I broke my arm by swinging on a wet tree branch when I was about 10 years old. It was a very crude, but effective way for me to learn that there are consequences to my actions. Obviously it's not the only time I learned this, and it wasn't like I didn't realise that my actions have consequences before that, but these things reinforce that learning.
I think that learning to battle through physical pain and unpleasantness is essential to learning how to battle through mental pain. I've been in a lot of situations when hunting, hiking, sailing, etc. where it gets hard and it stops being fun. You're cold, wet, hungry, and tired, and it's getting dark. But you have to keep going, because you are responsible for your own shit. You can't just give up in the middle of a hike, you can't just give up when your boat is a couple of km from the shore and you're battling a headwind. There's a certain mental fortitude that you can only build with physical adversity.
* I don't care/want them to be Olympic swimmers but if they fall in a pool or river, I want them to be able to tread water and get out without panicking.
* Despite everything I say and do, they're going to get on the roof. I know, I did. ;) So when they fall, I want them to fall the best way possible.
As a parent, I don't see my job to protect them from all consequences but to prevent and/or prepare them for the worst.
My oldest started in a school that used very traditional methods (first learn legs then add arms, start by dry swimming on land and move to water, and so on), and she took the course over and over without progressing. For unrelated reasons, we switched schools, and the new school focused on just spending time in water, running in shallow water, floating, dipping your head under water as part of games, and so on.
They had something they called "playing dolphins" where they would stand in waist-deep water, jump forward, and glide as far as they could before standing up again. She only needed one round of that course before she could advance to swimming for real. I suggest spending time just getting them used to water, getting splashed in the face, or playing with floating or sinking toys in waist-deep water, to quickly get over any blocking fear of water. I liked how the new school didn't even attempt to introduce real strokes at the beginner level, but instead gave the kids confidence in their own abilities to move in water.
The summer when I was 5, my brother (an excellent competitive swimmer in his youth) brought me to a pool and we played a game called "jump and I'll try to catch you" and in the course of a couple hours of him moving to deeper and deeper water and farther away from the edge I basically figured out how to doggy paddle to him. By the end of that summer my brother had me fetching coins from the bottom of a 3 meter pool from a steady tread.
Only then did he start to teach me any formal strokes, but to be honest, because of how he taught me, I think of swimming as a perfectly natural activity like walking, where I decide where to go and at what depth and my body simply figures out how to get there. Specific strokes and techniques don't really play much part.
To this day, I love swimming.
One thing I didn't mention was that when my daughter finally started swimming, she would swim underwater until she ran out of air and then stand up. The traditional school would never have allowed this, as you were supposed to breaststroke with your head above water at all times. Since she started to swim some distance underwater, it wasn't that much of a stretch for her to stay at the surface to swim longer distances.
The transition from dolphin to swimming underwater to swimming at the surface was very quick and seamless. Perhaps she was still helped by being drilled in the traditional school's proper technique, but I think we could have used the new school's methods from the start.
It's interesting that people I know who went through a very formal swimming program as youths and then think of swimming as exercise and laps, tend to struggle with below-the-surface activities, like diving for items.
I remember my brother had a whole slew of underwater games we used to play like "tea time", "hold your breath at the bottom the longest", "headstand", "underwater flips", "drag your friend while they're underwater while you run in a race", "pull a gallon of dirt off the bottom", "upside-down Buddha" and so on including some pretty intense and dangerous-ish horseplay. There's probably a more comprehensive list somewhere as he didn't invent all of these but learned them elsewhere. Looking back I realize that we learned breath control, buoyancy control, how to handle strange orientations and direction underwater, diving, getting accustomed to handling stale air or out of air situations. But it all happened naturally through play.
Growing up, the only other kids I knew who could do the same kind of things also learned in similar informal ways built around play.
A significant proportion of people couldn't swim 250 m or tread water for 10 minutes.
Unfortunately, ill-advised budget cuts mean that even here in the Netherlands (a country with a lot of surface water) swimming is no longer a standard part of the school curriculum in some municipalities (it used to be pretty much mandatory).
