Nature + positive risk goes hand in hand - and it's truly a mindset that one must have. Not to shy away, but to embrace the elements. Similarly, in winter - we need to be outdoors, and get our dose of light, even when it's cloudy and gloomy, it's still 10x brighter than the average office. Thank you for this wonderful article Ellen!
Unless we again get OK with the idea of some children potentially getting hurt while playing, and (a tiny number) getting it worse, and that's an acceptable and necessary part of giving them human freedom, this ain't gonna be resolved.
It's more likely they'll be in full custody 24/7, with gps and cameras watching them, helicoptered by their parents everywhere, left to rot watching screens in some climate controlled padded room, than that they'll be left to be humans, exploring and risking, and discovering freedom again.
I think this is why more and more of the writers and leaders in this space are moving to intentional communities. Moving to the woods of Norway isn’t an option for many people (I don’t mean that in the sense of “it’s hard”, I mean literally impossible to do legally if you aren’t in an in-demand employment field where you can get a visa) so the next best thing is finding a community of like-minded people in North America who don’t want their kids to rot on screens and have AI friends.
Many of these intentional communities seem to be religious-based, but not all of them. I think this is probably the most likely path for people who take this seriously. It’s really similar to what Rod Dreher called “the Benedict Option” for conservative Christians in a secular libertine world. Give up on the world, find your tribe, and move somewhere with them where you can create the world you want.
Having grown up in Sweden (I was born 1953), I can relate to everything in this story. We had so much freedom, and so little worries, except to beaten up by mean kids (which was mostly a fantasy!) Having raised two boys in New Jersey, I and my American wife tried to give them freedom to roam and explore, but this was often impractical as playdates required a parent to drive the kids, and the culture was much more risk aversive. When I recently wrote a book about my father that includes interviews where he talked about his childhood in northern Sweden in the 1920s, I realized that he had so much more freedom than we had, which influenced his way of raising his three sons.
You can read an excerpt about his childhood on my substack here:
Hej Hans, I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Finland, and I also roamed around the countryside with my friends on all sort of adventures. One day we were climbing hay bales (before they were round like the one in the photo) in a large barn, and another day we discovered an abandoned bus (!) in a field, and another day we jumped across wide ditches many kilometers away from home and scratches our elbows on rusty barbed wires. And in the spring time we played on flooded fields and got admonished by worried grandpartents who feared we would drown when we built "boats" out of everything we could find. We came home when it got dark, and we were dirty and very happy!
All of these articles about play are the same. Someone, an expert who is in a place of privilege, tells me that if I want the best for my child I must let them play and explore freely. That I must let them climb the trees in my yard and stay out until dusk. That I must take them to adventure playgrounds and allow them to ride their bike to the corner store and play in the woods unsupervised. And if I don't? I might as well start saving up for my child's therapy now, because I'm dooming them to a lifetime of anxiety disorders.
These articles imply that the only thing stopping me from giving my child the risky play that they need is on my own fear.
It plays on my own insecurities as a parent, raising the alarm, making the guilt swell inside of me. I'm the problem, I'm too scared, I'm holding him back.
But that's not the whole story. My child doesn't climb trees, not because I'm too scared, but because I have no climbable trees in my back yard (there is an overgrown bush that he climbs, though). He doesn't ride his bike to the corner store because there is no corner store and no sidewalks. He doesn't go to an adventure park because we don't have any. He doesn't play with his friends until dusk because hexs completely disconnected from his friends outside of school.
I'm not complaining about my personal situation, I'm trying to bring another perspective to the conversation. Some people live in rural areas, some people live in urban ares, many people are a part of under served communities. We have to stop acting like the only thing keeping kids from risky play is caregivers and teachers and start looking at how we can get this level of play to every child in every demographic.
Can we get an article about play written by someone who had to overcome barriers (geography, time, money, disability, isolation) to help their children or the children in their community access play?
> But that's not the whole story. My child doesn't climb trees, not because I'm too scared, but because I have no climbable trees in my back yard (there is an overgrown bush that he climbs, though). He doesn't ride his bike to the corner store because there is no corner store and no sidewalks. He doesn't go to an adventure park because we don't have any. He doesn't play with his friends until dusk because hexs completely disconnected from his friends outside of school.
Not all of those things are mandatory, and not all of those things have to happen, and those aren't the only options for such play.
That said, if the place doesn't have trees, there's no corner store, no adventure parks or general parks to go play, and they're completely disconnected from friends outside of school, then perhaps, risky play aside, that's not a great environment for their development to begin with.
Doesn't mean it's your fault (financial situation or job or other concern might make it impossible to live elsewhere). Still it's the fault of a society building such inhuman environments.
Of course those are not the only options for play, and as an intentional parent I have found ways to provide as many opportunities as I cam for my child. My point is simply that these articles are all the same and do not offer any alternatives or other perspectives.
It's always "let them climb trees, play with their friends unsupervised, and rude their bike to the store," which is all wonderful advice... if it's possible.
But it isn't always. And that doesn't mean that the environment is inhuman or ill equipped for childhood development, it just means that other options must be explored (like you said).
I share my experience, not to complain (I have done what I can to turn my backyard into an adventure playground. I'm privilegedenough to have the money and space to do so), but to get the conversation started around the diversity of childhood. I feel like these articles play on parental guilt instead of looking at the experiences of real families. What about someone who lives in a desert with no trees? Who has to contend with extreme heat? Or what about someone who lives in the city and doesn't have access to a park? Or what about a person with a disabled child? Or a disabled parent who has to content with accessibility just to take their child to a park?
