[Wondergirl]

Their meat's always tastier than those raised in pens...

Let's childproof our playgrounds, remove parks, and lock our kids indoors so they can play video games all day, safe from the ouchies and the one-in-a-zillion chance someone will kidnap them.

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Of course, this will only increase their likelihood of being obese by age 15, diabetic by 30, and dead of a heart attack by 50 by 300% each, but hey, we were just being good parents, right?

Recently, I saw a little kid, maybe 3 or 4, riding a Big Wheel on a playground with his parents. The kid had a bicycle helmet on his head! Do you remember what a Big Wheel looks like? Plastic tricycle that sits the kid in it about 4 inches off the ground?

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Then, when I told our nanny about what I saw, she told me that in her previous job she once was pulling a three-year-old in a wagon at a park, and a cop drove past, stopped his car, and told her that by law the child had to be wearing a helmet. She swore this was true, despite my incredulous protest--things could not have gotten THAT bad.

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But perhaps it has. My brother still lives in the town that he and I grew up in, where we rode our bikes all over and played in parks by ourselves. Today, he doesn't let his kids ride their bikes alone, or play in parks. When I ask him why not, when we did the same thing, he just either says "There's no one for the kids to play with--other parents don't let their kids play in the parks" or simply "Things have changed." As to what things have changed, and how, he can't say, but it's pretty obvious that what's changed is our tolerance for any risk, and a media-driven fearfulness.

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It's sad, but something that's been going on for quite a while now... My elementary school playground had great metal & wooden climbing structures, swings, and swinging rings in a tan-bark box with a fairly large wooden border, surrounded by blacktop; a nearby school park also had another big climbing sculpture with a rotating tire swing. There were about 300 kids running all over the place daily, plus sneaking honeysuckle & clover flowers... yet no injuries or bee stings.

They replaced it a few years later with a simplistic plastic tube sculpture (just tall enough to be unclimbable) that even a seven-year-old would have had to navigate on hands-and-knees; the honeysuckle & clover were gone. It would have bored the daylights out of most kids over seven -- not half as useful for building muscle/stamina or encouraging vigorous exercise.

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