Free Range Kids author on protecting children in the “unbrave new world”
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry), has an editorial in Forbes, driving home the point that not just some parents but institutions supposed to protect children can be so overprotective as to recall perfectly safe, time-tested toys. It could almost sound like “health and safety gone mad” stories, except that these concerns about overblown fears seem to be backed up with evidence. Skenazy mentions the high chair which has bumped or bruised only one child for every 50,000 products sold (isn’t that remarkably low?) and the schools which stop children studying real rocks and replacing them with posters. A toy workbench with large, very unswallowable parts, nearly managed to choke one child having been on the market since 1994, and was then recalled by what Skenazy calls the “now danger-hallucinating Consumer Product Safety Commission” in the US.
So we’re talking about a product that has been on the market for 15 years and sold 1,600,000 units. It is popular, safe and time-tested. To me that’s an exemplary toy.
[... And] Take cadmium, the latest “threat.” Last month McDonald’s and the CPSC issued a recall of 12 million Shrek 3 commemorative glasses because some of the paint on the cups contained trace levels of cadmium. It’s good to get those off the market, right? Cadmium can cause bone softening and kidney problems, right?
Well, possibly it can–if you absorb massive amounts of it by working at a cadmium plant. But cadmium has been used in paint and jewelry for decades with no appreciable danger. “You’d have to scrape the paint off of hundreds of those glasses, and EAT it, in order for your body to even develop a measurable level of cadmium in the blood,” says Jack Glass, a certified hazardous material manager. And you’d have to do it more than once. By the time your child is scraping the paint off thousands of commemorative cups–and calling it lunch–you’ve got bigger problems than cadmium contamination.
Full article: http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/21/consumer-product-safety-hazard-opinions-columnist-lenore-skenazy.html
I think I need to read some more of his work. I get SOOOO annoyed at ridiculous ‘health and safety’ measures which do absolutely nothing to prevent injury to children, or which send out the message that getting a scraped knee is an unacceptable outcome of any activity. Of course you would never want children to engage in behaviour that will probably get them hurt, but creating a generation of risk averse children who are never allowed to experience anything won’t do society any good in the long term.
Most recently I found out that I should not have had a sack race on my sports day. Why????? Are casualty wards secretly filled with children who have sustained serious injuries participating in these dangerous races?
A few years ago we were all advised not to use egg cups for crafting. Ridiculous.
There has to be a backlash against all of this soon because it can’t go much further. Give children back their childhoods!