I think we need to talk about these families because while individually they may not be in the majority, every family is contenting with SOMETHING other than fear that is keeping their child from free play and risky play. If we focus on fear as the only factor, we miss out on a huge part of the story and miss out on opportunities to help all kids get more play.
This is so true (even though your use of the term “privilege” will turn off a lot of people since it’s a loaded, 2012-2022 Social Justice-y term that implies that people’s own good choices about where to live and how to run their country are unearned privilege)
But more seriously. It’s just really really hard in North America where we are all-in on letting the public realm decay because we have our castles and our yards and our cars (the yards we don’t even use for our kids much — instead we just use screens in our homes). North American culture was always more antisocial than European, but there were limits to that tendency in the time before supercomputers in all our pockets. Those limits have been removed so the decay of our public realm is accelerating.
I think this is why so many writers in this space are moving to intentional communities lately. A lot of of them are religious, but they don’t have to be. Scott Siskind, the author of the famous blog Astral Codex Ten, is a San Francisco psychiatrist and philosophy/tech/AI writer, and since he and his wife had twins a year ago he’s been writing about creating an intentional community of free play in SF. He has enough cultural cachet that he might make it happen too.
I'll stand by my use of the word privilege. I'm sorry it triggered you, but perhaps it's important to see that it's not always about choices. That sometimes the situations we find ourselves in because of who we are and where we live grant us certain opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have.
For example, having a backyard for your child is a privilege. It's not about good choices, though. A person could make a lot of good choices and end up in a beautiful high rise apartment with no yard. I have a lovely yard that I use everyday, with gorgeous shade trees and lush grass. Did I make better choices than a person who lives out west and doesn't have grass and tall trees? Of course not.
Let's talk about living in a rural area, though. I do not have the privilege of allowing my child to ride his bike down the sidewalk to a corner store. The closest store is about 2 miles away and the only way to access it is the highway. Did I make poor choices? I live here because my husband found a good job in this area, would it have been a better choice for him to turn it down? We picked a home outside of town because it was in our price range, would it have been a better choice to live paycheck to paycheck in town? Of course not. We live where we live. We have privileges that some people do not have (a safe and beautiful yard), but we lack privileges others might have (access to a store, a neighborhood with sidewalks and other kids, the ability to walk or bike to get... anywhere).
When most people talk about privilege, they are simply talking about those circumstances that allow them to do things that others may not be able to do. The term may hurt your feelings because you have negative associations with it, but rest assured that it was not my intention to offend you, it was only to call out how narrow these articles can be when discussing opportunities for play. The authors usually have privileges that many people do not have. Access too climbable trees, a neighborhood with sidewalks, a community with new parks, the time and money to make sure their child has full access.
Privilege isn't a dirty word, and again I'm sorry that it hurt your feelings. But privilege is a fact of our lives. Not every person has the ability to open their front door and allow their child to run free. We live in a big broad world that varies in geography and customs. People are also different, I've never seen one of these articles address children with disabilities (and I am part of a playground designing committee that is making an accessible, but risky, playground, so it IS an important discussion to be had). When articles are written from only one perspective, from only the perspective of a person who has the privilege of accessible play for their child, then the conversation is pretty useless.
And it absolutely is not about choice, but even if it were, would that matter? Maybe you think I live in a rural region because I didn't make good enough choices, but does that mean my child doesn't deserve risky play? Of course not.
And that is why I always try to open up the conversation around play to include the diverse world we live in. Some people don't have yards, don't have safe communities, don't have cars or time or money. It doesn't matter how they got to that point, what matters is bringing play to their kids regardless.
I see the article focusing on why "risky" play is important and natural to kids if provided with opportunities. This can be adapted to families' individual circumstances. I didn't see any requirement for a backyard, car, sidewalk, or city vs rural community. My kids (now in their 30s) climbed lamp posts as well as suitable trees when they could find them. They learned to ride their bikes safely on streets (Toronto - pre bike lanes). I researched wilderness summer camps and subsidies so they could get out of the city for part of every summer - one continued on to work in wilderness education for 10 years. For me, this article was about principles and values, which we then adapt to our circumstances and children. In this way, it has the broadest reach.
I see what you are saying, and ai feel like my point is being misunderstood.
I am not at all saying that these articles are requiring risky play looks one way, I am saying that they often give the impression the the only thing standing in the way of risky play is individual values and fear. I am trying to say that what keeps many families from giving their child risky play isn't that they fear it or the don't value it, but because they simply don't have access to it.
I am calling for more diversity in these articles so that we can explore this topic in depth, to fully understand what is standing in the way of risky play.
When an article about risky play is written by a person with certain advantages and benefits, like a yard or access to a playground or even a body that can move with their child's, then it seems like the only thing standing in our way as parents is opening up the door and letting them run free.
I am pointing out that there are a lot more barriers. If we want to change the way people parent to benefit their kids, we should understand their choices from every angle and not assume it's always fear.
I hope that sheds a light on what I am trying to say.
Sorry but no, privilege has connotations that, in this era, make it essentially a slur. It has always had the implication that the privileged person(s) somehow does not deserve what they have and current usage has added an element of "identity" to that implication that makes the use of the term, outside of very formal discussions of legality, an insult.
