The Goddess writes: Or rather, how life used to work, back when I was a kid who rode into a parked car while reading on my bicycle. Note to self back then: "Hey, stupid, don't do that again!"

Sorry, Amy. I have to laugh. You really needed to run into something before you realized that reading a book while biking isn't a good idea?

April Fool prank strongly suspected here.

I'll bet Amy was so wrapped up in Heathcliff and Catherine that she didn't even know she'd crashed until her head hit the bumper!

Wuthering Heights has probably ruined more girls than drugs.

As for the slippy slide and the merry-go-round, whenever I hear stories like this, I always think that someone's afraid of being sued. Thus, cool playground equipment is removed, fun games are banned, and children are pointlessly restrained. But this appears to be a state regulation. What is the state government worried about?

Like so much other government regulation, the idea is control, not safety or whatever reason is officially put forth. Control of our lives, every aspect thereof, if they can get away with it. Simply because they can.

Good thing Texas is Texas, otherwise they'd be trying to ban all playground equipment here because it will burn the crap out of you 6 months a year if you aren't very careful. Our sun is brutal.

DH just put up a trampoline. I remember many an injury on my trampoline asa kid-including breaking my nose. Yet, I still bought my kids one! Why? Because they're damn fun and great exercise. I DO wonder why so many kids are fat nowadays, don't you?

I bet they don't sell animals to kids because the parents got sick of taking care of surprise animals.

Or maybe its to protect the animals.

I don't think its about protecting the kiddies.

Sighhhh.....

We used to bicycle all over the place.

Take the bike after lunch in the summer, not come back until dinner.

In a residential area of New York City.

Nobody worried.

The whole "free range kids" thing started when Ms. Eskanazy (spelling) actually let her kid take the subway by himself!!

Something we did all the time.

Now my cousins' kids are not allowed out of their own driveways/cul-de-sacs.

A while back I was part of a panel speaking to a group of visiting American Jews. They asked a guy who lived in Hebron (west-bank hotspot) if he wasn't afraid for his children.

His answer: "they play outside more freely than my nieces and nephews back in the States."

I hope today's kids feel "cherished" because of all of the protection. I don't think I was particularly swift as a kid, but I do remember thinking, "I could splash my brains all over that pavement if I fell" as I started down the 200 foot slide, or climbed the metal jungle gym. I saw it as an adult plan to kill us off. Therefore, I was very careful, because I figured if I got hurt I'd be yelled at en route to the hospital.
I was nipped by a dog, and almost hit by a car, and I never told my parents because they'd tell me to be more careful. My mother was always telling us that! Each time, I DID feel it was my fault,because I impulsively ran to the dog, and was daydreaming or spastic on my bike. The same was true when when I was tossed from a horse as an adult. My older brother and I almost set our hair on fire while smoking "Indian Tobacco???" in the back yard. We were pretty good kids, but both had ADD (in retrospect) and couldn't resist a good idea.
It's funny that back then we automatically assumed or knew we were at fault. Now it's always another's fault!
I know kids are missing some fun now. They'll just have to use their imagination! We are really going too far in over- protection, but no one wants a lawsuit.

I remember those "mushroom" molded plastic merry-go-rounds from the early '70s. The fun game to play on that was to get it spinning as fast as possible, climb on, and then try to climb up out of the little cubbyhole, slither over the top, and drop down into a cubbyhole on the opposite side, while it spun. If there were other kids onboard, then whilst at the top, you were supposed to pause to spit at them -- which was where we learned about Coriolis forces!

I don't recall ever reading on a bicycle, but it was probably the only stupid bicycle stunt I didn't do. In retrospect, it's rather remarkable that I still have all of my extremities intact. Fortunately, I was a few years too soon for the revival of the skateboard...

The reason Amy has so many fans is because she is the type of cool person who WOULD read on a bicycle until she learned the hard way.

I make no secret that I don't agree with all her views, but there are many good things about her to admire. (I have said so many times.) And, the strong desire not to waste valuable time, resulting in reading on a bicycle at ten mph, is part of that nature.

Being part of a large farm family, we sometimes engaged in dangerous competitions, which I usually lost. We'd race around the farm on our bicycles, and I'd come in the house with tree bark or gravel embedded in my forehead. Skin gone off both arms, or my shirt front ripped to shreds where I had slid on my chest, always trying to keep up with my younger brother.

He fell off his bicycle exactly once, and broke his arm. He was fast, but he had never learned the Zen art of bouncing well.

