5 ms·

The real takeaway for me as a parent here is that the more and more we prevent our kids from being actual kids, the more subtleties we might be depriving them o

The real takeaway for me as a parent here is that the more and more we prevent our kids from being actual kids, the more subtleties we might be depriving them of. Dating myself a little, but growing up as a kid in Virginia, 'outside' play was a mainstay. We went out into the woods, we built tree forts, we dug holes, we made tire swings. Nowadays, the parents of my children's friends are completely unwilling to let their kids engage in such behavior, whether because it's potentially dangerous (it is), or dirty (that too), the kids are expected to meet up in a sanitized location, play in a playroom, or possibly on a playground with rubber mulch as the surface material, and seldom are kids allowed or expected to just go play. Meanwhile, we've got more and more kids being prescribed more and more things, and while I honestly haven't the slightest clue whether to attribute it to the lack of outdoor play or the miracles of modern medicine, it seems possibly correlated.

agumonkey 9y ago
It's a weird situation to be an adult. You got cautious along the years (for good or bad reasons) and somehow forgot what you did. When I remember all the crazy things we did as 5yo .. climbing trees out of the blue, alone, no supervision, no phones. We're all alive and well.
- MikeTheGreat 9y ago
  True, we're all alive and well. Simultaneously, that's the definition of survivorship bias / selection bias right there :)
  - 24gttghh 9y ago
    I hate to say it but...what about Natural Selection bias?
- pseud0r 9y ago
  Not all kids I went to school with is alive, for example there was one guy who one day went fast down a hill on his bicycle, straight onto the road and was hit by a car. One guy I know let his four year old play outside, just for a short while without supervision, he fell into a pond and drowned. I always felt safe when I was five years old playing outside by myself though, even though I sometimes went several kilometers into the forest. There was no cars there and I was already a good swimmer, so I can't really imagine anything could have happened though.
- someSven 9y ago
  I thought about this a while ago. I even don't know about any incident in which a child was seriously hurt by playing outside in my former hometown or the villages around, while my whole time as a child or teenager. Though, maybe I forgot about something...
kwhitefoot 9y ago
There was a study done in Gothenburg, Sweden a few years ago that compared inner city kindergartens with those in the countryside. The difference was that in the countryside the children were found to be more confident. It seemed that the children in the city were discouraged from taking risks and hence never hurt themselves, no scraped knees, etc., while the children in the countryside were always playing in the mud, snow, trees, and so on, getting dirty, tired, and scraped. The kindergarten (barnehage) my children attended in Norway was much like that, the playground had all sorts of mildly dangerous equipment that you could fall off of, tricycles that you could get run over by, puddles to jump in, mud to play with. All the children were pretty healthy and still are decades later.
- babyrainbow 9y ago
  >while the children in the countryside were always playing in the mud, snow, trees, and so on, getting dirty, tired, and scraped. Now. Expect someone to show up with some statistics of how accident rate in the country side is greater than the rate in the city, along with other folks with supporting argument like. "A weak kid is better than a dead kid", "Mental handicap is better than physical handicap", which are obviously not false! All the evils of modern life can be summarized in a single word..."Fear". The next breakthrough for humanity would have to be freeing the masses from being perpetually afraid! Might be a bit hard since the fear this fear can be capitalized for massive gains by the current establishments !
  - DigDugDoug 9y ago
    I see where you're coming from but I think there's also a lot of unacknowledged variables in play here that get glossed over because of a focus on the outcomes such as dead kid vs. live kid. For example, I'm wondering if the same rules and recreation structure that result in a dead city kid result in a dead rural kid. A lot of environmental factors including traffic, neighborhood crime, average physique (in areas where children might often participate in their parent's physical labor), etc. could all create outcomes that are generally more potentially lethal for a child raised in a densely populated metropolitan area than for a child raised in a rural area.
  - 9y ago
bby 9y ago
same when I was young I had a gun I swung around, hunted game in the forest, shot at bullies who came at me (friendly shots).
teniutza 9y ago
At the day-care my 3 year old goes to, the children are encouraged to go out and play on a daily basis. The only exceptions are storms and extremely hot days (this does not happen that often in this part of Germany...). This is great for them. They play, explore, breathe fresh air, interact with germs, bacteria. On the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to the parents who try to shelter their kids, so that they don't get sick. Staying at home these days is not as simple as when we were kids. The pressure to succeed or lack of personnel take their toll in such situations.
- fredsir 9y ago
  My children (3 and 5) goes to a "nature kindergarten". We live in Denmark. Basically they are not inside if possible. They have a rather large building with rooms for each team, kitchens and whatever you would expect, but they use it as little as possible. Outside, the weather is taken into consideration, so even if it rains, they can play outside without getting wet, if that is what they want (the kids are encouraged to play in the rain), and if it's crazy hot and the sun is baking, they can play outside in the numerous locations setup for shade. They almost always eat their 3 lunchboxes outside. In the winter season, there is a bonfire every morning for warmth and hygge. The key to this kind of kindergarten is enough of the right kind of clothes and footwear. There is even a big forrest inside the kindergarten perimeter with trees they climb and holes they've dug. My children absolutely loves it!