It may be unfair, but face it, realistically, one can no longer title a book or movie "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay" or the "Gay Divorcee" and you certainly would avoid suggesting that Fred and Barney would have a gay, old time. Other examples include senile, divest, quell, egregious, and bully, while using the 20 years past sense of "raw-dogging", "thong", "hooking up", or "blue-haired" will, at least, get some some wry looks.
May I suggest the you consider "advantage" or "benefit".
Oh honey, I'm so sorry I hurt your feelings. Truly, I did not intend to do so. Where I live, the word is not seen as offensive and I had no idea that it would have this affect on someone! Please accept my deepest apologies, truly I would never intentionally use language that would harm anyone. I try to keep up with such things, I take the feelings of those around me and those that might read my words very seriously. Sincerely if what I said made you feel like I didn't think you worked very very hard to deserve every little thing you have, please know it was unintentional. People online can be so sensitive and it's hard to keep up with everyone's preferred language, so I really appreciate your bravery in coming forward and for being so honest about your feelings. It's hard when someone online is so flippantly using harmful language, even when they don't realize it! I will use "benefit" and "advantage" from now on, out of respect for you and all of those like you dealing with so many advantages and benefits that you didn't even ask for! I pride myself at looking at angles from as many perspectives as possible and I completly missed yours. Gosh, I can't believe I was so insensitive, I'm so embarrassed. Again, I'm really sorry. I will not make that mistake again!
Bless your little heart, you didn't hurt my feelings, you just embarrassed yourself. I was not aware that you lived in the 20th Century and were communicating through a time warp. Everyone here in 2025, understands that the use of loaded words simply demonstrates that the user is unlettered and does not have the means of effectively making their case.
Please feel free to be as obtuse as you choose, its a free country and it is your privilege to flaunt your limitations as much as you desire.
You may have to move if giving your kids a phone-free childhood isn’t possible where you live. I mean it’s as simple as that. People move for lots of reasons; this is a good one.
My point on choices wasn’t just about individual choices, but also about national choices by the voters of a polity. Here in Toronto we try to vote for quieter streets and are overruled by the voters at our provincial level of government (who are now ordering the bike lanes removed from our city). All of these things are choices.
Norwegians and Scandinavians make better choices for giving kids a phone-free childhood than we do in North America. That’s to their credit. It’s not “privilege”, it’s their good judgement and prudence and quality as citizens. They’re creating that success for themselves. We need to do better, or vote with our feet and move to somewhere where our kids won’t rot on screens.
Did I at any point say I can't give my child a phone free childhood? I've worked very hard to make sure my child has a reasonable relationship with screens, and I have no intention on giving him a phone. He doesn't even have a tablet (although he has access to one so he can play Space Flight Simulator once in awhile. Possible future rocket scientist, so I make an exception).
But I also want a phone free childhood for all the children in my community. My family has advantages that others do not have, the ability to move being a huge one (moving is incredibly expensive! And housing! There's a reason why people are actually starting to move to rural areas with flexible work!). I will keep bringing up issues that face disadvantaged communities, and I will keep calling it out when I see articles that do not acknowledge said communities, because I believe that all children deserve a phone free childhood regardless of where they live and what opportunities are available to them.
I agree with you about choices our governments make and our communities make, which is why I keep talking about it. If we want this to be an issue that gains traction, we need to move away from the narrative that it's purely based on fear. There's more to it than that, there are real geographic, economic, and social factors that limit the choices that a family can make.
All I am saying is that I have read dozens of articles from people who are...have... certain advantages and benefits that a lot of people do not have... and they sell the narrative that we just have to be a little more willing to let our kids play outside and a little more strict on the screens. But it's like taking diet advice from a 22 year old with an excellent metabolism or financial advice from a person who was born into a rich family. It misses a significant part of the story.
I think having articles about play from people who have had to navigate barriers (like my friends with children that have disabilities that are literally building an accessible playground!) is a reasonable thing to push for.
I don’t think we actually really disagree on much substantive; it’s just tone.
You’re saying systematic effects can matter; personal situation can matter; ones own unearned privilege can make it easier to give your kids a phone-free or phone-reduced free-range childhood. Of course that’s true. Here in Toronto, black and Indigenous kids are more likely than white kids to have child protective services called for them riding public transit alone. This needs to stop and we should all fight for equal treatment here.
Where I part ways from you is on the Social Justice hectoring that unless every article apply equally to everyone and spend a paragraph recognizing its own perspective, that the argument isn’t valid. Of course this is all harder if you live in a desert exurb in the US than if you’re in a walkable town in Norway. That’s so obvious as to not need to take up ink in the article.
I also think that everyone, even from disadvantaged groups, has personal agency here. We are talking about **letting kids play outside unsupervised and take risks**. If you don’t have a 40-foot pine tree, there are vacant lots and ravines in cities. It doesn’t cost anything. I just don’t accept that parents bear no responsibility for letting their kids stare at a phone for 5-8 hours per day, regardless of their disadvantaged-group status. We may have to agree to disagree on this.
Sweetie, my original post just said that we need to have articles written by people with different experiences, not that every article has to apply to every one. I was pretty clear.
I would love to read an article about this topic written by a black or Indigenous person.
We don't actually disagree on anything, but I used the p word (I won't repeat it, it's a slur and could offend a person with advantage), and my original message was lost.