I've known people who volunteered to go to various islands to teach basic swimming skills who also haven't been able to quite figure out why either.
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/2017/082...
https://alexischateau.com/2016/11/08/10-things-you-probably-...
It just seems bizarre to me.
I probably went to the sea (the Atlantic, in France) and played in water every other day or so during summer and autumn for most of my life until I had to move away as an adult, but that didn't magically teach my how to swim. I had to learn later. And I still hate swimming.
If you live next to the sea, you're going to be spending time around and on the water. It follows that you should learn how to survive in the water if something goes wrong. What if you get caught in a rip, or if someone else gets in trouble in the water and you have to help them? What if you're in a dingy and it capsizes?
Learning to tumble made me laugh, but is a good idea :)
I walk two of my kids to school daily.
Why? It isn't really the kids I worry about, it's the idiot adults. Around their school there are:
-- School zone signs, indicating the 20MPH speed reduction area. -- Flashing yellow lights that only activate during school hours -- Middle-of-the-road barriers that indicate there is a school zone ahead -- Painted crosswalks -- Adults with crossing flags to indicate the crosswalk. Sometimes they even wear orange safety vests. -- The speed limit within a half-mile in all directions is 25MPH
Guess what? Cars still blow through in excess of 40MPH, even with kids present. I've been nearly run over on multiple occasions.
This is in a rural ("family values") community. It's pure anarchy, that's why I don't let my kids walk to school alone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/well/family/utah-passes-f...
As you say, stuff where you balance quite high up, but usually with a softer material on the ground than asphalt so that a fall isn't lethal. I never saw kids fall and hurt themselves, so I don't know what would happen if they fell from the maximum height, but they wouldn't die.
I had my (then) 10 and 12yr olds go for it, because I had no idea where else they'd ever get the chance to try.
(OTOH, I tried the 1m springboard and got water in my ear that took days to get out. I'm not as young as I once was)
I remember the 3m springboard taken out of my pool in the states in the 80's, and I can't remember ever seeing a diving board in use at a pool in Ireland.
I don't see this in pools. 3m spring boards are still pretty common at pools in the US. My "nothing special" high school had 3m springs.
It's true that the 5m,7m,10m platforms are usually only found in sportsplex-type pools. They typically come as a package. But as you mentioned in an earlier comment, 5m+ starts the get actually dangerous. Flopping from 10m or even 7m without an agitator can do serious permanent damage. IMO a platform tower above 3m (or maybe 5m) is more "expensive sports equipment" than "general public recreational equipment".
I maybe could see a 5m platform as "general public recreational equipment", but 7 and 10 are definitely not. And there are just better ways to use time/money than building a 5m platform when you already have 3m spring boards.
American pools are moving away from exercise and toward recreation/amusement (i.e., switching out swimming lanes for "water playgrounds" and switching out diving boards for water slides). But that's a totally different phenomenon from "bubble wrap culture"; IMO those water playgrounds are way more dangerous than traditional pools (I've seen more than one kid injure themselves pretty seriously jumping off of the water playground into ~2ft water; that would never happen in a lane-swimming pool). And personally, I've had more injuries on water slides than on 1m or 3m spring boards.
So there's something annoying going on with American swimming pools, but it's not bubble wrap culture.
I know many, many just-below-olympic level divers. Of those, one suffered "minor" injuries (deep bruising basically everywhere on their body and a burst ear drum) and one suffered major life-threatening internal injuries (collapsed lung) after landing on their belly/back from 10m.
The person with the less severe injuries flopped with the aerator on, which is probably the only reason the injuries weren't more serious.
Diving from 10m is absolutely dangerous, even for professionals, especially without an aerator.
> but I don't know how open the facilities in the US are to the public/minors.
In the USA, at the places I know of, untrained children are allowed to dive off of 10m platforms during "free swimming" times. But only straight dives, and only after they demonstrate straight dives off of 5m and 7m.
Which seems like a sensible compromise, given the risks.
