SCENESSCENESSCENESSCENES
    0
  •   was successfully added to your cart.
  • Home
  • Country
  • Pop
  • Rock
  • Americana
  • R&B
  • Culture
  • Premium
  • About
  • Contact
    • Music Submissions
    • Advertising
      • Media Kit
    • Customer Support
  • Shop

Making The Case For Dangerous Play

    Home Collage Making The Case For Dangerous Play

    Making The Case For Dangerous Play

    By Mary McCleary | Collage | Comments are Closed | 26 October, 2016 | 0

    What are your best memories of your childhood? Are they the times indoors with dolls and games? Watching TV? Reading? Or the time spent with adults in supervised sports?

    My own fondest memories are the days with friends building forts. Our house was one of the first on a new street in a heavily wooded area of Houston called Memorial.  We had the perfect location for constructing forts on the vacant lots around us and a ready supply of material for building them with salvaged lumber from burn piles where builders were putting up new houses. In January, we made our bulwarks from discarded Christmas trees. Sometimes we cut down saplings and tied them together for our walls. Grey Spanish moss used to hang all over Houston. We would pull it down from trees and hang it on strings tied between trees to give us a screen.

    Manifest Destiny played a part in our activities.  We believed the vacant lots on either side of our house were ours for the taking. We tamed the wilderness by hacking through masses of tangled thorny vines and rotten logs to make trails to our forts among the dense pine, yaupon, and oak. The thick brush was also home to copperheads, coral snakes, rattlesnakes and even water moccasins.

    Living a block from Buffalo Bayou, we once built a raft that we tried to launch into those dark, probably polluted waters. Like other kids of the time, we were on our bikes night and day. Our time was ours. Our projects were ours. In summer and on weekends, we had very little structure or adult supervision.  Our parents assumed we would survive these somewhat dangerous activities.

    Driving those streets today,  I’ve seen a couple of professionally built tree houses, lots of traffic, no construction site, and all perfectly manicured yards. The only vacant lot is where someone has torn down a house to make way for a larger one. Where do kids learn to use tools, cooperate with others without adult direction, and gain a sense of mastery over their physical, not just virtual environment?

    Asking similar questions, Silicon Valley dad, Mike Lanza of Menlo Park, California believes in play where children take physical risks without supervision. He has turned his yard into a different kind of neighborhood playground. Melanie Thernstrom describes this in an article in the New York Times on anti-helicopter parenting. Here are a few nuggets from it:

    “Think about your own 10 best memories of childhood, and chances are most of them involve free play outdoors,” Mike is fond of saying. “How many of them took place with a grown-up around? I remember that when the grown-ups came over, we stopped playing and waited for them to go away. But moms nowadays never go away.

    ***

    Central to Mike’s philosophy is the importance of physical danger: of encouraging boys to take risks and play rough and tumble and get — or inflict — a scrape or two.

    ***

    Mike always talks about just wanting his boys to have a normal childhood, while complaining that his idea of normal is no longer normal. His free-time-is-for-goofing-around ethos is particularly anomalous in Silicon Valley. With all due respect to Westchester, Silicon Valley may have the densest concentration in the country of former engineers, executives and other highly educated women who have renounced work in favor of what they call uber-parenting — and they want results. Just as Silicon Valley leads the way in smartphones, Silicon Valley parents think they should be producing model kids, optimized kids, kids with extra capacity and cool features: kids who have start-ups (or at least work at one); do environmental work in the Galápagos; speak multiple languages; demonstrate a repeatable golf swing; or sing arias. To a comical extent, parents here justify the perverted ambition through appeals to research (enlarging the language center of the brain and so forth) while ignoring research on the negative effects on children of being micromanaged.

    Christina Hoff Sommers wrote of similar ideas back in 2000 in her book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men. Not everyone will agree with Mike Lanza’s ideas, but they worth considering. I just hope the girls in the neighborhood get in on some of the fun.

    Read the NY Times article here. And to find out even more, buy his book, Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into A Place For Play.

    childhood, Christina Hoff Sommers, helicopter parenting, Melanie Thernstrom, Mike Lanza, play, Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into A Place For Play, Silicon Valley

    Related Post

    • A Comic Pioneer – Her Drawings and Wisecracks Were Some of the Best

      By Mary McCleary | 1 comment

      Artist Barbara Shermund’s women were both ditzy and bright, dependent and independent, tough and soft.

    • Pollsters Weren’t the Only Experts Who Were Wrong

      By Mary McCleary | Comments are Closed

      The next time you are tempted to believe a prediction purely on the basis of an expert’s opinion, remember these famous last words.

    • Crooked House

      And They All Lived Together in a Crooked Little House

      By Mary McCleary | Comments are Closed

      In this world, nothing is quite the way it should be–every aspect of the world is crooked. And we are all in it together.

    • Keeping an Eye on Shaun Roberts

      By Mary McCleary | 4 comments

      Thirty year old Shaun Roberts was born in Lufkin, grew up in East Texas and is now an Assistant Professor and head of the painting program at Stephen F. Austin State University. Shaun’s paintings andRead more

    • Grateful Reverence for the Way Things Are

      By Mary McCleary | Comments are Closed

      For those who are interested in looking at lots and lots of art packed into one place, this weekend is the time to be in Houston. Two art fairs will be open there this ThursdayRead more

    • Sign up for our Daily Digest, where we deliver the top headlines in music and exclusive SCENES Live Sessions details straight to your inbox!

    Download Sessions and Buy Merch

    • Madeline Merlo on SCENES Live Sessions Madeline Merlo on SCENES Live Sessions $2.99
    • Nashville Love T-Shirt Nashville Love T-Shirt $25.00
    • Darling West on SCENES Live Sessions Darling West on SCENES Live Sessions $2.99
    • Jenna Raine on SCENES Live Sessions Jenna Raine on SCENES Live Sessions $2.99
    • Scruffy Pearls on SCENES Live Sessions Scruffy Pearls on SCENES Live Sessions $2.99
    • Media Kit
    • Privacy Policy
    © 2022 | All Rights Reserved
    • Home
    • Country
    • Pop
    • Rock
    • Americana
    • R&B
    • Culture
    • Premium
    • About
    • Contact
      • Music Submissions
      • Advertising
        • Media Kit
      • Customer Support
    • Shop
    SCENES
      0 items