Douglas Todd: Faster, higher — kids gain from exciting, risky play

This Canadian sculpture, by Stanley Bleifeld, celebrates the spirit of outdoor play for young people. Photo by Nga Kam Yiu

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Drownings are in the news in B.C. this year because they’ve increased almost 50 per cent from the same point last year, according to the Lifesaving Society of B.C. So far 32 people have drowned.

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The upsetting trend makes it a hard time to extol the virtues of the outdoors, especially when it comes to young people.

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News stories of ever-present hazards also produce less tolerance of old-timers waxing on about how they, back in the day, loved unsupervised fun in the ocean, walking to school by themselves in Grade 1, playing in the open fields near our houses or putting together a baseball game on city streets.

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Unfortunately, there is almost always news that is frightening. The flood of stories about danger, propelled upwards in the 1980s by 24-hour news channels, has contributed to a North American crisis of over-protectiveness.

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It’s led many parents to monitor their children at almost all moments — while, in an apparent contradiction, also wanting them to succeed in the real world, which happens to be full of risks.

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The main parenting style in Canada and the U.S. since the 1980s, studies show, has become to keep young people “safe” by having them do more academic work, spend more time in front of internet screens and engage in more supervised sports.

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Alison Yeung, a Canadian physician, has written about her desire to “geo-track” her seven-year-old son with electronic location-sharing devices. It’s become normalized as a form of reassurance, she says, mostly for parents. But Yeung realizes geo-tracking her son would erode his confidence in his ability to navigate challenges on his own.

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Some health specialists are going against the grain — probing the phenomenon of what some call the new “safetyism.”

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The biggest names in the field include American Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow; Britain’s Tim Gill, author of No Fear: Growing Up In a Risk-Averse Society; and New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation.

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Haidt, especially, is a big fan of University of B.C. developmental psychologist Mariana Brussoni, who investigates child injury prevention and unstructured, outdoor play, including risks that come with it. She helped found the website outsideplay.org. Its home page brashly announces: “Go Play Outside! Children experience the world through play. Let them experience the world.”

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In addition to 24-hour news channels, Brussoni describes other societal shifts since the 1980s that have resulted in more anxious parents. In Canada they include the shocking child murders by B.C.’s Clifford Olson, followed by the rapes and murders of Ontario teenage girls by Paul Bernardo and his accomplice Karla Homolka.

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Society went on high alert in the 1990s, Brussoni said, with publicity about missing kids. Pediatric researchers and epidemiologists, including Brussoni, were among those conducting feverish “risk analysis” of almost everything related to children.