Playground Pathology

Funny Playground Falls by blinkylicious

Do you hyperventilate every time your kid gets on the slide or climbs higher than 2 feet of the ground? Do you measure the depth of the wood chips around the teeter-totter? You could be setting your kid up for some sort of fearful psychopathology in the future. Eliminating or trying to eliminate the risk of injury at a playground may also eliminate a kid’s ability to conquer fear and ability to develop a sense of mastery. From the NY Times:

“We posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

Even when kids do fall and hurt themselves it actually seems to have a long-term positive effect on their fear:

“A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.”

But I suppose that having no fear of heights as a teenager could be problematic too:

Even with all the carnage that a robust, active child will probably experience on the playground, with the bumps, bruises, boo-boos, and less often, breaks, a playground fatality is awfully rare:

“The best current estimate of the mortality rate for short falls affecting infants and young children is 0.48 deaths per 1 million young children per year.”

So let them climb, roam, and wander–better you take the nerve pills now than them later.