Bliss-ninny political thinking changing childhood...

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Sindawe

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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-cplaygroundjul18,0,7619952.story

In the pursuit of safety, teeter-totters and swings are disappearing from playgrounds

By Chris Kahn
Education Writer
Posted July 18 2005


Andrea Levin is grateful that Broward County schools care about her daughter's safety. But this year when they posted a sign that demanded "no running" on the playground, it seemed like overkill.

"I realize we want to keep kids from cracking their heads open," said Levin, whose daughter is a Gator Run Elementary fifth grader in Weston. "But there has to be a place where they can get out and run."

<snip> The most telling part of this article? See below..

She scanned the tall metal sign while her daughters, Emma and Sarah, wandered with two other young girls through a sparse play area that's reserved for the youngest grades in school.

It warns 5- and 6-year-olds to "not use equipment in this playground without adult supervision" and "do not use equipment unless designed for your age group."

A third of the way down the sign, a stick-figure is pictured running with a red slash through the middle, followed by: "No running, pushing or shoving."

"I don't know if that would mean much to a 6-year-old," Bartleman said of the signs. "How does a child know what's appropriate for their age group?"

The girls tried out the horizontal ladder and balance beam for a few minutes before settling on a game of stacking plate-size dirt chunks into a neat pile.

"Making sand," explained Kristin Gonzalez, 6, as she crushed one in her hands and sprinkled the bits over the pile.

Bartleman, the only board member with children in elementary school, created a subcommittee this year to suggest ways to redesign school playgrounds. Safety is important, she said, but there's got to be a way to make Broward's playgrounds more interesting than dirt.

Hmmm...dirt is composed of decayed rock fragments and bits of organic matter, and its just teaming with bacteria and spores. Maybe dirt should be the next thing baned from play grounds after the last of the swing sets and climbing structures are gone. :banghead:
 
You know, even though I don't like them, I don't even really blame the bliss-ninnies so much as the blood-sucking ambulance chasers. It's more about not getting sued than keeping kids 'safe'.
 
This being in the same era when school officials can't figure out why gradeschool children are all sickly and obese.

I can probably speak for just about everyone here... When we were all kids, we didn't have a nanny to hold our hands and tell us not to go on that dangerous playground equipment. We took our chances, often times falling down, getting bruises, scrapes and sometimes *gasp* a broken arm. All of them bumps and bruises put strain on bones and helped increase bone density. There was maybe one of two fat kids in a class and these kids for good or bad were picked on for being fat, now its acceptable for 30% of a 6th grade class to be overweight.
 
When I was a lad, a kid fractured his skull diving off the top of a slide. Things happened. We all concluded doing stupid stuff while showing off could be ugly.

Maybe that wasn't the right lesson to teach kids, eh?
 
I call it the plastic bubble complex, wanting to protect children from all harm.

Fine, says I, for if they keep this up then the "Civilized" countrys of the world will soon be taken by the 3rd world countrys, and the cycle will start anew.
 
I remember swinging on the swings as high as I could go, then jumping off. For distance. In competition with the other kids. When we got bored with that we did it backwards.

Probably went at least six feet off the ground, maybe more than that, it has been a few years... ;)

Of course my parents probably would not have even thought of suing the school had I landed wrong and broken anything.

Some folks think our court system is like the lottery, and exists to redistrubute money to those lucky enough to win.

I think we will have an excellent opportunity in the coming years to find out what people are like when they have no concept of what laws are really for.
 
Parents

if they didn't have kids they wouldn't be trying to make my adult freedom world for their Disney kid safe vision, Gggrrrr I hate kids! :evil:
CT
 
You guys ever hear of a "lemon drop?" That's were you hang by your legs (behind the knee joint, leg bent) from the monkey bars, drop, flip, and land on your feet. That's the theory, anyway. It rarely results in a "cranial landing," but I did manage to land flat on my back a few times. I could see a teacher not allowing us to do that at recess, as things that involve falling headfirst can cause low test scores, but there comes a point... Anything that can result in nothing worse than a bruise, scrape, cut, and, *maybe* a broken arm or leg is just plain-old child's play. If I hadn't plummeted out of that tree a few dozen times, or had a skidding fall into the pea gravel, I would never have learned how to properly clean and dress a small wound. There's probably some kind of immune system corollary with all the germs that got into my numerous cuts and scrapes.

*sigh*... People are idiots. Remind me to home school my kids.
 
But look at the bright-side to this. Now any kids that still insist on running on the playground are obviously discipline problems or are suffering from ADHD and can now be put on Prozac or Ritalin or whatever the drug of the day is.
 
I have to admit that im kind of happy the parents of this generation are doing this to their kids. I believe it will result in the children ending up realizing that they can and will be hurt in life.

In other words, my hope is that in a few decades the 'Me! Me!' and 'Sue em all' arsehat generation will have raised offspring that will spell their ultimate doom.

Or itll just get worse. Thats humans for ya...
 
I call it the plastic bubble complex, wanting to protect children from all harm.
Click to expand...

reproductive strategies. In the animal world they go from spewing out thousands of eggs, and swimming away, to having a few and caring closely for them. Higher animals tend toward the few offspring end, because they also need to be trained.

