|
While I don't wax poetic about it, and if I ever had children wouldn't do it myself, I don't really view my parents application of corporal punishment as damaging in any way. But neither do I hold the view that it can't be damaging.
As for the risks thing, any individual aspect of risk abatement is hard to argue against, I just question when we've gone to far in trying to eliminate all risks.
When I was a kid we used to dig a pit in a nearby wild area and then build ramps to jump over the pit with our bikes. We all survived. None of us ever even owned a helmet. Many of us got hurt to some degree or another. And there was never any parental supervision (where we were if someone was seriously hurt it would have taken 20 minutes to even get to somewhere possible to call for help).
THere was serious risk (we were also generally swimming in the nearby creek without supervision as well) and it was all easily avoidable and it would be hard for me to fault a parent prohibiting the entire thing on safety grounds (or making us take it to a specially built bike park with padded walls and body armor and a 1:1 parent to child ratio). But I also can't help but feel that something important is also lost if that kind of unstructured, unsupervided group play is taken away.
Is there any reason to let kids ride in a car without a seatbelt? Not really (though sitting on my dad's lap "driving" the car up and down the street in front of my house when I was four is one of the strongest positive memories I have). Is it child abuse to leave you six year old in the car while running into the convenience store for five minutes? Not really.
|