I completely stand by my argument that these articles written by people with the benefits of a yard and a sidewalk and all that are fine, but that they are skewing the narrative towards one of "parents could if they weren't afraid" vs "parents can't because..."
I live out in anachronistic North Idaho and my wife and I notice many differences from New England where we previously lived. There is a lot of unsupervised play. Kids ride their bikes to school. We see young groups of boys in the park play fighting (like we used to do in the 60's). It is common to see young boys popping wheelies down the streets and bikeways. The men look like men out here and the women look like women. Men drive loud trucks. Women smile instead of sneer. You can tell that couples like each other by the way they interact. It is a sexy place.
That playground spinner...we called it "The Vomit Wheel" was the most popular place at the playground by far. When counselors would spin, every square inch of it was filled with campers. More than one flew off each summer, but that never dissuaded anyone from coming back on. This was in the 80's. One year I came back to visit as an adult and it was chained up, and the next time, gone entirely. Very sad.
Good article. Very practical stuff for advocacy and a bit for one’s own life too. I admit a mix of both pride (my 9 year old walks her 6 year old brother to school every day and to the park routinely) and shame (we’ve stopped our kids from climbing even half as high in pine trees here in Canada) while reading it.
As an aside/request — one thing I’d love to see a Scandinavian perspective on is traffic. Obviously the risk of getting hit by cars is 100x larger than any kind of abduction, and cars are far more powerful than even my childhood 30 years ago let alone the heyday of independent play in North America from 1920-1980. And at least here in Toronto, and I believe most American cities too, driver behaviour took a huge downturn during the Covid times of 2020-2021 and hasn’t really recovered, to the point where speeding, running stop signs, etc. is so common that it can’t even be enforced by police.
Is this just another thing where Scandinavia is a magic land of social cohesion and pro-social behaviour? (That’s a joke, I’m a big believer that there are specific things that can be copied from those countries, even despite different cultural context.) How do all those Teslas in Oslo not mow down kids playing in the street like what seems to be the constant terrifying reality here?
Now in my 80’s, I am surprised that I still have all my fingers. As a kid I packed cutoff match heads into used CO2 cylinders to make improvised rockets that sometimes exploded when set off. I like to tell my grandkids about how as ten year olds with paper routes my friends and I once rode our bikes to a nearby small airport. We gave a pilot we didn’t know a couple of bucks for gas and he flew us over our homes in a Piper Cub. When I got home and told my mom her response was “that’s nice, get ready for dinner” and that was it.
We lived in a Chicago suburb and would ride the train to the Loop and wander through the big department stores and once ended up on State street south of Van Buren outside a burlesque show hoping to get a peek inside. A friendly doorman waved us in for a free show. That we never mentioned to our folks.
When my son was about 4 years old, he asked me to boost him up to the lowest branch of a tree he wanted to climb. I told him, “No, but I’ll make you a bargain. Any tree you can reach, you can climb.” Fast forward about three years, he was climbing the tall pine trees at our church, probably 30-40 feet above the ground. When other parents saw this, they scolded me for allowing this. But I replied that having learned to climb at an early age, he was always very safety conscious. He’s now 54 years old, and surfs the big waves on the North Shore of Oahu. So he’s still climbing, but water mountains rather than trees. Thanks for reminding us that learning to take risks is an important part of childhood development.
The only time my mother walked me to school was in 1963, the year my family lived near Columbia University.
We attempted to let our children have as much free play as possible (including our own "top of the 40 foot cedar" story). But in the 1990s, we had to be careful--not of cars or kidnapping, but of neighbors reporting a child on the loose during school time (did I mention we homeschooled some?). By the time the grandchildren came along, there was that time a neighbor called the police on my daughter because two grandkids were playing in the front yard. They live on a farm now. And the kids wander all over.
My prematurity and total blindness journey has been documented elsewhere, leading to my further statement that, if unsupervised play had been forced on me, I might have gone back to selective mutism and I may have completely shut down. My parents never tried to prevent me from trying new things but my life was and still is rooted in fear of people and my environment. I only leave my apartment with a sighted guide and this is fine with me. Playgrounds terrified me, though I tried using them. It took weeks for me to be able to climb onto a slide and inch down it and I fell off sideways once, not understanding that leaning left would cause this. My mom told me about this incident, I do not remember it. It is past time that highly sensitive people and those with disabilities were considered and respected in the unsupervised and risky play movement.
On today's local news, one of the employees stated she had never learned how to ride a bike and she wanted to now. The fellow employee who started teaching her said he learned how to ride at age 3, which shocked me: I wasn't walking or talking at age 3 and I can't imagine ever riding a bike at any time due to my total blindness and balance issues. I tried for about 5 seconds when I was much older than age 3 and said no thanks! I am so thankfful that my parents did not force the issue.
I suspect that one of the contributing factors to country differences is the feeling of shared community. This is partly due to size/density of living but also the number of immigrants who have a different culture and view to risk etc. Norway has been, until recently, very homogenous and I bet that helped. England has been getting ever more diverse which weakens social cohesion. It will only reverse if/when community becomes more common and shared.
Thank you for this - I'm going to look further into Norway's education system as I'm an education scholar doing my doctoral dissertation on access to creative and outdoor education.
Nature + positive risk goes hand in hand - and it's truly a mindset that one must have. Not to shy away, but to embrace the elements. Similarly, in winter - we need to be outdoors, and get our dose of light, even when it's cloudy and gloomy, it's still 10x brighter than the average office. Thank you for this wonderful article Ellen!