(Exceptions are always possible. If you are training for platform diving, you can simply tell the life guard and they will let you do fancier dives from 10m.)
> giving 3.3 million inhabitants per tower, compared to 5.3 for the whole US
"conurbation vs. entire population" not a fair comparison -- a huge portion of the US population lives in rural areas that couldn't support a diving tower even if they wanted to.
All of the USA cities whose diving infrastructure I know about have between 1 million to 2 million inhabitants per tower. According to that metric, the USA is less risk averse about diving (but actually, it's really just a matter of wealth and interest, because diving is an expensive sport and platforms are actually specialized sports equipment).
Edit: Also, the wiki list of 10m platforms in the usa is out of date or just wrong. None of the 10m platforms I've used on a regular basis are on that list...
Last year there was a fatal car accident. The driver was going so fast down a narrow, one lane road that when he hit a car pulling out of the driveway, the car flipped over. Imagine how pedestrians feel about that or parents feel about that to their kids.
Which puts the per capita likelihood at 3.8, 0.2, 0.015, 0.0024% respectively, per year.
Parents have a right to their own decisions, but retarding a child's growth because of a fear of something that's only 20x as likely as getting struck by lightning?
Personally, that seems literally insane.
If my child were to be killed by a driver, I would mourn for the rest of my life, but at least I'd know they lived in the time they had on this Earth.
Being struck by lightening is a poor comparison since that is almost entirely avoidable with actions that most people follow subconsciously: they don’t want to walk through a field in the pooring rain. Chance of death from being run over by a cruise ship is also low. People generally don’t want to go swimming where they are transiting. Do you encourage your kids the jump of the pier when the ship is docking?
Chance of death from being hit by a TVG is pretty low. They only run on tracks with protected right of way, so it’s difficult to find oneself on their tracks. Do you encourage your kids to climb that fence and walk those tracks?
Death from traffic is not quite the same, but similar.
Historically, someone might've had 5-10 children and it acted as a form of redundancy. I think that feeling has changed significantly!
Conversely, I think there is a greater emphasis on extra-curricular activities now. These days, there is a feeling that you're selling your kid short or failing to set them up well if you don't have them enrolled in swimming lessons from maybe two years of age, in dance or sports or kinder-gym classes around 3-5 years of age, and then in after-school sports programs once they start school.
Something else had to have happened.
I'd hazard that on the whole Americans are less tolerant of risk than they were 60 years ago.
As an explanation, I'd tenuously tie it to a decrease in "real world physics" employment (e.g. farming, manufacturing). When 50% of the population works in farming (circa 1870), they have one way of evaluating risk and human capabilities. When that number drops to 2%, it's easy to forget how robust humans are.
Obviously, we're increasingly aware of the risks (usually without any appreciation of the odds). Previously, you heard through close circles. Now, by the time you're a parent, you've heard of hundreds of ways your child might die through news, movies, etc.
I'm a parent of three, and I actively work to minimise risk amongst my kids where I think it's appropriate, but I'm always conscious of when I'm doing it and try to balance it.
If news is optimized for clicks / views, negative stories are more engaging, and the availability heuristic is accurate (aka we assign greater importance to things we can immediately recall), then viewing profit-on-engagement news fundamentally reshapes our opinion of the world.
Abductors don't need to be everywhere. They just have to be a plausible threat to affect the thought process of a parent that's deciding whether or not they are going to leave their child completely unsupervised and unattended.
Maybe if the media didn't have a fetish for covering the incidents that do happen. Maybe if there wasn't a vocal subculture that crucifies parents for leaving their children to their own devices. Maybe if the thought of having the center of your world being beaten, violated and murdered at the hands of a stranger wasn't so mind-numbingly horrific. Maybe then this trend would start going the other way.
Or not? Sure parents used to let their kids roam free. They also let them ride in the back of pickup trucks and beat their asses when they did something wrong. There's probably a healthy middle ground.
