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Summer Math, Missing in Action
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Palestinian Anguishes Over MySpace Romance
Playgrounds With a Little Kick
Can a playground be too safe? In Great Britain, experts say parents' overprotectiveness can be harmful for kids.
Concerned that children will reject boring playgrounds in favor of railway banks, riverbanks and roadsides, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents -- a nonprofit group whose mission is promoting safety--is calling for play-space design that allow kids to take a few more risks.
"We need to provide play environments so that children can experience risk in a controlled and managed way," the society's David Yearley told the Guardian.
Play is crucial for children, who have a developmental drive to master the cues and rules of social interaction, argues Tim Gill, who is writing a book about growing up in a risk-averse society.
"What psychologists tell us is that those social codes are learnt through play, especially during the middle years of childhood," Gill writes in the Guardian. "And children learn them best when they learn them for themselves, largely (though not entirely) without adult intervention."
Life at Work: More Fathers Figure on Family Time
The Joy of Danger
It's no coincidence, Gill says, that the No. 1 book on Amazon UK is called "The Dangerous Book for Boys," a "muck-about manifesto, teaching the cosseted kids of today how to enjoy the kind of rambunctious games which caused their dads and grandpas to graze many a muddy knee," according to the Birmingham Sunday Mercury. (In the United States, the book is number 1,610 and climbing.)
Given that the title appears to promote peril and exclude girls, it's amazing the book ever got published, writes Christopher Middleton of the Daily Telegraph. Instructions include planting a tripwire, building a tree house, deciphering enemy code, and a game called "conkers," in which each player swings a horse chestnut on a string to try to break one held by the opponent
Middleton gave the book to his son, 11, and a friend, 12, who immediately started to fashion a bow and arrow set with a sharp Swiss Army knife. "I had to dig down deep in order to ignore the parental risk-ometer readings that were going off the scale." Middleton also swallowed hard and held back advice on how to make their crude slingshot work better.
