A year or two ago, our local playground had a magnificent slide. It was tall and very steep. Like most playground equipment where I live, the slide was made of plastic, not metal, but it was the only one in town that kids could really whiz down, their hair blowing in the breeze created by their own velocity.
The slide's not there any more. Even though signs were posted that the equipment was strictly for children, a parent took a trip down the slide, child in lap. The child's leg got caught between the cupped plastic and the parent's thigh. Voilà--baby's got a broken leg, and the slide was taken away from us all.
Shortly after this happened, I stood on the mulched surface of the playground with a knot of parents. "Just because someone's an idiot," one mother fumed, "doesn't mean the whole community should be punished."
I see her point and even feel her frustration, but the reality is, we're not all endowed with the same amount of common sense. The reason we follow safety precautions is precisely because, as that mother put it, someone's an idiot. This is what it means to belong to a community: You make personal compromises in order to reduce the chances that more reckless parents or more reckless children get seriously hurt.
I don't know what kind of kid you have. Mine are both the cautious sort, but my nephew is the terrifying combination of daredevil and, let's say, not especially graceful. I've dealt with exactly three scraped knees as a mother, but my sister-in-law is forever pouring antiseptic, placing bandages, checking for sprains, and getting X-rays. While I could, in all probability, let my girls go helmet-free and not worry, I make them wear their helmets because I love their cousin and I want to contribute to the peer pressure to put on the bike helmet.
It's not all my nephew, either. There are strangers out there--new teenage drivers, tired truck drivers, parents who buy their kids those mini-motorcycles--who figure in my decision to enforce the rules. People make bad decisions, get distracted, simply don't think, and the safety equipment protects my girls from the consequences of these situations. And there will be these situations; it's reality. As cautious as my kids are, they too might make a bad split-second decision someday--but by then I hope that their safety habits will be so ingrained that they'll mitigate the fallout.
Besides, these days my girls don't give the helmets a second thought. Sometimes they'll even stop riding their bikes and wander around the yard with the neighbor kids, helmeted like a small pack of Space Rangers. The safety precautions that we find so constrictive, my kids hardly notice. Around here, it's not up for discussion as to whether you wear the helmet. It's a hard rule that you don't cross the street that has the insane drivers racing down to the end. (Idiots.) You don't run up to strange dogs and pet them. The rule about the street will change over time, but I don't think I'm squashing their sense of independence or adventure by enforcing rules that wouldn't have occurred to my own parents. I think I'm teaching common sense and limits, what's acceptable risk, and what's not. The potential dog bite isn't worth a feel of Fluffy's head, and what's on the other side of the road isn't worth navigating a stream of cars at forty-five miles per hour.
In fact, I think "too far" is a pretty relative phrase, in terms of safety. Where I live, in a middle-class area with tree-lined streets, we parents tend to be stringent regarding the dangers we actually see here, like speeding cars (bike in the cul-de-sac only!) and the pedophiles we read about in the daily paper (stay away from strangers!). Our kids' play is often organized, with soccer teams and dance lessons. But I know there are other areas where safety precautions are vastly different. I've heard of kids in the country, hunters' kids, getting gun safety lessons (or even a gun) at eight years old, because the parents want their kids to know the risks of these objects that are under lock and key but also in their lives. I've heard of kids in inner cities whose play-safety rules are simple: Don't leave the house because of the gangs. What seems like "too far" from the outside is often a pretty spot-on set of rules, given a child's environment, temperament, or both.
I'm comfortable with the play-safety rules I've erected. The only one, in fact, that gives me pause is this: My girls cannot wander out of my sight. It gives me pause because I remember spending weekends and summer days doing exactly that as a child. I'd leave the house in the morning and set off on my bike for the park, a friend's house, or just aimlessly noodle around town. I was maybe nine years old. Once my whole vacation Bible school class just took off to explore the woods beyond the church. We didn't tell anyone, but we didn't get in trouble, either. I still remember the puffed-up feeling of exploration, a junior Christopher Columbus.
My girls can't do this, though, because they don't live in the same sort of place I grew up. I could knock on literally any door in town and feel that the people answering it would know my parents. I knew the three houses to stay away from because I'd been cautioned that the people in them were "weird." There was a sense that everyone (well, except the weird ones) was looking out for everyone's kids.
We don't have that sense of community where I live. I would no sooner tell a strange kid to go home and put his helmet on than I would tell his mother her pantyhose were the wrong color. And I don't think I really can view the adults in my town as a safety net, either. For starters, most of them aren't even home in the afternoon.
I imagine the people who think we've taken safety precautions too far will argue that, by most accounts, we live in an unprecedentedly safe time. And while that may be true, dangers are not the only thing that have dropped off. Sadly, we've also lost the community that let my mother feel safe letting me wander the streets of our town. Most parents are on their own, armed simply with new rules for this new age. It's a loss, certainly, but it's also reality.