What I would suggest then is that, those that are left to roam are in more danger than those who aren't, because there aren't as many alternate targets. There are also fewer witnesses now too. So even if you think it is a big scare, there is less, to use a vaccination analogue (incorrectly I know), herd immunity.
Learning to fall off the bike, get hurt a bit but then to brush it off and get back on has been f*g invaluable. He's able to make judgments on physical risks at a very impressive level. His skill levels are steadily increasing, which is great for his confidence.
And he's also learnt to push past comfort points sometimes, when those legs are dead tired. There's obviously a balance here, but I certainly think a little bit of hardening up can't hurt.
All of the activities that Penn State's Outing Club used to organize are still available to students through the university-run Outdoor Adventure program [1].
The only difference is that now instead of a student club (cost center), the activities are organized by a university-run office (revenue generator).
So it's not about coddling. It's about money (and not even insurance)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-kids-accidental-death-rates...
A high carbohydrate diet was never scientifically proven or tested. One guy (Ancel Keys) had a theory, cherry picked some countries that showed a very small correlation. But political things were afoot in America and Nixon went with his plan and enacted the US diet regulations in 1977 that promoted grains which helped US farmers especially the corn industry. The other countries soon adopted it since US leads the way.
But if you look at the graph of when diseases like obesity, mental illness, depression, heart disease really explodes from 1980s, right when the dietary guidelines are taken up.
Of course correlation doesn't equal causation (which is one of the flaws in the Ancel study). But it's definitely something we should do studies on.
That's not to say the rate of mental illness is going up or down or staying the same. But measuring the per capita diagnosis rate won't tell you anything about that.
Same here in all respects.
> But measuring the per capita diagnosis rate won't tell you anything about that.
I believe that some of the increase in diagnosis rates is because of increasing diagnosis in historically under-diagnosed groups, especially in the US where access to healthcare hasn't been available to everyone.
https://www.additudemag.com/race-and-adhd-how-people-of-colo...
You can control for rising diagnosis all day, but find me anorexic people 100 years ago. They basically didn’t exist.
2.) Afaik, anorexiction rates are going down. It is less of problem then it used to be in previous generation.
I did get all manner of small injuries from doing things that kids used to do, though.
The park wasn't closed, no one was banned from the park, us kids were all strongly warned by our parents from playing near the ditch in the rain.
Problem solved, no one died there in the remaining decade we lived near the park. They did put up bigger warning signs, but other than that, no changes were made until quite recently when the park was redeveloped and the drainage was moved completely underground.
Though I guess this is an argument both for and against "free range parenting" -- kids will do stupid stuff when they are not supervised and sometimes that stuff can get them killed or injured, but also they are able to look after themselves if they know the dangers out there. I only remember 2 other deaths in my school classmates - one died in a traffic accident on vacation with his parents, the other died after complications during wisdom tooth extraction (that one happened 2 weeks before my own wisdom tooth extraction, I was pretty worried).
In contrast to today's risk adverse society, a couple years ago a child injured himself on a wooden play structure (cut his arm on some split wood badly enough to need stitches). The city fenced off the structure for a year until they replaced it with a "safe" plastic structure.
River is not in bottom or dangerous canyon and look like normal river. Which is dangerous in cold weather, despite not looking dangerous.
The deaths you're speaking of are also not accidental.
This should be fun.
How "old" are you talking about here?
I assume we are speaking about the US. Only immediate physical harm is considered bad. On the other hand long term harmful conditions like the oversupply of junk food, overworking, lack of vacation or the health care situation are considered normal.
Unless the thing is guns, then it doesn't matter how many children are killed.
Also, using words like "conspire" or "conspiracy" is a total straw man. When lots of people have the same interests, e.g. increasing the number of times an average citizen must hire a lawyer, they will act in similar ways without needing to communicate. Seeing conspiracy where no one suggested one is a way of ignoring the point.
Supreme Court justices are appointed to lifetime positions specifically to give them the freedom to ignore politics and use their literal best judgment (if they can make it through congressional approval). What kind of supreme judge gets subjected to judgment every few years?