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> Opportunities to engage in outdoor free play—and risky play in particular—have declined significantly in recent years, in part because safety measures have sought to prevent all play-related injuries rather than focusing on serious and fatal injuries.

Of course. "injuries" don't matter, only serious and fatal ones do. A scratch is nothing and is healed in a couple of days. Even breaking a leg should not be considered serious. It's annoying, esp. for the parents, but it's in no way life-threatening.

Although I'm sure it has happened, it seems unlikely that any kind of play in a playground could result in serious injury or death. Let the kids play outside. And don't force them to put a coat in cold weather if they don't want to! Let them decide!

"don't force them to put on a coat"

I'm in the middle of this right now with a 2 year old. Allowing your child to make decisions you disagree with has many down stream consequences, like what food they eat, what time they go to bed, how much screen time they watch, whether they sit at the table to eat.

How's that gonna go when it's time say "don't force them to do their homework, let them decide!"?

It's not about the coat, though the coat can be a matter of life or death in the case of a car accident or the sudden unexpected incapacitation of the parent, it's about following instructions and setting boundaries and being able to make the necessary decisions as a parent.

> it seems unlikely that any kind of play in a playground could result in serious injury or death.

I think more important than the setting is ensuring they know how to play safely. Third most common cause of death is accidental self inflicted injuries. A lot of those are falls.

But we are living in a capitalistic society and injured kids probably mean reduced work force....
Correlated but not exactly the same is being out & playing without adult supervision.

Kids being out and running into emotional challenging situations allows them to learn and deals with emotions & anxiety are very important for later life.

I've been thinking a lot about this. What age would you let your child go out on errands by themselves? When I was 7, in France, I'd walk a kilometer by myself to go on errands like going to the baker. I have a friend living in Tokyo who let his daughter go on errands around 5 years old (but Japan in particular is very accepting of this). We live in Hong Kong, here, I think the age is more around 8 or 9 years old.
Can't access the website, but sounds like the German approach [1]. In the past years, I can see that some new playgrounds being built in my area in France also incorporate more risks, which is nice.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35220345

Which area in France? we went back to France during the holidays to visit my parents near Perpignan and I was really disappointed at how bad the playgrounds were.

Compared to playgrounds when I was a child in the 80s, they were much safer, there was no sand, only that black bouncing floor (which might be toxic) and above all there was very little to do.

Same when we visited our friends in Toulouse.

It was much worse than the playgounds we have in Hong Kong that at least have decent slides, climbing bars, etc...

One thing that I've noticed is missing from both countries though are swings. We have them in Hong Kong but instead of just being a flat piece of wood on which you can stand, sit and do other things, it's more of a safety seat like you'd see in a baby chair.

Hal Colebatch wrote a really great short story called 'The Colonel's Tiger' which is worth a read...
I submitted a story about a slide for kids: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38442577. And the only comment was about how it would lead to lawsuits. This is a slide, something kids have used for 100+ years.
In a more tech-driven/advanced military, who's to say we won't need more drone operators looking at a screen than front-line riflemen (and women)?
Modern large scale conflicts are still very labour intensive.

Israel has a tech-driven/advanced military but is still using hundreds of thousands of troops in Gaza. Ukraine / Russia use even more against each other.

The Royal Navy is currently unable to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea because of staffing issues, despite the UK's $70 billion defence budget. [1]

I'd recommend watching Perun's YouTube channel if you're interested in specific labour requirements of militaries [2]

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/12/aircraft-carrier... [2] https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU

It's ok to say rifleman without the women qualifier. This is a safe space.
Those we'll probably need again in WWIV to fight with sticks and rocks - after our modern infrastructure has been pulverized.
Article was short on details, like ages and age-appropriate activities. When can I let my child roam his city neighborhood? That would be extremely helpful.
That's really a matter of whether the adults in your vicinity will call child services when they spot unsupervised kids.
You as a parent probably know best when you can trust your child enough. Children are very different from each other, especially during the first ten years.
If you're waiting for your city to change, it's too late. Your kids will have grown up.

You need to move to a place where unsupervised outdoor play at young ages is encouraged. These places do in fact exist in the US.

The common reaction to this is that you can't just get up and move your family. We'll this is still a choice and we all set priorities on what is important.