Unless we again get OK with the idea of some children potentially getting hurt while playing, and (a tiny number) getting it worse, and that's an acceptable and necessary part of giving them human freedom, this ain't gonna be resolved.
It's more likely they'll be in full custody 24/7, with gps and cameras watching them, helicoptered by their parents everywhere, left to rot watching screens in some climate controlled padded room, than that they'll be left to be humans, exploring and risking, and discovering freedom again.
I think this is why more and more of the writers and leaders in this space are moving to intentional communities. Moving to the woods of Norway isn’t an option for many people (I don’t mean that in the sense of “it’s hard”, I mean literally impossible to do legally if you aren’t in an in-demand employment field where you can get a visa) so the next best thing is finding a community of like-minded people in North America who don’t want their kids to rot on screens and have AI friends.
Many of these intentional communities seem to be religious-based, but not all of them. I think this is probably the most likely path for people who take this seriously. It’s really similar to what Rod Dreher called “the Benedict Option” for conservative Christians in a secular libertine world. Give up on the world, find your tribe, and move somewhere with them where you can create the world you want.
Having grown up in Sweden (I was born 1953), I can relate to everything in this story. We had so much freedom, and so little worries, except to beaten up by mean kids (which was mostly a fantasy!) Having raised two boys in New Jersey, I and my American wife tried to give them freedom to roam and explore, but this was often impractical as playdates required a parent to drive the kids, and the culture was much more risk aversive. When I recently wrote a book about my father that includes interviews where he talked about his childhood in northern Sweden in the 1920s, I realized that he had so much more freedom than we had, which influenced his way of raising his three sons.
You can read an excerpt about his childhood on my substack here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/nordiclink/p/when-childs-play-was-childs-play
Hej Hans, I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Finland, and I also roamed around the countryside with my friends on all sort of adventures. One day we were climbing hay bales (before they were round like the one in the photo) in a large barn, and another day we discovered an abandoned bus (!) in a field, and another day we jumped across wide ditches many kilometers away from home and scratches our elbows on rusty barbed wires. And in the spring time we played on flooded fields and got admonished by worried grandpartents who feared we would drown when we built "boats" out of everything we could find. We came home when it got dark, and we were dirty and very happy!
All of these articles about play are the same. Someone, an expert who is in a place of privilege, tells me that if I want the best for my child I must let them play and explore freely. That I must let them climb the trees in my yard and stay out until dusk. That I must take them to adventure playgrounds and allow them to ride their bike to the corner store and play in the woods unsupervised. And if I don't? I might as well start saving up for my child's therapy now, because I'm dooming them to a lifetime of anxiety disorders.
These articles imply that the only thing stopping me from giving my child the risky play that they need is on my own fear.
It plays on my own insecurities as a parent, raising the alarm, making the guilt swell inside of me. I'm the problem, I'm too scared, I'm holding him back.
But that's not the whole story. My child doesn't climb trees, not because I'm too scared, but because I have no climbable trees in my back yard (there is an overgrown bush that he climbs, though). He doesn't ride his bike to the corner store because there is no corner store and no sidewalks. He doesn't go to an adventure park because we don't have any. He doesn't play with his friends until dusk because hexs completely disconnected from his friends outside of school.
I'm not complaining about my personal situation, I'm trying to bring another perspective to the conversation. Some people live in rural areas, some people live in urban ares, many people are a part of under served communities. We have to stop acting like the only thing keeping kids from risky play is caregivers and teachers and start looking at how we can get this level of play to every child in every demographic.
Can we get an article about play written by someone who had to overcome barriers (geography, time, money, disability, isolation) to help their children or the children in their community access play?
> But that's not the whole story. My child doesn't climb trees, not because I'm too scared, but because I have no climbable trees in my back yard (there is an overgrown bush that he climbs, though). He doesn't ride his bike to the corner store because there is no corner store and no sidewalks. He doesn't go to an adventure park because we don't have any. He doesn't play with his friends until dusk because hexs completely disconnected from his friends outside of school.
Not all of those things are mandatory, and not all of those things have to happen, and those aren't the only options for such play.
That said, if the place doesn't have trees, there's no corner store, no adventure parks or general parks to go play, and they're completely disconnected from friends outside of school, then perhaps, risky play aside, that's not a great environment for their development to begin with.
Doesn't mean it's your fault (financial situation or job or other concern might make it impossible to live elsewhere). Still it's the fault of a society building such inhuman environments.
You misunderstand me.
Of course those are not the only options for play, and as an intentional parent I have found ways to provide as many opportunities as I cam for my child. My point is simply that these articles are all the same and do not offer any alternatives or other perspectives.
It's always "let them climb trees, play with their friends unsupervised, and rude their bike to the store," which is all wonderful advice... if it's possible.
But it isn't always. And that doesn't mean that the environment is inhuman or ill equipped for childhood development, it just means that other options must be explored (like you said).
I share my experience, not to complain (I have done what I can to turn my backyard into an adventure playground. I'm privilegedenough to have the money and space to do so), but to get the conversation started around the diversity of childhood. I feel like these articles play on parental guilt instead of looking at the experiences of real families. What about someone who lives in a desert with no trees? Who has to contend with extreme heat? Or what about someone who lives in the city and doesn't have access to a park? Or what about a person with a disabled child? Or a disabled parent who has to content with accessibility just to take their child to a park?
