Red Tape and Childhood

How did we get to the point where having an old-fashioned see-saw on the playground is something almost no park district would consider? Or that students crossing the street to visit the firehouse must get a signed waiver? Or that a school bus can’t let a 7-year-old off at the bus stop unless there’s an adult waiting there to walk them home half a block? 

Philip Howard says it all began in the ‘60s. Not with the hippies – with the experts.

“The idea we had back then was that we could prescribe the correctness of public choices with detailed rules,” says Howard, author, most recently, of Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America. “But actually, that’s not correct. Practically every situation involves human judgment in the circumstances.”

Post-war optimism about technocracy led America to start substituting regulations for what some of us call common sense. (In fact, Howard’s first book was “The Death of Common Sense.”) It was also the era when any untoward experience started to become a potential lawsuit. This combination of expertise and litigation was supposed to make our world safer and more fair. But it had the unintended consequence of making things scary and sometimes stagnant. Lots of rules meant lots of opportunities to be punished for breaking them.

“Kids can’t go out and play because if they’re unsupervised and somebody had an accident, there might be a lawsuit,” says Howard. As for see-saws, merry-go-rounds, and the like, “Anything where kids might fall could create a lawsuit too,” he says. “So the best thing to do is to get rid of them.” Howard dug up a list of Consumer Product Safety Commission rules that warned parks against “tripping hazards, like…tree stumps and rocks.”

Tree stumps and rocks ARE tripping hazards. They are also native to earth, which is where kids must learn to live. (At least for the present.) It’s actually GOOD for kids to get used to paying attention to them!

Treat everything that isn’t a mulch chip as a child maimer and the result is not just boring playgrounds. It’s bored kids, with fewer chances to learn to be alert. And add to that a culture of constant supervision, and they have fewer chances to solve problems as well. “You no longer have the brain learning these social skills, because you have an adult overseeing them,” says Howard.

Perhaps Howard’s biggest bugaboo is the stacks of standards that schools and other institutions, like day care centers and nursing homes, must follow. The problem with micromanagement from afar is that something that may be dangerous in one situation (walking home from a bus stop along a highway) isn’t dangerous in another (walking home along a quiet street), yet it is prohibited everywhere. And that rule is backed up with the threat that if a child is hurt, however unpredictably, there is always someone to blame.

Administrators, in turn, are forced to think defensively instead of using their own best judgment: If saying no to this activity means no one will ever get hurt, how could I ever say yes?

But administrators – and teachers, and doctors, and all of us who have done our jobs for a while – have learned things. We have absorbed lessons. We have observed reality. And we should be able to make decisions based on what we have seen and come to understand. For instance, that free play is crucial for kids, even though they could get hurt. “Better a broken arm than a broken spirit,” I’ve heard wise parents say.

But making such judgments has also become taboo, says Howard. Even though wisdom is what you get from experience, people who work with kids are not allowed to form their own ideas of what is sensible and safe enough. They are forced to abandon this wisdom and, instead, comply.

And when they are busy trying to make sure that they have done things exactly as outlined on page 78, sub-paragraph H? They’re not getting smarter. “The regulatory state is literally mind-numbing,” Howard says. Load the brain up with rules and it can’t see the playground slide as anything other than a piece of equipment that is noncompliant, should it angle more than 43 degrees in a vertical direction.

Howard believes one solution to this state of affairs could be a Risk Commission that, like this Social Policy Journal piece, lays out what risks are appropriate – even critical – for children at different ages.

It would be based on child development, not risk aversion. It would be a back-up for parents and schools who want to let their kids do more on their own. And it would be a way to assert that there are ALWAYS trade-offs, so absolute safety is not always the best bet.

As for the people on that commission? (I’d like to be one!) They’d be allowed to use their actual, life-given judgment. They could look at a tree stump and decide whether or not it posed a crazy threat to kids.

If it did not, the stump could stay. And the 1000-page rule book could go.

Let Grow’s Reasonable Childhood Independence bill allows families to exercise this kind of judgment. The law (passed in 12 states so far) says that “neglect” is only when you put your child in serious, obvious danger – not any time you take your eyes off them. This gives parents back the power to make safety decisions based on knowing their specific kids and neighborhood.

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