  - sidegrid 9y ago
    3 lunchboxes?
    - fredsir 9y ago
      The convention in this particular kindergarten is that for each meal there is one lunchbox. Meals are usually at 8-9 (optional meal), 11:30 and 14:30. My kids kids usually don't have the first lunchbox since they have just eaten breakfast a half hour to one hour before arriving at the kindergarten at around 8-8:30 and are therefore not hungry, but some kids in the kindergarten is there from around 7-8 to 16-17: and thus packs three lunch boxes. Some actually arrive at 6 in the morning and thus eat 2-3 lunch boxes and a breakfast first thing when they arrive.
novaleaf 9y ago
have young kids, a work in progress: I used to limit them to 30 minutes of "tv or tablet" a day, which over time was slowly creeping up to an hour or more. So I moved it to "TV or Tablet only on weekends", it was hard for them to adjust for a few days, but now they happily spend their weekday afternoons playing outside, which also helps them spend more of the weekends outside too because they are "used to it". I'm sure the nicer late-spring weather helps too. hope that's helpful to any parents struggling to balance your kids digital life.
abandonliberty 9y ago
Meanwhile a school in Siberia believes that daily showers in the snow makes children stronger. From 2 years old. >'Perhaps people will not believe us, but facts are hard to argue with,' insisted teacher Lyubov Daniltsova. >'Our doctor confirms that children in groups that practice dousing get through the flu season a lot more easily, and generally the statistics show there are 95% of healthy children in the 'wet' group, compared to 75% among the others'. I would be curious about the overall rates of influenza have varied in the school as there could be a selection bias for the wet group. http://siberiantimes.com/healthandlifestyle/others/news/like-ducks-to-water-in-the-snow-keeping-kids-healthy-siberian-style/ http://siberiantimes.com/healthandlifestyle/others/news/like...
balabaster 9y ago
I moved to the country purposely to ensure my kids could have that life. They have 100 acres to run around. All the trees they could want to climb, a tire swing, a "fort" which is really just the clearing under a tree with branches that hang down to the ground and shield it from view. As long as they're not killing each other or destroying anything, I am actively hands off - on purpose. It's my opinion that the roam-free policy my parents took with me instilled the belief that I am capable of anything I decide. I'm actively trying to instill that in my kids. No matter how much frustration that causes me, I want that for them. There's no rubber mats. There's no safety net. In my whole school of kids, the worst injury prior to anyone learning to drive was a couple of concussions and a couple of broken limbs. 150 kids in the school. There were no deaths, no catastrophic injuries that put them in hospital. Those didn't come until they were old enough to drive. Most of the parents in my village seemed to have this roam free policy. We would all show up at each other's houses, go for bike rides for miles, swim in rivers unsupervised, learned our own fears and boundaries. Heaven forbid we pissed off one of the neighbours and our parents found out about it. Then we'd be for the high jump. Heaven forbid you got grounded and couldn't go outside and all you had to play with was buckets of Lego while all our friends were outside building jump ramps for their BMXs and all you could do was look out the window at them. Both of my kids have clinically diagnosed ADHD and my eldest also has ODD. If they didn't get this outside time, I might have jumped off the roof myself just to escape the torture this brings. I actively encourage the kids to go out and play. I'd rather they weren't in the house. When they're in the house, they're just making a mess that it's more of a fight to make them clean up than it is just to clean it up myself. I firmly believe that kids should be able to be kids without having all of our rules and orders shoved down their throats. It's stifling and all it does is make them question themselves and hurts their self esteem. My kids believe they can do anything. This frequently makes me pull my hair out in frustration, but I know that once they become adults, what frustrates me endlessly now will be the tools they use to take on the world and succeed.
- j_s 9y ago
  If you don't mind my asking, how do you pay the bills? I would love to provide this type of an opportunity for my family, but the transition from a 45-minute urban commute from the suburbs to something like what you're doing is uncharted territory.
jaclaz 9y ago
Purely anecdotal (and of course showing my age) but when we were kids we were not supposed to wear trousers (long to the ankle) until we became maybe 12 or 13 (exception made when we were all dressed up for some ceremony or similar), we had some choice between shorts and knee length shorts. There was a reason, I have no real memory of myself (nor of any of my friends) having ever both (at the same time I mean) knees/lower legs NOT scraped, bruised or cut, no matter if it was due to falling from a tree or from the bycicle or from experiments with any other possible 2 to 4 wheeled or sliding vehicle of sort, or simple bruises because of thorns while we went through the woods to get some berries. Of course we promptly washed the bruises (and in some cases even disinfected them) but if the article is even marginally right, given the quantity of dirt that must have entered my organism I should not ever be concerned with depression.