I think we need to talk about these families because while individually they may not be in the majority, every family is contenting with SOMETHING other than fear that is keeping their child from free play and risky play. If we focus on fear as the only factor, we miss out on a huge part of the story and miss out on opportunities to help all kids get more play.
This is so true (even though your use of the term “privilege” will turn off a lot of people since it’s a loaded, 2012-2022 Social Justice-y term that implies that people’s own good choices about where to live and how to run their country are unearned privilege)
But more seriously. It’s just really really hard in North America where we are all-in on letting the public realm decay because we have our castles and our yards and our cars (the yards we don’t even use for our kids much — instead we just use screens in our homes). North American culture was always more antisocial than European, but there were limits to that tendency in the time before supercomputers in all our pockets. Those limits have been removed so the decay of our public realm is accelerating.
I think this is why so many writers in this space are moving to intentional communities lately. A lot of of them are religious, but they don’t have to be. Scott Siskind, the author of the famous blog Astral Codex Ten, is a San Francisco psychiatrist and philosophy/tech/AI writer, and since he and his wife had twins a year ago he’s been writing about creating an intentional community of free play in SF. He has enough cultural cachet that he might make it happen too.
I'll stand by my use of the word privilege. I'm sorry it triggered you, but perhaps it's important to see that it's not always about choices. That sometimes the situations we find ourselves in because of who we are and where we live grant us certain opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have.
For example, having a backyard for your child is a privilege. It's not about good choices, though. A person could make a lot of good choices and end up in a beautiful high rise apartment with no yard. I have a lovely yard that I use everyday, with gorgeous shade trees and lush grass. Did I make better choices than a person who lives out west and doesn't have grass and tall trees? Of course not.
Let's talk about living in a rural area, though. I do not have the privilege of allowing my child to ride his bike down the sidewalk to a corner store. The closest store is about 2 miles away and the only way to access it is the highway. Did I make poor choices? I live here because my husband found a good job in this area, would it have been a better choice for him to turn it down? We picked a home outside of town because it was in our price range, would it have been a better choice to live paycheck to paycheck in town? Of course not. We live where we live. We have privileges that some people do not have (a safe and beautiful yard), but we lack privileges others might have (access to a store, a neighborhood with sidewalks and other kids, the ability to walk or bike to get... anywhere).
When most people talk about privilege, they are simply talking about those circumstances that allow them to do things that others may not be able to do. The term may hurt your feelings because you have negative associations with it, but rest assured that it was not my intention to offend you, it was only to call out how narrow these articles can be when discussing opportunities for play. The authors usually have privileges that many people do not have. Access too climbable trees, a neighborhood with sidewalks, a community with new parks, the time and money to make sure their child has full access.
Privilege isn't a dirty word, and again I'm sorry that it hurt your feelings. But privilege is a fact of our lives. Not every person has the ability to open their front door and allow their child to run free. We live in a big broad world that varies in geography and customs. People are also different, I've never seen one of these articles address children with disabilities (and I am part of a playground designing committee that is making an accessible, but risky, playground, so it IS an important discussion to be had). When articles are written from only one perspective, from only the perspective of a person who has the privilege of accessible play for their child, then the conversation is pretty useless.
And it absolutely is not about choice, but even if it were, would that matter? Maybe you think I live in a rural region because I didn't make good enough choices, but does that mean my child doesn't deserve risky play? Of course not.
And that is why I always try to open up the conversation around play to include the diverse world we live in. Some people don't have yards, don't have safe communities, don't have cars or time or money. It doesn't matter how they got to that point, what matters is bringing play to their kids regardless.
One of the best descriptions of "privilege" I've read. I agree with you completely.
I see the article focusing on why "risky" play is important and natural to kids if provided with opportunities. This can be adapted to families' individual circumstances. I didn't see any requirement for a backyard, car, sidewalk, or city vs rural community. My kids (now in their 30s) climbed lamp posts as well as suitable trees when they could find them. They learned to ride their bikes safely on streets (Toronto - pre bike lanes). I researched wilderness summer camps and subsidies so they could get out of the city for part of every summer - one continued on to work in wilderness education for 10 years. For me, this article was about principles and values, which we then adapt to our circumstances and children. In this way, it has the broadest reach.
I see what you are saying, and ai feel like my point is being misunderstood.
I am not at all saying that these articles are requiring risky play looks one way, I am saying that they often give the impression the the only thing standing in the way of risky play is individual values and fear. I am trying to say that what keeps many families from giving their child risky play isn't that they fear it or the don't value it, but because they simply don't have access to it.
I am calling for more diversity in these articles so that we can explore this topic in depth, to fully understand what is standing in the way of risky play.
When an article about risky play is written by a person with certain advantages and benefits, like a yard or access to a playground or even a body that can move with their child's, then it seems like the only thing standing in our way as parents is opening up the door and letting them run free.
I am pointing out that there are a lot more barriers. If we want to change the way people parent to benefit their kids, we should understand their choices from every angle and not assume it's always fear.
I hope that sheds a light on what I am trying to say.
Sorry but no, privilege has connotations that, in this era, make it essentially a slur. It has always had the implication that the privileged person(s) somehow does not deserve what they have and current usage has added an element of "identity" to that implication that makes the use of the term, outside of very formal discussions of legality, an insult.
