Crashing Into Something or Someone, Perhaps Repeatedly and Only for Fun

Risky play as a coordination problem 🤼

Children's Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1560)

When I was in elementary school, in the last couple years of the 20th century, there was a wonderful grove in the schoolyard. As an adult once I went back, and it was tiny and sparse, and I wondered if they had cut down some of the trees. More likely the woods were simply quite small from the beginning, and the illusion of vastness came from being small myself.

Or maybe they did cut down some of the trees. This is what the woods looked like in 2023 according to Google Street View, but those trees are younger and smaller than what I remember from the 1990s, and also Google Street View shows a much sparser affair when you go back in time to 2009. Either way, I’m glad those woods still exist.

The woods were by far the most fun part of the schoolyard. We divided ourselves into rival “camps,” gangs of 6- or 7-year old children who scoured the woods to collect rocks and plastic bags that we accumulated in secret bases hidden in some of the bushes. There we would grind the rocks into powder and collect that precious resource in the plastic bags. What we hoped to achieve by doing this, I do not remember. But it was great fun. There was drama and gossip (who was part of which camp??), there was nature, there was competition, and there was a lot of physical activity.

I can’t remember of anything else I did during recess, other than, in winter, sliding down a small snow hill — another rather risky activity.

But evidently we did do other things, because one day the teachers decided the woods were off-limits. At first they forbid it during winter, I think; they gradually the prohibition extended to the other seasons. We children were appalled. Why were they taking out the most fun part of recess? Why were those adults warring against fun?

I lied — I remember another activity I did, I think around grade 4. I stood near the place where we would line up to go back into the school at the sound of the bell. That way I would be first in line, not that it mattered in any way. I passed the time deep in thought, in fantasy lands of my own imagination.¹ The physical world of recess had become dull, and I wanted no part of it.

Later, at another school, in grade 6, the same pattern applied. There were woods near that school, too, and at the beginning of the year we played in it. By winter the administration had decided this long-lasting tradition was too dangerous. They decreed that the teachers would now park their cars in what had been the bus driveway, and they turned the previous parking lot into the play area. It was a big rectangle of asphalt, which they eventually ameliorated by surrounding it with wire fencing. Clearly the most fun environment you could dream of. Those who liked basketball (this didn’t apply to me) could play it in one corner and that was about it.

My friend and I convinced our teacher to let us spend recess indoors, working on a project that involved drawing big posters, instead of going to play in that farce of a schoolyard.

I have been diving into my old elementary school memories because of recent news from the Canadian Paediatrics Society. If you have heard of it, it may be because of the following tweet, which became (by some metrics) my most popular tweet ever:

Tag yourself, I’m “Exploring woods without adult supervision,” though I also have a soft spot for “Crashing into something or someone, perhaps repeatedly and only for fun” (link to the tweet)

(Those who want to dig more into this can read the full report by the Canadian Paediatrics Society — not the Canadian Pediatrics Association like I wrote, oops — here.)

I’m pretty happy this happened. It seems true that society has moved towards an overabundance of caution around kids. Every now and then this map makes the rounds, showing how restricted the range of 8-year-old children has become over the course of a few generations:

in the UK, at least

The norms have changed; the laws too. I greatly enjoyed reading this 2022 post from Zvi Mowshowitz on how car seat laws can be seen as contraception: they make it more expensive to have kids, especially more than two kids, since you typically need a larger car for the extra car seats. And therefore such laws probably reducing fertility in exchange for a marginal improvement in safety. After I read that the first time, I looked up what the law was where I live. Since 2019, it mandates that car seats are necessary for all children aged 8 and less, which Zvi appropriately calls “flat out nuts.”

These, and the story about my schoolyard woods, are only a few examples of the pervasive safetyism that seems to now permeate Western societies, and which especially affects children since they are in no position to fight back.

But what’s most interesting about this is that… no one seems to want that? When poring over the replies and quotes to my tweet, it seemed to me that everyone agreed with the Canadian paediatricians. Not literally everyone, some people thought some of the items in that table were a bit exaggerated (like playing near fire), and some misinterpreted the argument a bit (believing it encouraged kids to actually seek out dangerous activities, when it simply says that kids shouldn’t avoid activities just because there’s some reasonable risk). But overall the sentiment was the same everywhere: Of course we have to let kids be kids and do activities that carry some risk; of course it’s fine if children get mildly injured because they crashed into one another repeatedly and only for fun. After all, that’s how we learn our limits, and how to assess risk, and how the world actually works.

So why did the Canadian Paediatrics Society feel the need to point that out?

The reason, obviously, is that no one wants “safetyism” in the abstract, as a vague phenomenon affecting all of society, but everyone wants “safety” at the level of individual actions. Even more importantly, everyone wants to avoid looking like they’re causing risk to other people. When those other people are adults, they can at least protest; we have strong norms on individual freedoms. But kids have no choice but to comply.² And so we get things like teachers who banish the most fun part of recess, because how bad would it look if a child seriously injured themselves in those woods? Nobody wants to argue with an angry parent about that.

This is a beautiful illustration of a common issue: individual actions that separately make sense but collectively make things worse. A classic coordination problem. Some have given this phenomenon a metaphorical name and called it Moloch. A god of child sacrifice. Fitting.

Defeating coordination problems is hard, though doable. One could say that that’s the whole point of having any sort of established authorities: so that they can override a collection of individual decisions and steer everyone in the right direction. In this case it is the expert authority of paediatricians, and I’m glad they’re using it well. With any luck this will catalyze a vibe shift, in which I will perhaps have played a small part.

The benefits, if this vibe shift materializes, could be enormous: more children, and also healthier children, who go outside more, and play on iPads less, and suffer less from anxiety and depression. And therefore, a few years down the line, healthier adults. Perhaps adults who will be less prone to implementing harmful safetyism in all spheres of their life.

I don’t know if that’s what we’re headed for, but I’m hopeful. This was truly heartwarming news. In fact it even greatly increased my own desire to have kids, and I finally stopped procrastinating and called the adoption office today. Maybe, a few years from now, I can send my own kid playing in the woods with no adult supervision.

"Baby Play" by Ming Xia Kui (according to Google Translate, anyway; the file is called 明夏葵《嬰戲圖》)

1. Also because apparently I didn’t really have any friends in grade 4. Sad.

2. A related, separate problem is that of taking kids seriously, as actual people who can make decisions for themselves. It seems possible that a similar trend has made us move away from that, but I’m not sure why.