Is Playing Outside a Thing of the Past?

There's a little article in one of the giveaway papers: a "Field Guide to Family Pets." It lists the pros and cons of birds, bunnies and lizards, along with a "Good for what age?" chart. Bunnies are good for kids 5 or older, it says. Lizards for 10 and up. Birds for 14 and up. A chinchilla? Your child should also be 14.

Maybe that doesn't rile you, but there's something very sad about a society that now deems many household pets too challenging for kids under double digits. Wasn't it just a few generations ago that kids grew up on farms and were expected to grab the eggs from chickens and milk the cows? And suddenly they are too dumb or perhaps considered too easily "harmed" to deal with a lizard? In a few years, will bunnies bump up to a pet for tweens, too?

The article riled me because I found myself on the cover of the New York Daily News yesterday — yes, cover — with the headline "Leave your kids in the park! Mom's bizarre campaign." My bizarre notion? That on Saturday, we take our kids, age 7 or 8 or older, to the local playground and let them play there, with one another, without us for a little while. Maybe a half-hour. Maybe 10 minutes.

Eight TV appearances later, I can tell you that the first question out of every anchorman's mouth is: "What about predators?"

Not, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if kids started playing outside again, the way we did?"

The news media immediately jump to the worst-case scenario — a scenario both gruesome and, thank goodness, rare, far rarer than it is on TV. Far rarer than it was when we were kids. New York, for instance, just enjoyed its lowest murder rate on record! What if, I keep thinking, every sporting event began with, "We know it's crazy — because it could start raining and someone here could get struck by lightning — but let's play ball!"?

The fact is our kids are spending their childhoods cooped up indoors.

I could give you all the stats about the rise in obesity and diabetes (big!) versus the number of children abducted by strangers (so rare that the head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says, "We have been trying to debunk the myth of stranger danger"). But fear and "worst-case scenario" thinking rule the day.

So let me instead quote Dr. C. Everett Koop. The former surgeon general appears in a new DVD called "New York Street Games," all about the days when kids went outside, on their own, and spent the day playing stickball or baseball or anything else with a ball. Says the man once entrusted with the nation's health:

"If you want to know how we can step into childhood and make it better for them, I would start at the activity level. I'd like to say, 'Let your kids go out and play.' Then I'd say, 'You're not going to do that, are you?' Kids ought to grow up the way you and I grew up. ... Now who's playing in the afternoon? Nobody. Risks, I think, are the thing that make life important, and everything that you and I do is risk versus benefit. Is there a risk in sending your kid out? Absolutely. Is there a benefit? It exceeds the risk."

Same with the benefit of a pet. Same with the benefit of playing at the playground, without a bodyguard. The benefits exceed the risks.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now" and "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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