by Sara Zaske
Necessary Dangers
The German risk researcher Warwitz told me that such playgrounds “are a good way of self-testing for children,” providing places where they can try out skills and take risks, enhancing their knowledge of what they can do safely. Although Warwitz studies the benefits of risky play for children, he has a low opinion of amusement parks which feed children “pseudo-adventures” passively to induce the thrill of danger with things like roller coasters without any of the responsibility of taking a true risk.
“Real adventures do not have to be spectacular,” he said. “They have to involve independent initiative, responsibility for oneself, the potential for failure, and the willingness to accept any possible consequences.” Everyone needs to learn to manage risk, Warwitz contends, and children should start learning as early as possible how to identify and handle dangers.
Jörg, one of the fathers I met through my children’s kita, grew up in Wolfsburg, a city famous for its huge Volkswagen plant, and he told me he rode his bicycle to kita at age four. By elementary school, he often played outside all day, unsupervised, with a group of kids at a playground across the street from his house. “And we only enjoyed it if there was risky stuff to do,” he said. He described doing things like jumping off the top of the swing set, and “this terrific game” in which all the kids would help each other climb on top of a six-foot-high block and then try and push each other off. None of this Jörg considered too dangerous, and while he’d broken a couple of bones in his life, it was from doing other things—such as gymnastics—not during this wild play with his peers. “I find it really dangerous when kids are protected from risk taking, because that’s how you learn how much you can trust yourself,” he said.
The importance of children engaging in risky play is an idea backed by research—and not just from Germany. In 2015, the University of British Columbia and the Child & Family Research Institute at BC Children’s Hospital in Canada published a systemic review of twenty-one papers on the subject. The review determined that risky outdoor play was not only healthy for children but encouraged the development of creativity, social skills, and resilience. In particular, playgrounds that offered natural elements, changes in height, and freedom for children to choose their own activities helped bring about these positive results. “These spaces give children a chance to learn about risk and learn about their own limits,” said Mariana Brussoni, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor at UBC.
Brussoni’s study looked at three types of risky play: heights, rough-and-tumble play in which children have the potential to hurt each other, and play in which there’s a perceived risk of the child disappearing or getting lost—in other words, play or movement without adult supervision. These three categories of risky play are among six that were first defined by the Norwegian early childhood education professor Ellen Sandseter in 2007. She created the categories after interviewing preschool teachers and the preschoolers themselves about what they saw as risky play. Sandseter’s categories, which have since been much cited in the field, also include play involving great speed, dangerous tools, and dangerous elements, such as something a child could fall from or into.
In her 2011 paper titled “Children’s Risky Play From an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences,” Sandseter theorizes that there are evolutionary functions for these types of play that help children manage their own fear later in life. She points to studies that indicate that children who engage in climbing have less fear of heights as adults, young children who engage in rough and tumble play are less aggressive when they are older, and children who experience multiple, positive separations from their parents before the age of nine have less separation anxiety symptoms at age eighteen. She cautions that reducing or eliminating risky play could result in increased mental problems. “Overprotection through governmental control of playgrounds and exaggerated fear of playground accidents might thus result in an increase of anxiety in society,” she writes. “We might need to provide more stimulating environments for children, rather than hamper their development.”
Overprotection has definitely sucked the life out of most American playgrounds. In recent decades, the equipment has become extremely tame in the name of safety—and a fear of lawsuits, which journalist Hanna Rosin detailed well in a 2014 article for The Atlantic called “The Overprotected Kid.” Rosin describes the lawsuit mania that started in the late 1970s with a prime example: In 1978, a toddler named Frank Nelson fell through a gap between a tornado slide and the railing, and landed on his head on the hard asphalt below—because that was what covered the ground of most playgrounds in those days. Tragically, the fall caused permanent brain damage. His parents sued the Chicago Park District and two companies involved in manufacturing and installing the slide—and won. This and similar suits caused a sweeping change in playgrounds across the country.
Gone were the tall metal climbing structures and towering slides, replaced by plastic play structures of modest heights. Gone also was the asphalt, replaced by soft surfaces that almost bounce underfoot. Arguably, some of these hazardous things needed to disappear, but it’s hard not to notice that the kids have also disappeared from playgrounds. Most of the small, safe plastic playgrounds I’ve visited in the United States have few if any school-age children on them.
Even with all these safety measures, the number of playground accidents in the United States is still high. In 1980, the rate of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, both public ones and home equipment, was one visit per 1,452 Americans, according to what Rosin calculates using statistics from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. In 2012, even after all that plastic and soft padding, the injury rate stood at one per 1,156 Americans.
It is interesting to note that the rate of injury in the European Union is a bit lower, even though many countries tend to have riskier playground equipment and parents don’t monitor their children as closely. An estimated 119,000 children per year in the entire EU required emergency medical treatment due to injuries related to playground equipment, according to a study by EuroSafe. That’s about one for every 4,235 EU residents (based on the EU population in 2012, the last year of the Euro-Safe study).