"Or maybe its to protect the animals." ~NK

It is. For example, years ago a local teenager purchased a mouse from a pet store and sacrificed it in a microwave demonstration at a nearby department store in the same mall.

Unbeknownst to my parents, I once found an abandoned duck egg and hatched it in my sock drawer with the aid of a desk lamp. It didn't end well for the duckling, but at least it was a rescue attempt and not a market-generating purchase.

Which reminds me - if you must give a rabbit as an Easter gift, please adopt one from a local shelter.

~~~
Some of the changes made to playgrounds, etc. are prompted by a desire to avoid or reduce liability in lawsuits. Accordingly, insurance companies may charge government customers (boroughs, townships, etc.) higher rates unless those changes are made. Parents who file insurance claims to get their kid needed medical care as a result of a playground accident may find themselves part of such a lawsuit.

I'm all for animal rights (Hey Amy- lay off the fois gras!) but a goldfish? It ended up costing the taxpayers something like $20 grand over there in England for this prosecution. A lack of common sense is one thing, but when it takes away someone's liberty heads should roll.

(We have a pond outside with five $.39 goldfish- they freeze solid almost every year, and by March they are swimming around happy as can be. They have grown to be almost a foot long and are all three years old!)

Today's kids are going to be such wussies that they'll fall to pieces if they bump into the coffee table.

Seriously, this is WAY out of hand.

I understand the protection paranoia somewhat. When I was growing up the population of both people and cars was far smaller. Even though we didn't have bike lanes, I don't remember ever having a close bike-to-car encounter and I rode over two miles each way to school most days (some days the return trip was much longer since it involved chasing crawdads in a stream).

Today you'd have to be crazy to ride on the streets, bike lanes or no. Too many bluetooth-enabled over-caffeinated me-first drivers.

Scary!

Kids today don't have anywhere near the freedom we had when we were kids. I biked everywhere after my paper route was done. Down to the beach, to the park, across town, you name it. Out until the streetlights came on. Our parents has no idea where we even were, never mind what we were doing! One of my brothers fell out of one of the trees in our backyard once. He was five. An overnight stay in the hospital, and he was back at it - you could see the Long Island Sound from our trees if you climbed high enough. And he did. Repeatedly. (I used to climb up the tree behind the garage to read. Nobody bothered me there.)
It's such a shame everyone is so sue-happy these days. Buncha nattering fuckwits. (Yeah, I'm reading Christopher Moore again. 'Fool' is a retelling of 'King Lear' by his jester. If you're looking for inanity, this is it! It's also a good bit of fun!)

Our neighborhood had a pepper tree in front of every house- about 40-50 tall. We spent hours climbing them all. One day we came home from school and the city had come and cut every one of them down to protect the friggin sidewalks. Before that every year they would have a huge fog-machine type truck come through and fumigate the trees, which we played in minutes later. Times have changed for sure.

What about swings? We used to a lot of damage to ourselves on the swing set. Get some good sideways momentum and try to wind the swings up, or have your big sister give you an under-duck for height, than jump out of the swing and try not to land on your knees. Good times.

And let's not forget the monkey bars. God why is it that people who survived all the mayhem with great memories don't think their own kids can handle it? And if their kids can't handle it, well then obviously no one else's kids can handle it either.

Hey Eric, that was DDT the fog trucks were spraying, and in this case I have to say it's a good change that they no longer spray us with that crap.

My mom not only didn't know where we were, if we were hanging around the house too much she'd put us to work scrubbing the baseboards or some other hideous job, so we learned quickly to disappear all day. We'd pee behind bushes to avoid going home. Somehow I have to think that there is less scary stuff out there than we imagine and for the most part our kids would be fine running all over the place the same as we did. The problem is that the eighteen 24-hour news channels have to talk about something, so every sad story is highlighted. I'd like to know if abductions, molestations, etc. happened with the same frequency back in the days of three evening news broadcasts per day. The stats must be out there somewhere.

My own kids, raised in the 80's, had the good fortune to grow up in married student housing while I was working on an advanced degree. They and their 300 friends would disappear for the day the same way we did in the 60's. Recently I've been hearing the stories of what they did while they were out, and it's similar to my own stories. I guess they figured I'd be mad. Heck, I'm happy to hear that they had that lovely freedom. It's one of my own best memories.

Swings are pretty non-existant around here. All the schools have taken them out and replaced them with those tire swings that can't get a whole lot of height and make me sick to my stomach by spinning. Try as we might, we could NEVER get a normal swing to do a loopy-dee-loop with someone on it!!

