights manly strength and courage, see the Ballantyne link above and also the books of 19th century author, G. A. Henty. You can often get these books much more cheaply on Ebay or at used book sites.