If you are from the US, good luck. Here in Europe you often see kids alone in the city, either to go to school or to solve some sort of educational riddle they need to solve by finding the right place in small groups of three kids or something

I went to school alone since I was 7. As far as I know in much of the US people would probably sue you if your kid went alone.

We require more minerals

…but replace minerals with children

Emphasis on which faction produces this soundbite when there are indeed insufficient minerals.
One of the many reasons we moved our young children from the UK to Scandinavia was to improve their childhood by reducing hazards & risks whilst also being in an environment that was more acceptable of those risks. (The paper distinguishes risks vs hazards as something the child can perceive & control vs something they can't, like a car or unsafe equipment).

My children had whittling knives from age 5, built their own fires when we went on walks, could explore into the small woodlands on their own soon after and walked home from school at age 7. None of this would have been socially acceptable in a UK city but was pretty much standard in Oslo. Our children still feel safe and also feel confident doing things themselves. Our level of stress about our children seems to be lower than my friends elsewhere, who have a risk avoidance mindset, living in a society that highlights any potential risk as to be totally avoided and bad parenting if a child is exposed to any risk.

Occasionally you hear stories from the US about parents being arrested for letting their children walk down the street alone or play in the local park by themselves and that seems crazy to most of the rest of the world.

> The paper distinguishes risks vs hazards as something the child can perceive & control vs something they can't, like a car or unsafe equipment

I knew someone who worked with designing playgrounds here in Norway, and his focus was on this. He called it subjective safety vs objective safety.

The idea was to maximize objective safety while allowing the kids a lot of room to explore the subjective safety.

This could be say a climbing wall which was tall enough to be challenging, but ensuring the equipment and ground was designed and maintained[1] such that there was no risk of permanent injury should a kid fall from the top.

As most kids love a challenge this induced them to play freely in a natural way, which lead to other benefits including social aspects like reduction of bullying.

[1]: https://www.bsigroup.com/contentassets/fd0e8cd7dd174774890cd...

The channel Not Just Bikes did a video on this, he had the same experience as you.[1]

Growing up in Germany myself, I also feel that this trend is getting noticable here.

I have no data on this, but I feel like safer cars lead to higher speeds and therefore perceived higher risk from a pedestrian/children point of view. The fact that there are more cars and they are bigger, while speed enforcement is basically non-existent (because freedom) are probably also doing their part.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=mV7kT0Oj2z6ic18L

In Norway, when I (24) went to kindergarten my dad used to call to tell them to let me out the gate when it was time for me to go home. When I started at school I got walked only the couple of first times so that I would learn the way. After that you would most commonly walk alone or with classmates and friends who lived close to you.

As a Norwegian I would say something that is a big trait of Norwegian/Scandinavian culture that seperates it from many other parts of the world other than being very high trust societies, is independency. Young people get very independent at a young age. And parents don't meddle in their lives to the same extent as in many other countries. Politics also enables this by giving grants and loans to students, which makes the majority of people economically independent from their parents at 18/19.

My wife and I take the approach of allowing our kids take risks too. Even though it is not that socially acceptable. If people want to judge me for letting my 4yo boy help with building and lighting a fire, then let them.

There is so many things you can do in the home as a parent to encourage kids to take controllable risks. My oldest was helping his mother with knife-work in the kitchen from as early as 3. I also removed the enclosure net from the trampoline in our backyard. I buy bicycles for my kids as early as possible. I rough-and-tumble with my kids on an almost daily basis.

Of course there are limits. We try to keep it age appropriate, around some dangerous areas (fire, deep water, the road) we always keep them supervised. We teach them about the dangers. We teach them how to manage the risks.

Luckily my brother-in-law also removed the enclosure net on their backyard trampoline after he saw that my kids were OK jumping on an open trampoline. So it seems our attitude is starting to have a positive affect on the families around us.

The UK used to be like that in the 70's, when it was a high trust environment.

I used to walk half a mile to the shops at age 7 or 8 to complete an errand, people left their children in pushchairs (or dogs) outside of shops etc. I wish I knew what changed the UK for the worse.

There's "natural" hazards and human-induced ones. One paragraph of the article mentions parents in a poor neighbourhood not letting their kids play outside due to "discarded needles, homeless people sleeping in parks, and proximity to the sex trade and drug users". If that's the kind of world outside your apartment block, it might be a reasonable choice to stay indoors. If it's a woodland where kids might slip and fall of a log they're balancing on, that's a different matter.