How many kids does the average yuppie have? Too few.
 
I broke my hand on a playground. I was going down the slide, threw my arms out and cracked the back of my hand on the safety rail. Yes it hurt, yes it was preventable- by me paying closer attention to where I wheel my flailing arms.

Jeebus, people. There is no Nerf world. Kids are gonna run on a playground. They'll trip, they'll fall, they'll knock a few teeth out.

Get. Over. It.

Mike
 
Well I hope they enforce those rules!

Kid caught running? - mandatory ridalin!

Kid caught pushing or shoving? Clearly a criminal in the making - 10 years detention!

Hey, if you can't do the time don't do the "crime"!


:barf:

Seriously, policies like this will simply instill a distain for all rules in our children. These kids will not be able to distinguish between a modern ridiculous rule and a traditional justified rule.
 
Andrea Levin is grateful that Broward County schools care about her daughter's safety. But this year when they posted a sign that demanded "no running" on the playground, it seemed like overkill.

"I realize we want to keep kids from cracking their heads open," said Levin, whose daughter is a Gator Run Elementary fifth grader in Weston. "But there has to be a place where they can get out and run."
Click to expand...


The schools and the government work hand-in-hand in our modern era to attempt to assure that as many of the populace are fat, lazy, stupid, dependent, and easily controlled as possible.

Thus, we have the dumbing-down of the educational system, coupled with the attempted eradication of any belief in one's own right to bear arms, and the elimination of normal, physique-enhancing play.


-Jeffrey
 
I'm 33, and so is my best friend.
When we were in elementary school, we did not go to the same school at that time.

He told me a story that when he was a kid, he jumped off the monkey bars of his own volition and broke his arm.

His family sued the school and got about $10,000, I think (this was in the early/mid '70s!) because supposedly the school nurse downplayed how injured he was, and caused a delay in getting him hospital care. :rolleyes:

Remembering that tale makes me realize that this "there was an injury, so SOMEONE's got to be sued" mentality is not super-recent.

-Jeffrey
 
The local Elementary School that the mud monster attended got rid of their gravel & tarmac in favor of some stuff that I can't identify, and some more grass.

They also built (it was a community-wide volunteer effort) all kinds of "play stuff", mostly out of wood, that sort of classifies as a "Jungle Jim" (or is that "Gym"?). Great stuff.

You can still re-arrange your innards on these things, but common sense seems to have prevailed.

(Which surprises the heck out of me 'cause this is a yuppie suburb, sort of. 'Course a lot of us are Republicans....)

In short, improvements were made that removed or repaired dangerous "rides" on the grounds and added some new stuff that is roughly as safe as is possible given a bit of tolerance for kids being kids.

I expect that the prior makeup of the Supremes would require us to bubble-pack the kids if they are permitted to use that playground, but....

My daughter moved on to other schools as she got older. Playgrounds vanished from her life, and stadiums appeared. I'm surprised that they still let the kids play sports. The rifle team vanished decades ago. Imagine High School kids on the bus with rifles. And First Graders.... The horror.... Over the 13 years I was in that school system, we had one knife fight, and an occasional fistfight. Nobody died. Nobody went to the hospital. Nobody got sued.

'Bout the worst thing that happened to my generation (disregarding, with due reverence, those who ended up in Vietnam) was a kid who used to beat up on me. Perhaps 20 years after graduation, he got married unexpectedly, and his new father-in-law didn't like him. I forget if it was two or three 9mms....

I didn't cry, but he wasn't exactly worthy of that. Something slower, more painful, and non-fatal, maybe.... OTOH, kids is kids, and 25+ years later (he stopped beating up on people in favor of just being an SOB rather a while before graduation), it's hard to say what he'd turned into.

I think the blissninnies kids are in for a rude shock. Whether it's going to help or destroy them, though, I don't know.

("Mud Monster" - she could find a way to get dirty in the bathtub. An attempt to put her into the sheepdip resulted in a complaint from the sheep. She now has a job, is going to college, and if her car didn't look like it'd already been to the crusher, about the only thing left for perfection would be marrying a guy who can support me :neener: .)
 
The way I look at it...

If kids are brought up physically and mentally weak these days, a parent can take advantage of it to give their kid the best chance to succeed. I encourage my son to push his limits, I play rough and tumble with him, I let him think for himself, I encourage him to try some fo the more challenging playground equipment. At 2 1/2 years old, he can run a mile without stopping (though he runs pretty slow :D ) he can climb like a monkey, and he can solve a lot of problems on his own. I figure that if I keep pushing him, he could easily be in the top 10% physically and mentally by the time he enters high school, which can give him an edge in life.
 
I remember hearing some report that toddlers that are allowed to play in the dirt are less likely to get asthma when they get older. Home schooling is sounding better every day lol. My girlfriend has a younger brother, I think he's 4 or so. He doesn't have any brothers to play rough with him so the minute some other relative does he starts crying because he's not conditioned for it at all.
 
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