Jumping Off Roofs and Other Risk Taking Behavior

Have you had a chance to read the article "The Overprotected Kid" by Hanna Rosin? I have stumbled across references to it on several blogs (including A Cup of Jo). It is an excellent read about how kid's play has shifted in the last 30 years. 

How we used to roam free and how now kids are watched 24-7 with very little time for exploratory play, or play that allows children to take risks. It is a fascinating article. Especially when I think back to my own childhood (and the stories my mom would tell us of her childhood)...

When I was in my 20s, I started sharing my risk-taking stories with my parents and I think they were pretty surprised (as I am sure my grandparents were surprised when they learned that my mom and her brothers had floated down the river by their home, amongst other things).

Some of my unsupervised, risk-taking behavior as a child include: 

Hermitage, Tennessee (Ages 7-8)

• Climbing out of the window of my house (onto the roof)
• Roller skating down a paved hill in my neighborhood. 
• Riding down the paved hill in my little red wagon
• Baking cookies and selling them door-to-door in our neighborhood

Corunna, Ontario, Canada (Age 9-11)

• Sneaking out of my friends house (by climbing out a window and jumping off the roof)
• Floating in the Saint Lawrence River that was close to my house, at night
• Climbing onto the top of my elementary school building (on the weekend)
• Reading in the tops of trees
• Canoeing down a creek behind a friend's house

Searcy, Arkansas (Ages 12-15)

• Roaming in the woods next to our home
• Climbing onto the roof of the shed in our back yard to read books
• Roller skating around the court square (after 10pm)
• Jumping off the tall cliffs at Heber Springs

As a child of the 80s, I experienced a lot of the unsupervised play that this article talks about and I believe it has helped shape me as an adult. Now that I am a parent, I wrestle with wanting to supervise my child to the nth degree (I actually wrote about this concern right before Jack was born). 

Jack is two-and-a-hafl, so I have plenty of time to (hopefully) learn how to balance my fear and desire to keep him safe with my desire for him to learn independence, creativity, problem solving and risk taking. 

As the article states, all of the strict playground modifications and parental monitoring hasn't really reduced injuries, so we have to weigh the risks and let the kids explore a bit more... Besides, our current home is surrounded by tall rocks and trees and I'm pretty sure there will come a day when I have little control over what Jack climbs.

Thoughts on Dormers

The closer we get to having our baby, the more I start to think about parenting type things. Things that have never crossed my mind before.

For instance last week I was looking out the nursery window and it dawned on me that I once lived in a house that had dormers. I was between the ages of 8 and 10 and for some reason I thought it was a good idea to knock the screen out of the window and crawl out and sit on the roof. What 8-year-old thinks that is a good idea??? I have no idea if this was my own adventurous spirit or if a friend encouraged me to do it. I do remember that my friend and I did this on a regular basis.

So now I am worried. We have dormers in both upstairs bedrooms AND the bathroom. I can just envision our kid {or kids} crawling out the window and walking down the roof to the other bedroom. I mean it was something I did as a kid, so what's to say our kid won't do something similar? 

This past weekend I told my parents about my penchant for sitting on the roof as a kid and asked if they knew I had done such things. They had no idea. So the good news is that if my kids do climb out windows and hang out on the roof I will probably be clueless about it...

When I was 10-12 I graduated from sitting on rooftops to climbing out windows and jumping off of the roof at my best friend's house in the middle of the night. We would wander around our small town before sneaking back and using a bicycle as a ladder to climb back onto a lower level of the house and back inside through a second floor window.

When I was growing up, my mom used to tell me stories of her adventures – she has quite a few of her own. I don't know if her stories made me more willing to try things or if I just had a natural compulsion to be adventurous. I never did the things she did, but I did plenty of my own stupid things. At least we have several years until we truly have to worry about kids getting brave {stupid} enough to climb out on rooftops... right?