Praise for free play... and risky play

Has a child who has never risked tearing his pants on a tree branch had a childhood?

Before psychological vocabulary had replaced natural language, everyone accepted as perfectly normal that being a child meant possessing far more energy than the sense to control it. A naughty child was called a naughty boy; in the naughty group, a naughty boy, and every children's group proudly had someone who looked like the devil. Everyone knew that life has no instructions other than those provided by the inalienable experience of living.

Today, there are children with syndromes who, instead of playing, engage in pedagogically sound leisure activities. The result is that they are the first generation in history to grow up with immaculate knees. To see children with their own childhoods, with lives in the open air, with that light in their eyes that comes with adventurous experience, you have to go to Third World countries, where they still have ample spaces where they can be children independently, without the supervision of an overprotective adult. The faces of these children, without comforts but free, contrast sharply with those of ours, who, surrounded by toys, are bored. Our children no longer know what free, unstructured, and risky play is.

We have cancelled Huckleberry Finn.

When I advocate for free and risky play to parents, I immediately sense their discomfort, because they feel, at the same time, dissatisfied with their overprotection and unable to do without it. Many understand, because they still retain vivid memories of their childhood, especially if they are from a village, that risky play is not only fun but, above all, necessary for a child's balanced development. However, they magnify the potential threats and, without realizing it, transmit their insecurity to their children.

In the current debate about screens and childhood, I miss the essential question: what need have screens come to address? My thesis is that they are a response to the tedious emptiness caused by the absence of expectations of real, intense, vital play. Mobile phones are the most effective response we've invented to distract ourselves from our daily micro-tediums. If they've become the protagonists of our lives, it's because they had previously been emptied of direct, exciting, first-person experiences, of adventurous contact with the real world. You can argue that their victory is sad, but it's instantaneous. And this, in a time that has outlawed waiting, counts. A lot.

It is necessary to return childhood to its rightful owners.

The fear modern parents feel about risky play, in turn, reflects their growing distrust of the world, the future, and their children's abilities. Their anxiety is infecting their families with an indefinite fear of the possible. And how could this not be the case if we don't allow their children to test their abilities to learn independently to assess the potential risks of a situation, to navigate in unfamiliar environments, and to accept the real consequences of risk-taking?

Whatever the dangers of risky play, the risks of overprotection are no less. The more parents do for their children, the less the children do for themselves. For example, the age at which children learn to potty train is declining. At the beginning of the century, 60% of 18-month-olds were toilet trained. Today, only half are toilet trained by 36 months. And there are 4-year-olds in diapers.

There should be nothing more normal than a child who is full of energy, exploratory, curious, eager to constantly surpass themselves, and who feels a curious attraction to risk. This attraction arises spontaneously, because when children's abilities exceed the challenges offered by their entertainment, they try to reduce boredom by increasing the challenge, but adults can pacify it to the point of sterilizing it.

Children should be as safe as necessary, but not as safe as possible. Our goal should be to strengthen their risk-taking skills, precisely because risk, in life, is real. We must provide them with a supportive environment and then step back as much as circumstances allow.

Overprotection is a form of abuse, because it does not consider children worthy of discovering (in a process of progressive autonomy) the adventures, fatalities, hopes, and disappointments of the world.