agumonkey 9y ago

It's a weird situation to be an adult. You got cautious along the years (for good or bad reasons) and somehow forgot what you did. When I remember all the crazy things we did as 5yo .. climbing trees out of the blue, alone, no supervision, no phones. We're all alive and well.

MikeTheGreat 9y ago
True, we're all alive and well. Simultaneously, that's the definition of survivorship bias / selection bias right there :)
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  I hate to say it but...what about Natural Selection bias?
pseud0r 9y ago
Not all kids I went to school with is alive, for example there was one guy who one day went fast down a hill on his bicycle, straight onto the road and was hit by a car. One guy I know let his four year old play outside, just for a short while without supervision, he fell into a pond and drowned. I always felt safe when I was five years old playing outside by myself though, even though I sometimes went several kilometers into the forest. There was no cars there and I was already a good swimmer, so I can't really imagine anything could have happened though.
someSven 9y ago
I thought about this a while ago. I even don't know about any incident in which a child was seriously hurt by playing outside in my former hometown or the villages around, while my whole time as a child or teenager. Though, maybe I forgot about something...

kwhitefoot 9y ago

There was a study done in Gothenburg, Sweden a few years ago that compared inner city kindergartens with those in the countryside. The difference was that in the countryside the children were found to be more confident. It seemed that the children in the city were discouraged from taking risks and hence never hurt themselves, no scraped knees, etc., while the children in the countryside were always playing in the mud, snow, trees, and so on, getting dirty, tired, and scraped. The kindergarten (barnehage) my children attended in Norway was much like that, the playground had all sorts of mildly dangerous equipment that you could fall off of, tricycles that you could get run over by, puddles to jump in, mud to play with. All the children were pretty healthy and still are decades later.

babyrainbow 9y ago
>while the children in the countryside were always playing in the mud, snow, trees, and so on, getting dirty, tired, and scraped. Now. Expect someone to show up with some statistics of how accident rate in the country side is greater than the rate in the city, along with other folks with supporting argument like. "A weak kid is better than a dead kid", "Mental handicap is better than physical handicap", which are obviously not false! All the evils of modern life can be summarized in a single word..."Fear". The next breakthrough for humanity would have to be freeing the masses from being perpetually afraid! Might be a bit hard since the fear this fear can be capitalized for massive gains by the current establishments !
- DigDugDoug 9y ago
  I see where you're coming from but I think there's also a lot of unacknowledged variables in play here that get glossed over because of a focus on the outcomes such as dead kid vs. live kid. For example, I'm wondering if the same rules and recreation structure that result in a dead city kid result in a dead rural kid. A lot of environmental factors including traffic, neighborhood crime, average physique (in areas where children might often participate in their parent's physical labor), etc. could all create outcomes that are generally more potentially lethal for a child raised in a densely populated metropolitan area than for a child raised in a rural area.
- 9y ago

bby 9y ago

same when I was young I had a gun I swung around, hunted game in the forest, shot at bullies who came at me (friendly shots).

teniutza 9y ago

At the day-care my 3 year old goes to, the children are encouraged to go out and play on a daily basis. The only exceptions are storms and extremely hot days (this does not happen that often in this part of Germany...). This is great for them. They play, explore, breathe fresh air, interact with germs, bacteria. On the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to the parents who try to shelter their kids, so that they don't get sick. Staying at home these days is not as simple as when we were kids. The pressure to succeed or lack of personnel take their toll in such situations.

fredsir 9y ago
My children (3 and 5) goes to a "nature kindergarten". We live in Denmark. Basically they are not inside if possible. They have a rather large building with rooms for each team, kitchens and whatever you would expect, but they use it as little as possible. Outside, the weather is taken into consideration, so even if it rains, they can play outside without getting wet, if that is what they want (the kids are encouraged to play in the rain), and if it's crazy hot and the sun is baking, they can play outside in the numerous locations setup for shade. They almost always eat their 3 lunchboxes outside. In the winter season, there is a bonfire every morning for warmth and hygge. The key to this kind of kindergarten is enough of the right kind of clothes and footwear. There is even a big forrest inside the kindergarten perimeter with trees they climb and holes they've dug. My children absolutely loves it!
- sidegrid 9y ago
  3 lunchboxes?
  - fredsir 9y ago
    The convention in this particular kindergarten is that for each meal there is one lunchbox. Meals are usually at 8-9 (optional meal), 11:30 and 14:30. My kids kids usually don't have the first lunchbox since they have just eaten breakfast a half hour to one hour before arriving at the kindergarten at around 8-8:30 and are therefore not hungry, but some kids in the kindergarten is there from around 7-8 to 16-17: and thus packs three lunch boxes. Some actually arrive at 6 in the morning and thus eat 2-3 lunch boxes and a breakfast first thing when they arrive.