It may be unfair, but face it, realistically, one can no longer title a book or movie "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay" or the "Gay Divorcee" and you certainly would avoid suggesting that Fred and Barney would have a gay, old time. Other examples include senile, divest, quell, egregious, and bully, while using the 20 years past sense of "raw-dogging", "thong", "hooking up", or "blue-haired" will, at least, get some some wry looks.
May I suggest the you consider "advantage" or "benefit".
Oh honey, I'm so sorry I hurt your feelings. Truly, I did not intend to do so. Where I live, the word is not seen as offensive and I had no idea that it would have this affect on someone! Please accept my deepest apologies, truly I would never intentionally use language that would harm anyone. I try to keep up with such things, I take the feelings of those around me and those that might read my words very seriously. Sincerely if what I said made you feel like I didn't think you worked very very hard to deserve every little thing you have, please know it was unintentional. People online can be so sensitive and it's hard to keep up with everyone's preferred language, so I really appreciate your bravery in coming forward and for being so honest about your feelings. It's hard when someone online is so flippantly using harmful language, even when they don't realize it! I will use "benefit" and "advantage" from now on, out of respect for you and all of those like you dealing with so many advantages and benefits that you didn't even ask for! I pride myself at looking at angles from as many perspectives as possible and I completly missed yours. Gosh, I can't believe I was so insensitive, I'm so embarrassed. Again, I'm really sorry. I will not make that mistake again!
Bless your little heart, you didn't hurt my feelings, you just embarrassed yourself. I was not aware that you lived in the 20th Century and were communicating through a time warp. Everyone here in 2025, understands that the use of loaded words simply demonstrates that the user is unlettered and does not have the means of effectively making their case.
Please feel free to be as obtuse as you choose, its a free country and it is your privilege to flaunt your limitations as much as you desire.
Haha ok
You may have to move if giving your kids a phone-free childhood isn’t possible where you live. I mean it’s as simple as that. People move for lots of reasons; this is a good one.
My point on choices wasn’t just about individual choices, but also about national choices by the voters of a polity. Here in Toronto we try to vote for quieter streets and are overruled by the voters at our provincial level of government (who are now ordering the bike lanes removed from our city). All of these things are choices.
Norwegians and Scandinavians make better choices for giving kids a phone-free childhood than we do in North America. That’s to their credit. It’s not “privilege”, it’s their good judgement and prudence and quality as citizens. They’re creating that success for themselves. We need to do better, or vote with our feet and move to somewhere where our kids won’t rot on screens.
Did I at any point say I can't give my child a phone free childhood? I've worked very hard to make sure my child has a reasonable relationship with screens, and I have no intention on giving him a phone. He doesn't even have a tablet (although he has access to one so he can play Space Flight Simulator once in awhile. Possible future rocket scientist, so I make an exception).
But I also want a phone free childhood for all the children in my community. My family has advantages that others do not have, the ability to move being a huge one (moving is incredibly expensive! And housing! There's a reason why people are actually starting to move to rural areas with flexible work!). I will keep bringing up issues that face disadvantaged communities, and I will keep calling it out when I see articles that do not acknowledge said communities, because I believe that all children deserve a phone free childhood regardless of where they live and what opportunities are available to them.
I agree with you about choices our governments make and our communities make, which is why I keep talking about it. If we want this to be an issue that gains traction, we need to move away from the narrative that it's purely based on fear. There's more to it than that, there are real geographic, economic, and social factors that limit the choices that a family can make.
All I am saying is that I have read dozens of articles from people who are...have... certain advantages and benefits that a lot of people do not have... and they sell the narrative that we just have to be a little more willing to let our kids play outside and a little more strict on the screens. But it's like taking diet advice from a 22 year old with an excellent metabolism or financial advice from a person who was born into a rich family. It misses a significant part of the story.
I think having articles about play from people who have had to navigate barriers (like my friends with children that have disabilities that are literally building an accessible playground!) is a reasonable thing to push for.
I don’t think we actually really disagree on much substantive; it’s just tone.
You’re saying systematic effects can matter; personal situation can matter; ones own unearned privilege can make it easier to give your kids a phone-free or phone-reduced free-range childhood. Of course that’s true. Here in Toronto, black and Indigenous kids are more likely than white kids to have child protective services called for them riding public transit alone. This needs to stop and we should all fight for equal treatment here.
Where I part ways from you is on the Social Justice hectoring that unless every article apply equally to everyone and spend a paragraph recognizing its own perspective, that the argument isn’t valid. Of course this is all harder if you live in a desert exurb in the US than if you’re in a walkable town in Norway. That’s so obvious as to not need to take up ink in the article.
I also think that everyone, even from disadvantaged groups, has personal agency here. We are talking about **letting kids play outside unsupervised and take risks**. If you don’t have a 40-foot pine tree, there are vacant lots and ravines in cities. It doesn’t cost anything. I just don’t accept that parents bear no responsibility for letting their kids stare at a phone for 5-8 hours per day, regardless of their disadvantaged-group status. We may have to agree to disagree on this.
Sweetie, my original post just said that we need to have articles written by people with different experiences, not that every article has to apply to every one. I was pretty clear.
I would love to read an article about this topic written by a black or Indigenous person.
We don't actually disagree on anything, but I used the p word (I won't repeat it, it's a slur and could offend a person with advantage), and my original message was lost.
I completely stand by my argument that these articles written by people with the benefits of a yard and a sidewalk and all that are fine, but that they are skewing the narrative towards one of "parents could if they weren't afraid" vs "parents can't because..."
