Awakened by Death by Christiana N. Peterson

Author:Christiana N. Peterson [Peterson, Christiana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2020-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

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One of my sharpest memories from elementary school is of the blood dripping over my classmate’s brow when he fell off the giant wooden dinosaur playscape that one of our teachers had built in the school playground. After a few stitches, my classmate was fine, and I’m sure he climbed right back on the dinosaur after he healed. But the dinosaur playscape didn’t survive much longer.

The parks and playscapes of my childhood looked very different to many of the parks of today. When I was a child, we chased each other through pebbled playgrounds in the shadow of that dinosaur. We got dizzy from creaky merry-go-rounds that lurched and tipped as we held on to keep from flying out into the gravel. We hid in concrete tunnels away from the ears of adults, sharing the quiet excitement of secrets. We bobbed on rusty seesaws whose rapid rebounds left cuts and bruises on our chins. We climbed thin metal ladders to the tops of steep narrow slides as high as tree branches.

Things have changed since then. The parks that my children play in, if they were built in the last few decades, have specially cushioned ground cover that bounces when you walk. Merry-go-rounds have seats with curved backs so that no one slides out. Seesaws have been replaced with colorful balance beams just inches from the ground.

There are so many good reasons to rethink the construction of our old playgrounds, both for the safety of our children and so that children with disabilities or mobility issues can have a place to explore and play too. Oddly enough, though, even with all of these playground modifications, the statistics of childhood injury and death haven’t changed much since the 1980s. And in fact, there is evidence that certain injuries are increasing as a direct result of these specially cushioned parks. According to Hanna Rosin in the Atlantic, this could be due to “risk compensation”—children aren’t accustomed to needing to be careful on the harder surfaces of our childhood playgrounds so they get injured more frequently. David Ball, a professor of risk management, says that “we have come to think of accidents as preventable and not a natural part of life.”5

I’ve struggled with fears about safeguarding my children. I once believed that if I tried hard enough, I could protect them from harm. But life has shown me the ugly truth. Each of my four children has been to the emergency room for some reason or another: one for a dog bite, one for asthma exacerbated by a virus, one for a clavicle that got fractured while doing somersaults on a carpet in the living room, and one for a massive splinter from climbing on top of the monkey bars. Accidents will happen, even if we are hypervigilant.

Part of the upsetting reality of parenting is that even if we can protect our children from every physical injury, other things can hurt them, things that life throws at them that we might not anticipate. Friends will hurt them, they will fail, and they will be injured.

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