No Child Left Alone by Abby W. Schachter

Author:Abby W. Schachter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594038624
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2016-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The War on Fun

Banning play, toys, and games

YOU’VE NO DOUBT heard of the war on poverty and the war on women, but what about the war on fun? As unhappy as it sounds, there has been a decades-long march by government-empowered bureaucrats, school administrators, regulators, and health professionals against nearly every aspect of childhood fun, both indoors and out.

Toys, games, playground equipment, and general free play have all been banned, recalled, curtailed, or removed. And often the decision is taken without consultation with or even informing parents and the local community. The reasons are both legal and cultural; they include safety concerns that get blown out of proportion and well-founded fears of liability and litigation.

Toys that have caused no permanent or even serious harm are recalled and even banned. Games have been outlawed and schools have cut recess down and out. And playgrounds have been redesigned, with concrete replaced by shock-absorbing rubber or mulch just so kids won’t experience falling on a hard surface. Kids tend not to experience much fun at these “playgrounds,” either. Independent play is practically extinct.

Popular toys have been banned because they’ve been incorrectly played with and some kids have gotten hurt, even though the vast majority has enjoyed the same products without incident. But what the majority does without incident is not persuasive to the regulatory state. Instead, arbitrary and probably impossible-to-achieve safety standards, combined with our collective and ever-growing fear of risk, have replaced a commonsense approach to assessing what is dangerous, harmful, or hazardous.

The nanny state is incapable of agreeing to disagree about standards of care. The nature of government oversight is to create a single universal standard and apply it equally everywhere. Therefore, the decision of what is safe is removed from parents and put into the hands (most often) of bureaucrats. The consequences are easy to spot. Do a quick Internet search, and you’ll come upon multiple top-ten lists of childhood activities, toys, and school fun that are today completely unacceptable.

When Frank Furedi published his 2001 book Paranoid Parenting, he found a “growing tendency to extend adult supervision into every aspect of children’s lives. It was apparent that the outdoors had become a no-go area for many youngsters,” he explained in his regular newspaper column.1 “During the past decade or so, the banning of a variety of activities associated with children’s life has acquired a relentless dynamic,” Furedi continued. “[I]n February 2007 after a group of children were suspended from school for throwing snowballs, an angry mother [wrote] to me to ask: ‘What will they think of next?’ Regrettably, the obsessive impulse to regulate children’s life ensures that the next target of child protection is already on the horizon.”

Tim Gill agrees. In his book No Fear, Gill argues “childhood is becoming undermined by risk aversion. Activities and experiences that previous generations of children enjoyed without a second thought have been relabeled as troubling or dangerous, while the adults who still permit them are branded as irresponsible. At the extreme . .

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