I live out in anachronistic North Idaho and my wife and I notice many differences from New England where we previously lived. There is a lot of unsupervised play. Kids ride their bikes to school. We see young groups of boys in the park play fighting (like we used to do in the 60's). It is common to see young boys popping wheelies down the streets and bikeways. The men look like men out here and the women look like women. Men drive loud trucks. Women smile instead of sneer. You can tell that couples like each other by the way they interact. It is a sexy place.
That playground spinner...we called it "The Vomit Wheel" was the most popular place at the playground by far. When counselors would spin, every square inch of it was filled with campers. More than one flew off each summer, but that never dissuaded anyone from coming back on. This was in the 80's. One year I came back to visit as an adult and it was chained up, and the next time, gone entirely. Very sad.
Good article. Very practical stuff for advocacy and a bit for one’s own life too. I admit a mix of both pride (my 9 year old walks her 6 year old brother to school every day and to the park routinely) and shame (we’ve stopped our kids from climbing even half as high in pine trees here in Canada) while reading it.
As an aside/request — one thing I’d love to see a Scandinavian perspective on is traffic. Obviously the risk of getting hit by cars is 100x larger than any kind of abduction, and cars are far more powerful than even my childhood 30 years ago let alone the heyday of independent play in North America from 1920-1980. And at least here in Toronto, and I believe most American cities too, driver behaviour took a huge downturn during the Covid times of 2020-2021 and hasn’t really recovered, to the point where speeding, running stop signs, etc. is so common that it can’t even be enforced by police.
Is this just another thing where Scandinavia is a magic land of social cohesion and pro-social behaviour? (That’s a joke, I’m a big believer that there are specific things that can be copied from those countries, even despite different cultural context.) How do all those Teslas in Oslo not mow down kids playing in the street like what seems to be the constant terrifying reality here?
Now in my 80’s, I am surprised that I still have all my fingers. As a kid I packed cutoff match heads into used CO2 cylinders to make improvised rockets that sometimes exploded when set off. I like to tell my grandkids about how as ten year olds with paper routes my friends and I once rode our bikes to a nearby small airport. We gave a pilot we didn’t know a couple of bucks for gas and he flew us over our homes in a Piper Cub. When I got home and told my mom her response was “that’s nice, get ready for dinner” and that was it.
We lived in a Chicago suburb and would ride the train to the Loop and wander through the big department stores and once ended up on State street south of Van Buren outside a burlesque show hoping to get a peek inside. A friendly doorman waved us in for a free show. That we never mentioned to our folks.
When my son was about 4 years old, he asked me to boost him up to the lowest branch of a tree he wanted to climb. I told him, “No, but I’ll make you a bargain. Any tree you can reach, you can climb.” Fast forward about three years, he was climbing the tall pine trees at our church, probably 30-40 feet above the ground. When other parents saw this, they scolded me for allowing this. But I replied that having learned to climb at an early age, he was always very safety conscious. He’s now 54 years old, and surfs the big waves on the North Shore of Oahu. So he’s still climbing, but water mountains rather than trees. Thanks for reminding us that learning to take risks is an important part of childhood development.
The only time my mother walked me to school was in 1963, the year my family lived near Columbia University.
We attempted to let our children have as much free play as possible (including our own "top of the 40 foot cedar" story). But in the 1990s, we had to be careful--not of cars or kidnapping, but of neighbors reporting a child on the loose during school time (did I mention we homeschooled some?). By the time the grandchildren came along, there was that time a neighbor called the police on my daughter because two grandkids were playing in the front yard. They live on a farm now. And the kids wander all over.
My prematurity and total blindness journey has been documented elsewhere, leading to my further statement that, if unsupervised play had been forced on me, I might have gone back to selective mutism and I may have completely shut down. My parents never tried to prevent me from trying new things but my life was and still is rooted in fear of people and my environment. I only leave my apartment with a sighted guide and this is fine with me. Playgrounds terrified me, though I tried using them. It took weeks for me to be able to climb onto a slide and inch down it and I fell off sideways once, not understanding that leaning left would cause this. My mom told me about this incident, I do not remember it. It is past time that highly sensitive people and those with disabilities were considered and respected in the unsupervised and risky play movement.
The illusion of control is basically the root of all evil today IMHO.
On today's local news, one of the employees stated she had never learned how to ride a bike and she wanted to now. The fellow employee who started teaching her said he learned how to ride at age 3, which shocked me: I wasn't walking or talking at age 3 and I can't imagine ever riding a bike at any time due to my total blindness and balance issues. I tried for about 5 seconds when I was much older than age 3 and said no thanks! I am so thankfful that my parents did not force the issue.
I suspect that one of the contributing factors to country differences is the feeling of shared community. This is partly due to size/density of living but also the number of immigrants who have a different culture and view to risk etc. Norway has been, until recently, very homogenous and I bet that helped. England has been getting ever more diverse which weakens social cohesion. It will only reverse if/when community becomes more common and shared.
How can parents encourage schools to adopt this perspective? My kids have to pass a test (supervised by the PE teacher) in order to be allowed to use the monkey bars (https://kylieking.substack.com/p/the-monkey-bar-test-rethinking-risk)!
Thank you for this - I'm going to look further into Norway's education system as I'm an education scholar doing my doctoral dissertation on access to creative and outdoor education.