I freely admit to not being (wo)man enough to allow my two-year-old son to play with items 2 and 6 on the list of things Gever Tulley of the Tinkering School says we should let our kids play with. I do, however, absolutely agree with what he says about letting our kids explore their world and that risk-taking is an important part of the learning process. Watching the video (see below) of Tulley’s talk at TED.com will help any parent understand why their kids should be allowed to engage in the following activities:

1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
5. Break the DMCA
6. Drive a car

Open Education’s article about Tulley’s philosophy on risk-taking segues from a paper published a few years ago about how risk is viewed in our society: Understanding the Effect of Risk Aversion on Risk. None is somehow considered best, but what does that mean for society later on down the road? What will our kids have learned if they’ve never been allowed to explore and take risks? How are they supposed to figure out how to move through the world if they’re so padded and coddled that they effectively go through childhood with fuzzy blinders on and are never aware of their surrounding and how to make good decisions?

I don’t let my kids play in traffic, and I’m a huge fan of the seat belt, and as much as I want my kids to be safe in the world, even I am reduced to head-shaking disgust and disappointment when I go to the park and all the playground equipment has warning labels worthy of a recently-sued fast food franchise.

Yes, I get it already: if my kid falls off of this particular piece of equipment, he may very well sustain bodily injuries that could result in death; I get it that it’s my choice to let him play on said equipment; and I also get it that apparently, because you’ve slapped a humongous yellow warning label on your big plastic slide, it will be tougher for me to sue you.

Sometimes I want to go back in time, find some primordial ooze, and apologize profusely to any and all single-celled creatures I can scoop up for humanity having evolved into the warning-label freaks we are today. I’m not going to sue a playground equipment company. Good grief. I’m just happy they put wood chips under the equipment these days. Although, who knows what that’s doing to the gene pool.

Anyway, Tulley has a good philosophy about how to teach our children independence and awareness of themselves and of their surroundings. Watching his talk is pretty convincing; afterwards I was ready to teach my six-year-old to build stuff using something more powerful than a hammer and nails.

Posted by Alexa Harrington