As for Amy riding/reading...at least she was only 8. Drivers do it all the time while they're driving a car -- texting anyone?

But I'm glad I'm not the only one to hit a parked car while riding as a kid. A bunch of us were on the way home from passing our bike safety test and I had turned my head back to brag to my friends about my 100%! My first lesson in irony.

You really needed to run into something before you realized that reading a book while biking isn't a good idea?

The Goddess writes: Apparently, yes. In my defense, I must have been 8.

I guess eight is a good time to go through the School of Hard Knocks. Especially, if you're going to take it so literally.

I really hope this article is the bloggers idea of an April Fools prank.

Seriously? Are states really taking "precautions" like that to "protect" the childen? Really?

My favorite playground game as a kid involved the merry go round. It wasn't a game that we made up and had rules. It just sorta evolved one day with no communication whatsoever. Everyone just sorta caught on and there were never any arguments about who's turn it was. Even the newcomers would catch on quickly. Hell, I think I learned some of my best lessons about teamwork at that playground. We would all lay in between the bars, and we would take turns being the "pusher" (for lack of a better word). Their job was to get it going around as fast as possible then yell "LET GO". And we would. The idea was to try to stay on the merry go round without flying off while it was spinning at a ridiculous high speed. We were basically trying to beat centrifugal force and defy gravity. Sometimes we won, bt mostly the force won. And every time one of us went flying off and got hurt, we swore we would never do it again, but we always did. And we always got hurt... again. None of our parents ever condemned the state or the equipment for it. They knew that we were just being dumb kids. If it we didn't have that merry go round, we would have found some other way to get hurt.

I gotta get one of those little Ferret working signs.

If DDT were harmful to humans, I'd be dead. We used to dust the heck out of the flies on Grandma's porch...

If you're a bird egg, or an insect, it's not so great. Human, no problem. Now if you want to ask millions of humans dead from malaria for lack of DDT, you're out of luck. They are dead, killed by an eco-scare. They won't be the last.

Yeah, I'm burning a bunch of people at another website with that ferret thing now. :D

I do think the photo is super-cute, though.

I can't believe England has gone from the country that fought back Hitler to this pansified-thing. It's very sad.

My favorite was a contraption called a 'giant stride'. There was a metal pole about 20' high with plate attached at the top that could spin freely about the axis of the pole. Attached to the plate were about 10 chains that all hung down to the ground, and each terminated in a handle that kids could grab onto.

We'd all grab a chain, and in coordination, begin running around the pole. Once you all got moving one or more kids would jump up and out and sail around for 5 or 10 feet or so. Great fun.

Best was to take one chain and wrap it around the others. Once the system went in to motion, the kid on the wrapped chain would fly for 2 or 3 full revolutions about 15' off the ground. Dangerous as hell.

Kick ass fun as hell too.

. . . . and long gone to the scrap yard, I'm sure. We aren't really worried about kid's safety. I believe it is more a pathological fear of attorneys.

There oughta be a law against everything, except, Lawyers filing frivilous lawsuits. Thank God we have a Nanny State, I feel so safe. And a special shout out to all you parents who crave safety over Freedom (to fall down and get hurt), where would we be without you?

You know, I haven't seen a merry-go-round at a playground for YEARS! Now that I have kids, I've noticed they are all gone. What happened?!

Regarding frivolous lawsuits in the U.S.:

"Because a frivolous defense or claim wastes the court's and the other parties' time, resources and legal fees, it may result in sanctions being levied by a court upon the party or the lawyer who presents the frivolous defense or claim.

Lawyer Daniel B. Evans writes:

[W]hen a judge calls an argument "ridiculous" or "frivolous," it is absolutely the worst thing the judge could say. It means that the person arguing the position has absolutely no idea of what he is doing, and has completely wasted everyone's time. It doesn't mean that the case wasn't well argued, or that judge simply decided for the other side, it means that there was no other side. The argument was absolutely, positively, incompetent. The judge is not telling you that you were "wrong." The judge is telling you that you are out of your mind. [1]"

http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Frivolous-lawsuit

God the playground game I remember was with tire swings at my elementary school. Take your basic chain hanging from a big wood beam and hooked to the end like a big O was the tire. Students would climb on top of the tire and hold on to the chain while another student would grab the bottom and proceed to give a poor mans bronco ride. A few kids would fall nobody majorly hurt. Looked back at the school a few years ago - GONE.

it is the shame that all the good parks with various equipment are now being paved over to make life SAFE. Me a man in his thirties is really depressed that he can not go back to park of my childhood.

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