Lick a battery – is the first of “Fifty Dangerous Things (you should let your children do),” a book that our son gave us. His friend, author Gever Tulley’s simple premise is that we need to go back to letting kids play dangerously. Readers who grew up without every childhood moment digitally documented know whereof I speak. It was those halcyon days before we rounded the edges off of every sharp corner, cushioned every fall with two feet of shredded foam, and slapped ludicrous warning labels on every toy. Every kid did stupid, dangerous, wonderful things. A few of us lived to tell about it. How many of these “dangerous things” from the book did you do? • Super glue your fingers together • Play in a hailstorm • Throw rocks • Burn things with a magnifying glass ( What little sadist did not do this?) • Play with fire or firecrackers As juveniles we would get up early after a neighbor’s party and crawl through their yards finding unexploded firecrackers. Many lacked fuses, as attested to by kids who showed up at school the following day lacking eyebrows. For a few weeks every summer, no mailbox, garbage can or hastily-constructed model car was safe from our armaments. It was only as an adult that I learned M-80s were manufactured by the U.S. military to simulate artillery fire. • Climb a tree One refinement I invented was running down a steep slope and leaping out into space to grab the top of a sapling growing lower down, then riding it as it bent t o the ground. It was a quick, reckless, exhilarating, stupid way to get down a hill. • Spend an hour blindfolded I used to have my elementary students do this for no pedagogical reason. I’d also duct tape a board to one leg so they couldn’t bend a knee, put a perfectly good arm in a sling and tape their mouths shut. It was just interesting to see how they coped with being handicapped. The students loved it. But some parents were not amused so my principal made me stop. Some of the suggestions seem hardly dangerous to those of us who grew up in middle America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. • Walk home from school How else were we going to get there? Unless it was riding a horse from the country school, which my father-inlaw did. • Whittle I still have the “ball in a cage” and scars to prove it. • Dam up a creek It’s how we spent our summers. No trip with my brothers to our timber was complete unless at least one of us had fallen in the creek. • Make a slingshot? Heck, we made bows and arrows from willow branches, and used them on each other. • Go to the dump This is now probably illegal, but it was what we did on Saturday night back on the farm. It was great fun as we scrambled over mountains of hazardous household and industrial waste, pulling out perfectly good 2x4s and plywood panels to use for treehouses and forts. The bonanza was when we arrived shortly after the local turkey hatchery had dumped truckloads of unhatched eggs. We kids were deployed like post-earthquake search teams to track down partially hatched poults, which we pulled from the shells and took home to raise for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. Writing this now makes me sound like we were hillbillies, but it was really an early form of recycling. • Stand on the roof Our great diversion with our kids was climbing on the roof and lying in sleeping bags as the sun went down, listening for night sounds and watching the stars pop out. • Throw things from a moving car My kids still remember when I pushed wooden matches into an orange and let them throw it out the window while driving down a highway, watching it burst into a rolling fireball. Stupid? Yeah. Fun? Definitely. • Stick your hand out the window of a moving car I never believed it when Mom said we’d get our arms torn off by a road sign, but I told my kids the same thing when I became a dad. Author Tulley includes a section titled “Why” that explains the philosophical reasons for letting children do dangerous things. But I don’t believe there needs to be any point. That is the point.
