No One Escapes Unscarred

Typically, when I'm invited to speak, it's to audiences of early childhood educators, which means mostly women between the ages of, say, 30 and 50. The internet tells me the average age of our profession is 39-years-old. That seems about right.

Recently, however, I was invited to speak on the topic of "risky play" to a group that skewed much younger than that. There was still a good number of mid-career educators in the group, but most were college-aged. Some were even still in high school. 

The way I typically run a risky play session is to share a story of risk from my own childhood. In this case it was a story of a small group of us kids straying away from our parents while at the beach, climbing a cliff, eating strange fruit, exploring a cave, then finding ourselves walking along a busy, shoulder-less roadway to find our way back to our parents who hadn't even noticed we were gone.

I then ask my workshop participants to share some of their own childhood risky play stories.

The first woman to offer her story, an educator who appeared slightly older than the average age, told us that she and her friends had gotten their clothing wet while playing in a creek. They worried their mothers would be mad at them, so they "went into the barn, poured gasoline into a pan, set it on fire, and dried our clothes in the flame." Yikes! Harrowing, but not much more so than other stories I've heard over the years.

The next educator, another mid-career professional, told a story of jumping off the garage roof. Another talked about adventures in the woods. So far, it had all been the older people. I thought maybe the younger ones were feeling left out, so I called on a young man who appeared to be in his early 20's.

"I've been thinking about this and I don't really have any stories from when I was a kid, but I'm getting my night camping certification right now and a few weeks ago I slept outside overnight for the first time . . . It was scary because, you know, there are coyotes in the woods." As compared to the other stories it was mild, and I had questions about that "night camping certification", but I moved on to another young man who had raised his hand.

"I just took my first road trip without my parents. We got off the highway and lost data, so our GPS stopped working. We were lost for almost an hour. It was scary."

Then an even younger woman jumped in with something I found more shocking than the story about setting a fire in a barn, "I don't have any stories like that". She then swept her hand toward some of the older people, saying, "And I think your stories can't be true. No body would do those things."

I'd of course heard about this generation who has been raised under ubiquitous adult surveillance, but this moment really shook me. Those of us with genuine risky play experiences, which really can only happen when children are free from constant adult supervision, are not only the last generation with these stories to tell, but perhaps the last to really understand why these experiences are so important.

According to the data, nearly 32 percent of our adolescents will be diagnosed with anxiety, a number that continues to increase, with the median age of "onset" being 6-years-old. Major depressive disorders are similarly on the rise. This isn't a function of improved methods of diagnosis as some suggest, but rather a direct result of not enough play, and not enough risky play in particular. An ever-growing body of developmental psychology, neuroscience, and play research tells us that when children are deprived of age-appropriate risky play, they miss critical experiences that help build emotional resilience, self-regulation, and confidence. This deprivation is directly linked to higher rates of anxiety and depression.

Our evolution, which is to say our species' drive to survive, has made us, especially in the early years, seek out risk because those experiences teach us about both our limits and our capabilities. The learning comes from both our successes and failures in more or less equal measure. And when it comes to risky play, failure can result in (horror of horror) injuries.

The children we are teaching today will live their entire childhoods under adult supervision and modern adults have been taught that injuries, not matter how small, are always our fault. Parents are blamed when their child, say, scrapes a knee or, heaven forbid, breaks an arm. Educators fear being sued for even standard-issue bumps and bruises. Sure, most courts will toss those minor injury lawsuits out, but that doesn't mitigate the stress and expense of being sued, not to mention the harm of our professional reputations. The result is that we don't let kids to anything that smacks of risk.

In popular culture, the blame for childhood mental health issues most often falls on screens, smartphones, AI, video games, social media, or some other technological boogyman, but in a real sense these are the symptoms. The culture of fear and constant supervision means that parents can't just send their kids outside to play because it's "too dangerous." After all, there might be coyotes out there! These indoor, technological distractions feel safer than, say, the local playground or even our own backyards, but it's clear that what we prevent as far as physical injury is paid for in the coin of a mental health crisis. 

One of the key lessons of life is that no one escapes unscarred. Speaking for myself, I'd rather those scars be physical than psychological.

The great allure of these modern technologies for young people is that they are the last frontier in which they can escape the ever-present eye of adults, although even that window is starting to close as the cries for more regulation in the name of "safety" increase.

If we continue on this trajectory, it won't be long before these young people will be having children of their own and our stories of unsupervised play will be found only in books labeled as fiction. I have no illusion that society is going to change anytime soon, but as adults of a certain age, we are in a position to make a difference for the children who come our way. We can take one step back . . . And then another . . . And then another. We can shut up and fight the urge to constantly caution and scold. We can create opportunities for children to climb a little higher than we are comfortable with, run a little faster, wrestle, experience fire, air, earth, and water, work with real tools, hide, and witness others challenging themselves in similar ways. We must create real spaces in which children feel free to challenge themselves.

And we must keep telling our stories, even if they sound unbelievable to some.

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