It’s difficult to compare the playground injury rates with those in Germany, because the country’s national statistics office does not keep that statistic separate from other injuries, which is perhaps indicative of the lower concern about making playgrounds perfectly safe. However, Mario Ladu, CEO of the playground inspection firm Spielplatzmobil, told the German press agency DPA in 2013 that about 16,000 playground injuries are reported every year. If that’s an accurate number, that would mean the injury rate is even lower in Germany at one per 5,039 residents.
There can be many reasons for a higher injury rate in the United States—children following their natural inclinations will often be more careful on playgrounds that feel more dangerous and likewise if a playground is too safe or boring, they will make something risky to make it more fun. They will go up a slide backward or throw themselves down the slide headfirst. They will climb on the outside of a structure not meant for climbing on or stand up on a swing. This behavior fits with the risk compensation theory, which argues that people adjust their behavior according to the level of risk—taking more risk if they perceive that something is safer. So since all the safety equipment has been put in place, children may be more likely to misjudge the danger involved. For instance, they might think it’s safer to climb higher if the surface below them is designed to soften their fall.
Risk researchers argue that normal children have a natural instinct for self-preservation and will usually only dare as much as they think they can manage. Warwitz says that children’s “fear acts as a natural brake.” The really dangerous situations happen when something interferes with that normal instinct; for instance, when other people, such as older kids or adults, pressure children to try something they aren’t ready for.
> Sports writer Mark Hyman found that this damaging outside pressure often comes from the parents themselves when it comes to organized team sports. Hyman wrote about the phenomenon in his book Until It Hurts, showing that the pressure to win from coaches and parents cheering on the sidelines can cause children and teens to play past the point of pain to injury. His own son, a high school pitcher, wound up with a rare injury requiring a surgery normally used on professional baseball players. Sometimes it seems that parents watching can be more harmful than when we let children play on their own.
So what can parents do in America with our ultrasafe playgrounds and culture of controlling children to encourage kids to take reasonable risks? It’s pretty simple. Do as the Germans do. Send your kids outside to play, and don’t watch everything they do. Take them to the playground and leave them on their own for a while. Let them climb trees and ride bikes. Seek out playgrounds with creative and riskier structures. They are few and far between in the United States, but they can be found. There are even some adventure playgrounds, including ones in New York City and Berkeley, California. We also can urge our parks and recreation districts to create more exciting play spaces for our kids.
Most of all, we parents can help by turning off the “Achtung” in our heads. If we can break the habit of constantly telling our school-age kids to “Stop!” and “Be careful!” then they’ll have a better chance to test their own limits and rely on their natural “fear brakes” to judge what they can and cannot do. “Kids are supposed to do things that make their parents nervous,” my husband told me once. I remind myself of that almost every day.
Another thing we can do is to let our children engage fully in the parts of our culture that do encourage risk-taking and facing fears—in my opinion, the best thing for this is American Halloween.
A Celebration of Fear
When I was a young kid, Halloween was the biggest, most scary-fun night of the year. This was a night to dress up like frightening creatures, to overcome shyness to ring a stranger’s doorbell, and threaten them with tricks unless they gave you treats. Despite all the razor-blades-in-candy scares, Americans have still preserved much of that Halloween spirit, and at least for one evening a year school-age children are still allowed to roam the streets with only light adult supervision.
I thought Germans would be all over this holiday, since it seems to embrace so much of what they teach their children. After I experienced a German Halloween, it was clear they didn’t understand the concept. Halloween, I didn’t realize, is really an American holiday. While Halloween has roots in Europe, starting out as a Celtic tradition that was later modified and picked up by Christianity as the day before All Saint’s Day, Germans have not formally celebrated it until recently. It is seen as an imported holiday, not from Ireland, but from the United States.
In my opinion, Germans don’t know how to do Halloween right. Part of the problem is that October 31 falls close to a traditional German holiday called Saint Martin’s Day. Usually celebrated on or near November 11, Saint Martin’s Day is built around the story of a Good Samaritan, Saint Martin, who gave half his cloak to a freezing beggar. To mark this act of mercy, German children make paper lanterns, often lit with candles, and then parade through the streets and sing songs. While this is a lovely idea—children spreading the light of mercy and kindness through their neighborhoods—in practice, it’s not exactly a thrilling children’s holiday, at least compared to Halloween.
We celebrated Saint Martin’s Day several times at our kita and at Sophia’s school. November can be a cold time of year in Berlin, and the party usually started out with a bonfire in the kita’s garden or schoolyard, with some food and drink. The school served the parents warm spiced wine, which was a major plus. Still, for the parents, the holiday was simply a lot of time spent standing and walking around in the cold. The kids would march around the block with their lanterns, singing—and that was it. No scary costumes. No candy.
Since Germans already had one holiday that meant walking around at night in the cold, I could see why they weren’t eager to adopt another. Halloween got short shrift in Berlin. First no one seemed to know that Halloween had to be celebrated on the actual day of October 31. Parties at the school or in the neighborhood would happen on a day near Halloween that was most convenient, so that meant nobody celebrated it at the same time. While some stores gave out candy, none of our neighbors expected children in costumes to come knocking on their doors demanding treats.
