There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  Research also shows that three-quarters of all American parents worry that their children will get abducted, despite the fact that violent crime against children has been decreasing steadily since the 1990s and the risk of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger is so minimal—around 0.00007 percent, or one in 1.4 million annually—that experts call it effectively zero. And in a vast majority of sex abuse cases against children, the perpetrator is somebody close to the victim—a family member, relative, or acquaintance—and not a stranger off the street. Still, these numbers have done little to alleviate parents’ fears that their children will get snatched and hurt by a stranger.

  According to David Eberhard, chief psychiatrist at the emergency psychiatric ward in Stockholm, our brains have a tendency to overestimate two types of events that may occur to our children: those that have disastrous consequences and those that are out of our control. Both types encompass kidnapping. No matter how extremely rare it is, our brains are simply not that good at judging this type of risk. And fear is a powerful thing. When stories about child abductions lead the evening news, it is easy to believe that the same thing is going to happen to your child. “The reason why these things make such big news is that they virtually never happen,” Eberhard says. “But the human psyche finds that type of information very hard to handle.”

  If the risk of letting children play unsupervised outside hasn’t changed in the past generation, it appears that moral attitudes have. As the researchers behind a 2016 study at the University of California conclude, “Americans have adopted a parenting norm in which every child is expected to be under constant direct adult supervision. Parents who violate this norm by allowing their children to be alone, even for short periods of time, often face harsh criticism and even legal action.” The researchers brought this shift to light through a series of experiments in which participants were asked to judge the level of risk associated with leaving a child unsupervised in five different hypothetical scenarios. The ages of the children and the circumstances during which they were left were the same in all the studies, but the parent’s reason for leaving the child varied. In some cases, the hypothetical parent had left the child unintentionally or to go to work, in other cases to relax or to rendezvous with a secret lover. As it turned out, participants consistently rated the situation as more dangerous to the child when the reason for the parent’s absence was deemed morally unacceptable—for example, seeing a lover. “People don’t only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous,” the authors write. Playing outside unsupervised is far from the only childhood activity that used to be considered perfectly normal that has been demonized lately. Climbing trees, walking barefoot, playing tag, waging snowball war—the list of abolished pastimes goes on. A study by Play England showed that half of all British children have been stopped from climbing trees and one out of five has been banned from playing tag or chase, even though in 2007, children were nearly three times as likely to be admitted to the hospital after falling out of bed than after falling from a tree.

  Ironically, in a time when our children are statistically safer and more secure than ever, removing all perceivable risk from their lives has become a mainstream parenting strategy. Human ecology researcher Ebba Lisberg Jensen at Malmö University believes the anxiety over so-called risky play is a result of the fact that society has become so safe and secure. “The safety becomes a little bit of a trap. We want more and more safety, and it’s just never safe enough. This is what we call ‘care anxiety,’” she says. “Once you’ve secured your children’s safety, you somehow feel like you’ve succeeded, and that in turns creates positive reinforcement.”

  Erin Kenny, who cofounded the first forest kindergarten in the US, Cedarsong Nature School, on Vashon Island, Washington, says that the prevailing culture mistrusts children’s ability to assess risk to the degree that they’re missing out on learning opportunities and physical skills. “If every surface around a climbing structure is soft and spongy, it gives children a false message that they can fall and they may climb higher than they actually should. They don’t learn how to assess risk,” she says about the ever-stricter safety regulations for playgrounds. “As a culture, we don’t trust our children at all—we basically live their lives for them. Up until age seven or eight they’re so bubble-wrapped and helicoptered that they don’t get to practice any of their physical skills, and now there’s huge fallout. Public kindergarten teachers are reporting that kids don’t even have the hand strength to hold a pencil. Eighteen-year-olds are in physical therapy because they don’t have any upper-body strength. It’s shocking.”

  Kenny’s words reminded me of a time when I stood at the local playground back in the US and noticed a mother barking at her daughter, who was maybe six or seven years old, to immediately get down from the monkey bars. “You’re going to break a leg and we don’t have time to go to the emergency room today!”

  The girl, visibly disappointed, obliged and promptly got down from the equipment. And who wouldn’t, considering the threat of impending orthopedic surgery?

  I don’t doubt that this mom had good intentions. After all, no parent wants to see their child get seriously hurt. It can be extremely tempting to hover over children and implore them to “be careful,” “slow down,” and “get down from there.” But there are many good reasons why children seek out risky play, and why adults should allow it.

  Ellen Sandseter, an associate professor of physical education at Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Trondheim, Norway, describes risky play as “thrilling and exciting play that can include the possibility of physical injury.” She goes on to identify six different types of risky play: those involving, respectively, great heights, high speed, dangerous tools, dangerous elements, rough-and-tumble play, and disappearing/getting lost. When Sandseter reviewed several studies on risky play, she found that children who played unsupervised or had independent mobility are more physically active and have better social skills than their peers. They’re also better at judging risk, which can help them later in life, when they’re no longer monitored by adults. Sandseter argues that the overall positive health effects of risky outdoor play are greater than those associated with avoiding it. She also notes that risky play makes children better able to master peril. When adults restrict children’s risky play, it hampers their ability to seek out the challenges and stimulation that they need for normal physical and mental development.

