"I'll Bet You Won't Try That Again"

One of the best parts of growing up as I did, when I did, was that much of our childhood play took place beyond the reach and view of the adults. It's not that the adults weren't at hand, it's just that when the kids were playing outside, they did their adult things while we played in the neighborhood. This meant that there was very little prior restraint placed on our choices.

If we, say, wanted to try jumping off a shed roof or ride our brakeless red wagon willy-nilly down a hill, there was nothing but our own judgement to stop us. If we survived without significant injury, we got to try it again and again. If, however, things went poorly, our adults would tend to us, then be confident in saying, "I'll bet you won't try that again." And by-and-large we didn't.

What if we had been seriously injured, or even, heaven forbid killed? I don't know. It never happened. In fact, I don't recall any of the neighborhood kids suffering from anything worse than a broken bone or a few stitches. Maybe more terrible things happened to a kid two neighborhoods over, but we didn't have access to those grapevines. I imagine if we did, if say, our parents had heard about a local child becoming permanently paralyzed by a fall from a pine tree, we may have experienced prior restraint, "No climbing pine trees," but we were all "blissful" in our ignorance.

We don't live in that world any more, of course. Nearly everything in our children's lives is subject to prior restraint. There is always adult supervision and there are always rules about how fast, high, or far the kids can go. The grapevines have since invaded every nook of childhood, the fruit of which is the kind of catastrophic thinking that would have abhorred our parents as irresponsible and negligent.

But let's be honest, I'm quite certain that if our parents had known we were planning to jump from a shed roof (something I never, in fact, tried), they would have wisely put the kibosh on it. Likewise with careening downhill in wagons (something I did, in fact, do repeatedly). At a minimum they would have made us wear helmets . . . Had they existed.

And, indeed, the world has changed materially since then. I don't mean that there are more predators or that the laws of gravity have somehow shifted into a more dangerous phase -- the risks associated with those things, I expect, have stayed pretty constant over the decades. What has change are all those grapevines and their fearful fruit. We hear about every catastrophe, not just the local ones, and that has made us more anxious. But perhaps the most impactful things that have changed since the 1960's are that there is now a lot more traffic and that our neighbors are too often strangers who cannot be trusted in the impromptu project of responsible community supervision.

One of our few prior restraints was to avoid Macon Street. It was a "busy" street, the through street that connected all of our cul-de-sacs. By today's standards, it was a shady neighborhood promenade, but compared to the streets on which we played, everyone, even us kids, agreed it wasn't a safe place for us. And maybe because of this, we didn't know any of the families who lived on Macon, while we did know everyone on our own Wembley Street as well as Christopher which was the next cul-de-sac over, accessible to us kids by cutting through unfenced yards, thus avoiding Macon altogether.

In 1965, the leading causes of childhood death in the US were accidents like drowning or burns, followed by death by illnesses like influenza and pneumonia. Today, according to the CDC, the leading causes of childhood death are motor vehicles, followed by firearms. 

So yes, the world has changed, but not necessarily in the ways we often think.

Whatever the case, the result is that for today's children, every waking moment tends to involve prior restraint, enforced by ever-present adults.

As an educator, I can't change the world and its attitudes, but I can make a difference for the children in my care. 

I once taught a boy named Joseph who had a cannon for an arm. By that I mean, that he, as a three-year-old, was capable of throwing any object that could fit in his hand, on a line from one side of the playground to the other. And he loved to throw things: balls, rocks, blocks . . . You name it. He wasn't the first kid who enjoyed throwing, but he was the only preschooler I'd ever met who could throw with such velocity.

Naturally, Joseph's "genius" couldn't be tolerated in a crowded preschool setting. At the same time I felt incredibly guilty putting that prior restraint on something that he enjoyed and at which he excelled. Fortunately, we had access to a large, high-ceilinged room that we barely used for anything other than adult meetings and a bit of storage. One day, when Joseph was struggling with his urge to chuck stuff, I had the idea of designating this room as a kind of throwing range. I then provided him with a few tennis balls and turned it over to him.

He was in heaven.

There was some negotiating when other, less capable, kids wanted to try out the "throwing room," but Joseph himself devised a system whereby he waited until all the throwers were together, shoulder-to-shoulder, then, "One-two-three," they would throw together, all in the same direction, meaning no one was ever in harm's way. Like I said, genius.

It was a much better solution than the blanket prior restraint that children like Joseph so often face: "No throwing things." And it reminded me of the kind of agreements we kids made with one another when playing together unsupervised.

Similarly, when spontaneous wrestling disrupted things, instead of an adult-imposed, "No wrestling," we found a way to make it work without prior restraint, with the children themselves in charge of making it safe enough.

As anyone familiar with my work knows, we always began our school years with no prior restraints on the children because if we were going to have rules, I wanted the children, in the spirit of democracy, to make their own. So there were always restraints, but only those agreed upon by the children themselves, which is, again, in the spirit of how us neighborhood kids managed our own play off the radar of our adults.

I've been accused of wrapping my childhood memories in he sepia tones of nostalgia, making our freedom sound more perfect and complete than it actually was, and there is certainly some truth in that. It's what old men do. At the same time, that underlying freedom and autonomy is something I've always tried to make real for the children in my care and one of the ways to do that is to avoid, to the degree possible, prior restraint. 

And when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, to say with confidence, "I'll bet you won't try that again."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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