How much is too much?

Hi You Ole' Geezer

Your post brought some thoughts to mind.

I grew up in Houston,born in 1945 so became sports active around what? 1952..53?
In those days, (baby boomers), there were a LOT of kids in the neighborhood.

We would mosey up to the local elementary school on weekends and summer days and play ad-hoc ballgames that lasted all day sometimes. (Well, we sorta' played all day. I get a chuckle still, remembering just how much time we spent arguing over a particular "call"...Ha! DEMOCRACY IN ACTION! Everybody seemed to have an opinion, shaded of course by which team the call would favor.)

Today that same elementary school has a chain length fence around it...with barbed wire along the top! And signs warning of really dire penalties for "trespassing", even though the local parents pay the taxes that keep the darned thing open. Even if it were open, most parents today here in Houston wouldn't allow their kids to play unsupervised...out of sight of their home.

Two things interacting here. First we live in a different society...lots of predators out there, or at least there SEEM to be. Second,there are simply a lot more parental-protective-measures in force.

Even six years ago, my teams' parents thought nothing amiss about me piling the team in the back of my pickup,(it had a camper on it and thus was enclosed), and taking off down to a malt shop after practice. The kids loved it, and the parents would join us, and we would have wonderful times. That couldn't happen today. Pickups don't come equipped with 13 or 14 safety belts and airbags in the back...and I might be a pedophile...and I might be too stupid to realize that I have 13 or 14 futures in the back.

You know, Geezer, I'm not sure just where one draws the line between prudence and over protectiveness, but there has to be a line doesn't there? I cared about the welfare of my kids just as much as people do today, and I took driving them somewhere very, veeeeeeeery seriously!

...And I know children have been hurt riding a bicycle without a helmet, so should we go ahead and suit them up in kevlar body armor like knights of old?

...And I know that a child can get hurt playing any sport, so should we just take them down the hall and point them at the computer?

Somewhere along here we have to realize that there is a RISK / REWARD RATIO!!! At some point the quality of life for our kids demands that we give them the opportunity to be hurt, to keep them from growing up to be computer veggies. Don't we have to accept that they are going to face some dangers if they are ever to grow into courageous human adults?

Another thought: Today kids are growing up to believe that everything should be perfect, safe, and pain-free...AND IF IT ISN'T...THEN SUE SOMEBODY!

Are we rearing a generation of cowardly wimps?

I read a future history novel about a nation that got so darned "civilized", and safety conscious that when a deadly danger presented itself from outside that nation, the nation folded up and was no more...and everybody in it was enslaved?

Is that where we are headed? I'm sure I don't know, but it worries me.

"Organized" sports for our kids are better than no sports at all, and injuries attendant to those sports must be accepted, don't they, though we should try our best to make those injuries ones that can be healed?

Any thoughts?

Best regards
Kenneth Bean