The use of "risk" here is not the one I'm used to; the way pretty much everyone in risk management uses it is the product of likelihood and severity. I understand that they need different words for "hazard a child can deal with" and "hazard a child can't deal with", but the work "risk" is already taken.

I didn't have kids until I moved to Iceland but it's pretty idyllic for them here as well. We live in downtown Reykjavik and its perfectly safe for them to walk to and from school alone and do stuff around town together. I'm not sure how that differs to the UK now but my childhood was filled with building tree houses in farmers fields and that sort of thing and I can't really see them growing up differently even if we had to move back.
Plenty of people do this in the UK, just not in the inner cities. Oslo is a nice place though and a friend of mine just moved to Bergen with young kids. It's pretty chill in the UK if you don't live in London and have enough money to live in a nice suburb.
> None of this would have been socially acceptable in a UK city

I guess it depends on the city? We used to cycle with my friends everywhere when I grew up in the UK, and build dens and treehouses in the forest. I'm only 25 now.

I totally agree on it being an important experience though. Independence and exploration are absolutely key to how I have turned out, I think.

> My children had whittling knives from age 5, built their own fires when we went on walks, could explore into the small woodlands on their own soon after and walked home from school at age 7.

You can still do the former if you find a proper Scout group and the latter if you live in the right area. But it's a shame you need to actively look for these opportunities now.

Those activities were socially acceptable in the UK 50 years ago.
Site is down.

Comparable statement from Scotland.[1]

Kids need riskier play, so that the military can get more recruits. Only about 23% of American kids qualify for the US military.[2] With a war with either Russia or China coming up, we'll need more fresh meat for the grinder.

[1] https://www.playscotland.org/resources/print/Risky-Play-Leaf...

[2] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/PW/PW07/20230511/115823/HHRG...

I thought you were exaggerating but skimming, it is chilling how that 2nd link just says the quiet part loud:

> The powerful effect of incentive plans (independent of quotas) was documented in an older study of Army guidance counselors.22 A key responsibility of guidance counselors is to channel applicants into the Army’s priority occupations. During the period under study, guidance counselors were under an incentive plan that offered counselors additional points for selling a high-priority occupation. The study found that simply offering five more incentive plan points for selling a particular occupation was more than twice as effective as offering an enlistment bonus to a recruit. That is, it was more effective to give the seller (the guidance counselor) an incentive to “sell” the occupation than it was to give the buyer (the recruit) an incentive to “buy” the occupation.

Nice to know that government funded studies show tricking people is more effective than convincing or bargaining with them in good faith

I'd like to read the original analysis. My concern isn't about cannon fodder provision but about all round health. Kids growing up with exercise and a penchant for adventure are IMO better placed to succeed in life (long term health benefits, bravery etc.) but not so if they break their legs all the time falling off of things. It's not obvious to me how to balance these things.

The links you provide, as far as I can skim, don't weigh in on the tradeoff.

That's a really cynical take. Early experience in learning how to fall correctly is important for safety as you get older.

Dan John, in Intervention, talks about how a lot of movement patterning is developed during youth, and thus encourages a broad range of activities. This includes learning to tumble.

It is possible that this is some big conspiracy to increase the number of fit, military age folks in the short term, it seems unlikely.

If there were ever to be any kind of “meat grinding” war, it would be escalated to aircraft, drones, and long range missiles pretty quickly I think, with a relatively small number of infantry losses through active combat.

There are also a significant number of people who believe that risky play (or the lack of it) is resulting in mental health issues in today’s young adults, who are finding themselves inexperienced in dealing with feelings of fear, unfamiliar with perseverance and delayed gratification, and are also as you have noted, physically out of shape.

Just because “teenagers being fitter” would benefit the military does not mean that’s the purpose of encouraging riskier play.

I'm not sure why the riskier play would address any of the issues actually linked there: https://prod-media.asvabprogram.com/CEP_PDF_Contents/Qualifi... If they want systemic solutions, then sorting out healthcare, mental health care, not charging weed users, and maybe replacing the corn subsidies could have a bigger impact...

What happens on the playground has way more steps separating it from enlistment criteria then any of those. It would be like counting on 5th order effects working just right.

Damn, usually I'm pro risky play but if this is the long game to neuter the war machine, it can't be all bad.