Thing 2 will be camping with her Girl Guide troop in a couple of weeks, and while I was filling out the extensive forms for her, I noticed that the parents are warned that drawstrings in sweatshirts or jackets will not be tolerated. Apparently, possession of illegal fastening devices is enough to get you thrown out of Girl Guide camp.
I understand that they are concerned for the safety of the children and all, but I think we may be overstating the danger here, I mean, it's a piece of string.
I got to thinking of all the things we did as kids that seemed perfectly okay then, and would have us put in foster care now:
I didn't wear a seat belt until I was a teenager. In fact, I can remember at least 3 of my father's cars that didn't even have seat belts in the back, AT ALL.
Bicycle helmets? What's that?
When we went to Timmins to visit my aunt and uncle and cousins, (a 10 hour drive.) my parents would take the mattress off of one of the twin beds and put it in the back of the station wagon. Then they would deposit my sleeping brother and I onto the car and take off at around 5 in the morning. That way they could count on us sleeping for about 4 hours or so. No seat belts, no car seats. Then, when we woke up, we would play on the floor of the car between the front and back seats. Sometimes we'd climb up on the luggage at the back and squish ourselves between it and the ceiling of the car. In the event of an accident, I imagine we would have been projected right through the windshield of the car. Luckily, that never happened.
There used to be a playground on the outskirts of the city, which had an ice cream parlor attached to it, called "The Dairy Dell". We would beg to be taken to on summer evenings. From what I can remember, it was a glorious place, filled with the most violent and potentially lethal play equipment you could ever think of . They had one of those carousel-type things where several children got on each of the pie-shaped sections, and then someone else (preferably a dad, for his sheer brute strength) would spin that thing around at increasingly higher speeds until the centrifugal force shot the kids off of it like watermelons from a cannon. Honestly, it was like being on a Japanese bullet train, except you ended up in a heap in the dirt at the end of it. (One was wise to finish one's ice cream cone before enjoying that particular activity.)
They also had the highest teeter-totters I'd ever seen, which meant that the kid on the high end had to be at least 8 feet off the ground at full tilt. You can only imagine the teeth-jarring crash that would end that ride, when the other kid would get off.
I also remember a swing set that was really high and had really, really long chains. This meant that if you put some effort into it, you could get going mighty fast, and the g-forces would make you black out.
That place is gone now.
There's a park in the north end of town that we used to call "The Pit", because it used to be, well, a big, old gravel pit. It's basically a huge, grassy hole in the ground, almost the size of a whole city block. It makes for excellent tobogganing in the winter, as the sides are not only at a pretty steep angle, but about 100 feet long. We also used to ride our bikes down it. (When I told my mother about this 30 years after the fact, I found out that the statute of limitations never runs out on when your mother can yell at you.) Luckily, that park is right beside the hospital.
When I was a fair bit older, (i.e. should have known better.) we used to steal the cafeteria trays from the University and use them as toboggans down the hill of the local convent. In the dark. (That was back in the day when my bum was small enough to actually fit on a cafeteria tray.) Those things would smoke down that hill, the bottom of which was a wrought iron fence. (I remember some kids asking us if we had waxed the bottom of the trays, that's how fast those suckers moved.) I don't recall ever even thinking of wearing a helmet. I drive past that place every day now and marvel that I don't have a steel plate in my head.
Climbing the pine trees on the grounds of the seminary was a particularly attractive activity when we were kids, because the trees were huge and they provided a very easy climb. I remember one of my brother's friends getting up so high that the top of the tree was so thin it couldn't support him and started to bend over and he had trouble holding on. He must have been 5o feet off the ground. When he fell out of the tree, there were plenty of branches to break his fall on the way down, and he only sprained his ankle. I don't think we even mentioned it to his mother.
We also liked to play in the unfinished houses that were being constructed in our neighbourhood. I can recall having some trouble getting the ladder hoisted up so that we could get out of a basement, but we did it.
I'm sure there were plenty of children getting lead poison from the paint in their toys, and getting head injuries for lack of helmets, and I'm not dismissing the dangers therein. But for all the activities that now makes me gasp in horror, we did live to tell the tale. I'm happy enough that the safety of children is such a priority, but I also wonder if we're not protecting our kids to the point where they don't know how to protect themselves. I mean, if they aren't allowed to experiment with a drawstring, how will they ever know how to use one wisely?
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