  A study led by Mariana Brussoni of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver also showed that children who were allowed to engage in risky activities like climbing and jumping, rough-and-tumble play, and exploring alone had greater physical and social health. Brussoni points out that risk-taking during play “helps children test their physical limits, develop their perceptual-motor capacity, and learn to avoid and adjust to dangerous environments and activities.” Simply put: Allowing some risky play actually makes children safer and less prone to injury.

  I think of Brussoni’s words as I watch Maya and Nora play one day at a new playground in Ulricehamn, one of the bigger nearby cities. The girls are off playing on a modern piece of equipment that looks a bit like the swing carousels that you would normally find at amusement parks, except this one is human powered and has a motley collection of swings, some for standing up in, others for sitting in or hanging from. Nora is hanging upside down on some sort of rope contraption and Maya is standing up on one of the swings. It doesn’t look like any other piece of playground equipment I’ve seen before. Four or five other kids have their own ways of hanging on to the remaining swings. One unfortunate dad has gotten stuck acting as the engine and ends up pulling the carousel around and around, until it gains enough speed and momentum to go around a few laps on its own. “Again! Again!” the ecstatic children shout until he grabs the carousel and makes it go again.

  Meanwhile, I’m watching them from a distance with the car
ousel dad’s wife, Anette. She shakes her head and smiles as her daughter goes around, lap after lap, showing no signs of wanting to slow down. “As long as they don’t do anything life-threatening, they’re okay as far as I’m concerned,” she says. “We’ve never told our kids, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ and they’ve never broken anything either. I think they get better coordination from trying things and staying active. Even if they did break something, a broken bone heals quickly. The most dangerous thing of all is to sit still.”

  I had heard many other parents in Scandinavia say the same thing. “Of course you don’t want your child to get seriously injured,” says Magnus, a father of two, “but it’s normal for kids to get bruised legs and scraped knees. That’s what we call ‘summer legs.’”

  According to researchers, at least part of the reason for this common attitude is that Scandinavians regard nature as a much-needed, unrestricted “free zone” for children, a necessary counterweight to adult-led, organized activities and predictable routines. In nature, children face physical and mental challenges from powers much greater than themselves, and Scandinavian parents believe that doing so fosters prized traits like self-restraint, resilience, and problem-solving skills. One of the most renowned advocates of risky play, Peter Gray, research professor of psychology at Boston College, says that not only is risky play beneficial to children’s health and development but that depriving them of it can cause harm. According to Gray, risky play is nature’s way for children to teach themselves emotional resilience and learn how to manage and overcome their fears. Gray draws a straight line from the decline in children’s freedom to play and embrace risk to the dramatic rise in childhood mental disorders like anxiety and depression that has occurred since the 1950s.

  “The story is both ironic and tragic. We deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger, but in the process we set them up for mental breakdowns,” he writes in Psychology Today. “In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing such play than by allowing it. And, we deprive them of fun.”

  Resilience is often defined as the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and keep going in the face of adversity. Educators and CEOs alike often tout this grit, determination, and ability to learn from failure as essential for coping with challenges at school and at work. Resilience, it turns out, is key to academic and professional success, not least for children, who face a considerable amount of adversity.

  In order to foster these traits and encourage physical activity, researchers suggest a shift from the prevailing attitude to keep children “as safe as possible” to the more nuanced approach of keeping them “as safe as necessary.” Scandinavian forest schools are an excellent example of a place where children are allowed to take manageable risks on a daily basis, whether by climbing trees (great heights), poking sticks in a fire (dangerous elements), or using hammers and saws (dangerous tools).

  “Our children are independent because we let them do things—not hazardous things, but real things,” says Siw Linde, cofounder of Sweden’s first forest school, Mulleborg, as she shows me a woodshop in the yard where the preschoolers are in the process of making their own stick horses. “I think children need to use real tools in order to create something real. Yes, they may hit their thumb with the hammer, but there’s something to be learned from that too. I think we need to let them try things; we can’t protect them against everything that’s dangerous.”

  Free play in nature can potentially involve all six of Sandseter’s risky play categories. However, Scandinavians have been curiously unaffected by the fear of nature that seems to have spread to many parents elsewhere. “The one thing that I worry most about is traffic. But in nature? No, I feel like nothing could happen to my kids in the woods,” one mom tells me.

  This is a shared view, and it can partly be explained by the fact that Scandinavians have lucked out with flora and fauna that are pretty harmless. Mosquitoes, the deadliest animal on the planet, don’t harbor any dangerous diseases here, and the woods are even spared from the nuisance of poison ivy. But here, too, nature is a wild place that offers its fair share of risk. In Sweden, moose are common, as are ticks, wasps, and the country’s only poisonous snake species, the European viper. Wild boars have become prevalent in some areas, and once in a blue moon predators like wolves and lynx are spotted near urban centers. Uprooted trees, noxious weeds, tall cliffs, slick rocks, fast-moving water, sinkholes, and poisonous berries and mushrooms are more common potential hazards to a young child.

