It seems we do a poor job, as parents, as an American society, as humans, preparing our kids to deal with adversity, to help them quickly (and without drama) get back up after life delivers a knock-down. It’s so natural to want to shield and insulate and protect. So as a collective, for entire generations, we’ve sheltered our children. Maybe that’s wrong. By trying to remove all risk, all hardship, maybe we have blunted important traits and skills needed for happiness, achievement, survival. I wonder.

Starting maybe a decade ago, educators in England decided to try something new (well, it was really old school, but it felt new). They started to change their playgrounds, not by making them safer, but by making them a little dangerous. Just like in America, political correctness and fear and shortsightedness had turned their playgrounds into no fun zones. They had become fenced-in mausoleums with plank swings and metal merry-go-rounds replaced by rubber floors and fiberglass boulders. As the playgrounds became more boring, children stopped going there. So they went about the business of adding risk – calculated, monitored risk, but risk just the same.

They figured out that exposing our children to limited risks is essential to healthy childhood development – it builds resilience and grit. Experts in England concluded that exposing children to limited risks now, while they are young, will help them survive. Letting kids figure stuff out on their own, letting them fail, letting them scrape their knees on the playground of life, teaches them an appreciation of risk … this way, when they encounter that risk in real life, they won’t be paralyzed by it rather they will recognize it, come to grips with it and move on.

The modifications they made to their playgrounds seem like a valuable metaphor for living. They filled the playing spaces with two-by-fours and crates and loose bricks. They added tire swings and stump logs and work benches with hammers and saws. They erected twenty-foot climbing towers, treehouses, wobbly bridges, tall prairie grass and bushes with thorns. In short, they wanted to reverse the decades-long drift toward overprotecting children. The approach says that if kids encounter something sharp or take a fall that the lesson learned will outlive the bruise and the ultimate effect will tougher, more self-reliant adults.

All of this, of course, is a work in progress and to make societal changes like this requires compromise and shifted perspective and soul-searching and short-term pain for long-term gain things that, suddenly in 2018, Americans don’t seem to be very good at.

Our kids need to be more resilient. They need to be able to more easily regain their balance after setbacks. When life delivers a sucker punch they need to be able to stand up and punch back. Maybe taking on more risks, on the playground and other places, would be a good place to start. I wonder.