One year, we went to a Halloween party held at Forcki, our neighborhood adventure playground. It was packed. There was pumpkin soup, cooked apples, hot cocoa for the kids, and warm spiced wine for the adults. Children in scary costumes were running everywhere. In the middle, some adults and teenagers had built a crude dragon statue out of wood planks, fabric, and paper. It was quite large, about six feet tall and ten feet long. At first, I didn’t understand what it was for—an art project perhaps for the teenagers.
Sophia, dressed as a witch, ran around the whole place, trying out the haunted house that other kids had made out of the wooden huts. Eight years old and above it all, she declared it to be “not scary.” When I asked her what was inside, she said, “Just some kids in costumes who jump out at you.”
Ozzie, who had recently turned four, wouldn’t go near the haunted house. He was dressed up as a Spiderman–alien (he couldn’t decide on one costume) and stuck to my side. He kept asking to go back to look at the dragon. There was a circle around it marked with a single rope strung between stakes, so the little kids wouldn’t get too close. Ozzie gripped that rope and stood wide-eyed as a teenager set up a dry ice machine, which made the dragon look even scarier.
After some time, a couple of guys with drums and, for some reason, bagpipes, started playing music—a signal for all the kids to line up. Then we all paraded in one big mass down the city streets. People in apartments opened their windows and threw candy down on the kids, who scrambled to pick it up. It was completely crazy and, I thought, missed the entire point of Halloween! Where is the daring if the kids didn’t have to go to the doors by themselves and ring the bell? Essentially, as one big roiling group of kids and parents walking down the street, it was a lot like Saint Martin’s Day, except with scary costumes instead of lanterns. My kids barely got any sweets, but only Zac and I knew what they were missing out on. They’d never experienced the excesses of an American Halloween.
After walking around a while in the cold, we went back to Forcki. They lit the dragon on fire. All the kids who had been running around and yelling were suddenly still and quiet. Ozzie watched as the sculpture that had fascinated and terrified him turned into a raging bonfire and started falling apart. The head with its open jaw full of teeth flamed for a moment and then broke and fell to the ground. The children laughed and cheered. The adults and teens that were managing the fire picked up bits of fallen dragon and threw them back onto the growing bonfire.
Sure, my German neighbors had got all the details of the holiday wrong, but they got this part of the Halloween spirit right. They created something monstrous and scary—then they burned it down.
10
Tough Subjects
When you live in a country where your language skills are less than perfect, you miss a few memos. One of the first important memos I missed was about sex education. I’m sure it was discussed at a parents’ meeting, probably right after a long conversation in rapid-fire German about the lunch menu. So my daughter was introduced to the birds and the bees in school at age seven via a picture book called Mummy Laid an Egg, by British author Babette Cole. Sophia, of course, heard it translated into German. It’s a silly book—perfect for giggling children.
I only learned what she knew when I saw her pull the same book out at the library and start showing it to Ozzie. I glanced over at the pages and saw childish cartoon drawings of all the ways Mommy and Daddy “fit together.” I turned as red in the face as the embarrassed parents in the book. I took the book and flippe
d through the pages. It was about a wise child counteracting her parents’ white lies about how babies are made: like a stork brings babies or that they are grown in a cabbage patch. Then the child explains how it really happens with cartoon drawings.
“Um … I’d rather you not look at this right now,” I told Sophia. “We can talk about it later.”
“Mo-om,” Sophia said with a hand on her hip. “Frau Schneider already read it to us in class.”
“She did? When was this?”
“A couple weeks ago. It’s really funny.”
I showed the book to Zac and explained what happened. He raised his eyebrows. “Well, now she knows,” he said.
I found myself battling conflicting reactions: someone else had that dreaded conversation with her first, and on the other hand, someone else had that dreaded conversation with her first! I had always thought I’d be the one to talk to my daughter about sex, but quite honestly, I wasn’t sure when and how I was going to handle the topic. Now that the subject had already been introduced, I found it much easier to talk with Sophia about it, to find out what she knew, what questions she had. While she was still quite giggly, she seemed at ease with the idea. She was less embarrassed than I was. She saw sex as a normal if silly thing to do, and I couldn’t help affirming that truth. “It’s OK to laugh,” I told her. “It is kind of funny.”
Another huge benefit of having the teacher read this book to her students meant that all Sophia’s friends knew the same basic information that she did. There were no secrets or weird stories floating around. When I was Sophia’s age, I was one of the only kids in my neighborhood who knew the facts of life. My mother had told me straight out fairly early. I didn’t go around telling all my friends, but I did feel obligated to inject some truth when other kids told crazy stories of how babies are conceived. For instance, I remember having a heated argument with a neighbor girl who insisted that women got pregnant when a man peed on them and then the baby came out of their belly button. She told me this with a mixture of seriousness and horror and refused to believe what I told her. She was already convinced by her own odd version of sex, which she probably got through a combination of TV, overheard conversations, and kid logic.