  The difference is that in Scandinavia fears regarding such dangers are fought with familiarity, both at preschool and at home. When you grow up going to the woods on a regular basis, climb those trees, roll down those hills, cross those creeks, scramble up those boulders, those activities don’t feel any more dangerous than sitting on your couch. (Which, it could be argued, is actually far riskier, considering the very real and serious effects of a sedentary lifestyle on children’s health.)

  “In the forest there are poisonous berries and mushrooms, but instead of telling the children that they can’t pick any of them, we teach them which ones are poisonous,” Linde says. “Otherwise they won’t know once they get out in the woods on their own.”

  Coffe, a father of two young girls, is thinking along the same lines regarding risks in nature. “We want our daughters to learn how to climb trees, because if you know how to climb, you don’t fall. We want them to feel safe with it, because it’s when you’re scared that you fall.”

  The potential pitfalls of nature also pale when viewed in light of other risks. For example, approximately thirty children die in traffic every year in Sweden, whereas poisonous snakes kill on average one very allergic person every eight years. The last fatal wolf attack in the wild occurred in 1821. A few people do get attacked by moose every year, and in 2008 a sixty-three-year-old woman in southern Sweden was fatally injured by an unusually aggressive animal. (The woman’s husband was jailed for a year, suspected of her murder, before DNA evidence from moose saliva found on the woman’s clothes solved the mystery.) But logically, the risk of getting hurt or killed by a moose is by far the greatest when you are in a car, since there are roughly five thousand traffic accidents involving moose in Sweden every year. (As a side note, more people in the world died while taking selfies than from being attacked by sharks in 2015.)

  The idea that nature is an ideal and safe place for children to play is so prevalent that it is even embraced by self-proclaimed worriers like Emilia, a friend of mine from high school. When I catch up with her and her husband, Christos, who live in a trilevel brick home in a small town outside of Borås, both their children are playing in the woods adjacent to the house. Estrid, who is six, is weaving pine branches through the small, cone-shaped den that she and her four-year-old brother, Oscar, have built with the help of their dad, while Oscar is filling a bucket with water from the small creek that runs through the wooded area. The kids don’t have any set boundaries in the forest, but “they rarely go very far,” Emilia says.

  A few blocks from Emilia and Christos’s house is a small playground with a couple of slides, a climbing structure, a sandbox, and a swing set. The playground is a popular gathering spot for the neighborhood children, and, like many of the other kids in the area, Estrid is allowed to walk there as well as to her friends’ houses by herself, sometimes with her little brother in tow.

  “It was scary the first time,” Emilia acknowledges. “But she’s very good about following instructions. We really feel like we can trust her. We could tell that she was really proud afterward.”

  Traffic is not much of a problem on these quiet streets. But what about strangers with malicious intent? Those who are every parent’s worst nightmare and one of the main reasons why so many children are no longer allowed to play outside on their own in the US? It’s one thing to recognize how far-fetched it is, statistically speaking, for a child to get snatched off the street, and another to be able to
let go of these deep-seated fears.

  “I’ve never heard anybody worry about kidnappings. That just doesn’t happen,” Christos says.

  His statement surprises me a little bit. Christos grew up in a rough part of Borås and had not enjoyed the sheltered middle-class upbringing in a small town that I had had. Plus he works as a policeman.

  “What do go in waves are reports about perverts. All of a sudden we’ll get a tip about a white van that’s parked outside a school and then it’s all over the grapevine. Because of social media, it takes five minutes for the news to reach the whole town, and then everybody is seeing white vans everywhere. Of course, about ninety percent of all contractors drive white vans, so it’s not very strange that people see them everywhere. Or it could just be somebody’s grandpa who’s sitting outside the school, waiting.”

  Naturally, in Sweden, as in the US, there are people who could pose a threat to children, but according to Christos they are fairly few. “Of course there are mentally ill people out there, but most of them aren’t dangerous. They mostly stick to themselves. Children run a much greater risk of getting bullied or beat up by a classmate than running into a pervert on the street.”

  At first glance these stories may only prove that Swedes are lax on safety, yet they are anything but. This is the country that invented the modern version of the three-point seat belt, where you can’t as much as smell a beer and legally get behind the wheel, and finding a place to smoke indoors besides your own home is about as easy as finding a smiling person on the Stockholm subway at seven o’clock on a Monday morning. Children are recommended to ride in a rear-facing car seat at least until their fourth birthday, and bike helmets are mandatory by law until you turn fifteen. Most adults use them too. In fact, when I show up to a bike-riding meet-up with a group of friends one day, I’m the only one who’s not wearing one and I’m immediately scolded. “You know me, always living on the edge,” I joke defensively. They are not amused. Instead, one of them proceeds to tell me a heartbreaking story of a workmate who had fallen off his bike and ended up paralyzed from the neck down. The next time I see them, they’ve pooled money to buy me a helmet.