novaleaf 9y ago

have young kids, a work in progress: I used to limit them to 30 minutes of "tv or tablet" a day, which over time was slowly creeping up to an hour or more. So I moved it to "TV or Tablet only on weekends", it was hard for them to adjust for a few days, but now they happily spend their weekday afternoons playing outside, which also helps them spend more of the weekends outside too because they are "used to it". I'm sure the nicer late-spring weather helps too. hope that's helpful to any parents struggling to balance your kids digital life.

abandonliberty 9y ago

Meanwhile a school in Siberia believes that daily showers in the snow makes children stronger. From 2 years old. >'Perhaps people will not believe us, but facts are hard to argue with,' insisted teacher Lyubov Daniltsova. >'Our doctor confirms that children in groups that practice dousing get through the flu season a lot more easily, and generally the statistics show there are 95% of healthy children in the 'wet' group, compared to 75% among the others'. I would be curious about the overall rates of influenza have varied in the school as there could be a selection bias for the wet group. http://siberiantimes.com/healthandlifestyle/others/news/like-ducks-to-water-in-the-snow-keeping-kids-healthy-siberian-style/ http://siberiantimes.com/healthandlifestyle/others/news/like...

balabaster 9y ago

I moved to the country purposely to ensure my kids could have that life. They have 100 acres to run around. All the trees they could want to climb, a tire swing, a "fort" which is really just the clearing under a tree with branches that hang down to the ground and shield it from view. As long as they're not killing each other or destroying anything, I am actively hands off - on purpose. It's my opinion that the roam-free policy my parents took with me instilled the belief that I am capable of anything I decide. I'm actively trying to instill that in my kids. No matter how much frustration that causes me, I want that for them. There's no rubber mats. There's no safety net. In my whole school of kids, the worst injury prior to anyone learning to drive was a couple of concussions and a couple of broken limbs. 150 kids in the school. There were no deaths, no catastrophic injuries that put them in hospital. Those didn't come until they were old enough to drive. Most of the parents in my village seemed to have this roam free policy. We would all show up at each other's houses, go for bike rides for miles, swim in rivers unsupervised, learned our own fears and boundaries. Heaven forbid we pissed off one of the neighbours and our parents found out about it. Then we'd be for the high jump. Heaven forbid you got grounded and couldn't go outside and all you had to play with was buckets of Lego while all our friends were outside building jump ramps for their BMXs and all you could do was look out the window at them. Both of my kids have clinically diagnosed ADHD and my eldest also has ODD. If they didn't get this outside time, I might have jumped off the roof myself just to escape the torture this brings. I actively encourage the kids to go out and play. I'd rather they weren't in the house. When they're in the house, they're just making a mess that it's more of a fight to make them clean up than it is just to clean it up myself. I firmly believe that kids should be able to be kids without having all of our rules and orders shoved down their throats. It's stifling and all it does is make them question themselves and hurts their self esteem. My kids believe they can do anything. This frequently makes me pull my hair out in frustration, but I know that once they become adults, what frustrates me endlessly now will be the tools they use to take on the world and succeed.

j_s 9y ago
If you don't mind my asking, how do you pay the bills? I would love to provide this type of an opportunity for my family, but the transition from a 45-minute urban commute from the suburbs to something like what you're doing is uncharted territory.

jaclaz 9y ago

Purely anecdotal (and of course showing my age) but when we were kids we were not supposed to wear trousers (long to the ankle) until we became maybe 12 or 13 (exception made when we were all dressed up for some ceremony or similar), we had some choice between shorts and knee length shorts. There was a reason, I have no real memory of myself (nor of any of my friends) having ever both (at the same time I mean) knees/lower legs NOT scraped, bruised or cut, no matter if it was due to falling from a tree or from the bycicle or from experiments with any other possible 2 to 4 wheeled or sliding vehicle of sort, or simple bruises because of thorns while we went through the woods to get some berries. Of course we promptly washed the bruises (and in some cases even disinfected them) but if the article is even marginally right, given the quantity of dirt that must have entered my organism I should not ever be concerned with depression.