This would be great advice if boomers hadn’t turned outside into a car-dominated hellscape.
So we dismantle playgrounds, defund schools, make after-school activities into a cash-grab, defund mental-health and addiction services and kick problematic people out into the street, allow commercial landlords to squeeze out businesses that kids might frequent and, like you say, make neighbourhoods that are designed to maximize developer profits and now you lay this on millenial and zoomer parents?
Yeah, I have to agree, screw the “…bbbbut my tax dollars!!” crowd. They built this.
And by building it, they rob children of the opportunities to become independent earlier in life by robbing them of their freedom of movement and squeezing young generations financially
Come on CBC, that’s a garbage headline
Agreed. Terrible headline, but solid advice in the article.
So parents are supposed to put their kids in risky situations before letting them play with bubble wrap?
No no, you’ve got it all wrong. Parents are supposed to pop bubble wrap while their kids play outside.
It’s a very calming activity… it’ll probably be a great boon for their anxiety.
I think this may have more to do with the internet and mass communication and entertainment. We were poor when I was a kid in the late 70s and 80s … we had no internet and we really had no TV because we had no cable and my parents couldn’t afford much. We also had no books or reading material in the house. So when you’re a kid left with nothing to do, read, or watch at home, you naturally go wandering around looking for things to do elsewhere. I was about 7 or 8 when I started roaming around my neighbourhood, 10 by the time I went around my entire town and by 12 I was making treks into the woods and even overnight camping with me and my friends.
I’m Indigenous Canadian and to my parents it was all natural. Dad told us stories of learning to hunt and trap with his father at about 8 to 10 and then by the time he was 12, he was on his own. At 14 he was making money as a guide for visiting hunters from southern Ontario and the US. By 16, he was more or less living on his own and had become his own man.
That’s possible but Canada (and the US) are outliers on this. In Japan, the Netherlands, etc. kids are still encouraged and allowed to play outside without adult supervision. I think we have a particularly paranoid parenting culture in this country.
My daughter spends all day Socializing online and through video games. She never gets as bored as I used to, so she never wants to go out to the mall or hang out with friends. Seems bad, but that means she’s not off doing drugs or having teen sex. My generation grew up way too fast, gen z is taking it slower and that’s good.
This one lady in my city let her kids go play in the playground right behind her house. She could see them from th window. Because the kids were under 15, neighbors called the police, and the mother was charged with child neglect.
That’s why parents don’t let their kids go out anymore.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Climbing a tree, tobogganing or rough-and-tumble play are all outdoor activities that children should be encouraged to do to promote health, Canadian pediatricians say in new guidance.
New recommendations released Thursday by the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) emphasize the importance of unstructured outdoor play for children’s development and physical and mental health amid rising obesity, anxiety and behavioural issues.
As an emergency physician at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and head of the CPS’s injury prevention committee, Beno said it’s also important to distinguish risk from hazard.
While hazards like busy roads or rough waters are clear, others such as being around fire or play fighting are more nuanced, the authors said.
Dr. April Kam, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at McMaster University in Hamilton, said it’s healthier for kids to play outside to build resilience, develop their abilities and learn what their limits are through natural consequences.
Psychologist Kathleen Martin Ginis, a professor in the department of medicine at the University of British Columbia who wasn’t involved in the new guidelines, called them balanced overall.
The original article contains 559 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
