Keeping Children Safe

[John Wagenseil]

When my Dad was a school kid during the Depression, the farm kids brought their guns to school and stacked them up in the cloak room. They hoped to shoot something for the pot on the walk back home. My Dad and his brother were "townies" so they did not take guns to school, but their mother expected them to use dangerous sharp hoes in the back yard garden and chop vegetables and clean chickens and rabbits with dangerous sharp knives and work near a dangerously hot cast iron stove.

My high school had a lab equipped with dangerous screwdrivers, hammers, pliers, soldering irons, dangerous (really!!) high amperage banks of Exide lead acid batteries, real chemicals and breakable glass wear, air compressors, and boxes of electronic components, that students were allowed to use virtually without supervision. Companies thought nothing of giving their surplus equipment to the school, they did not worry about the horrible dangers the students were being exposed to.
While still in high school I got a job doing electronics assembly and Basic programming. I had to use a dangerous soldering iron, was exposed to dangerous toxic lead solder, dangerous pointy bits of wire, used a dangerous drill press, had unsupervised access to an expensive easily messed up PDP-8, and used without a nearby adult, low and high voltage power supplies and tested the circuits I built with a Tektronics scope worth thousands of dollars without an adult standing by.
I was around lab animals without adult supervision.
I started by talking my way into a lab, was shown how to do stuff and turned loose to sink or swim. After awhile they started giving me money in return for the stuff I was doing for them.
That could never happen now, letting a kid have real responsibility around real tools with sharp edges, around real animals that could bite if not treated with respect and caution, to hire a 16 year old to build custom electronic devices for sale to other labs and doctors offices. When I screwed up I experienced real physical (sore cut and bruised fingers) or real financial (having to work off the components I fried) consequences.

Recently, I offered paper models to a friend for his children. They were turned down, as they were "difficult" and might frustrate them.
A colleague's mother was boasting about her kids computer skills, they have some "edu-toys" that let them push buttons that make lights flash. The "edu-toy" is just like the Skinner boxes for lab monkeys that I built and helped program when when I only slightly older than the kids in question.
I had a Mom go nearly ballistic when I gave her kid a small tool set for Christmas. Too dangerous. I still use and treasure the socket wrenches my late uncle gave me when I was a child, though I did have to add a set of metric adaptors to it. I learned how to take my bicycle apart with it and clean and grease the hub.
I carried a pocket knife to school, and used it to make things, so did a lot of my friends, now we would be hauled off in cuffs by a squad of police, expelled, be undergoing psychiatric evaluation and permanently branded as dangers to society. Whittling a toy boat between classes is now considered an anti social, criminal activity.
Erector sets once had electric real motors that plugged into the wall, They got hot and had gears that could pinch fingers, and could deliver a nasty shock. They had small pointy parts with sharp edges. They were fun.

Once upon a time there were chemistry sets with real chemicals that let you do interesting things. You could buy real pyrex glassware and burners at a hobby shop. You could buy more chemicals without parental permission a hobby shop, or drug store, or at a supply house either in person or by mail.
No one at the supply houses thought anything of a ten year old walking his bike up to the front counter and buying an ounce or two of nitrates or permanganates. Now no one would dare allow their child to ride his bike by himself across town to the low rent districts where the surplus stores and supply houses clustered. And no one would take the time to answer a kid's questions or walk him through the process of placing a small order for parts or chemicals, or take him behind the counter into the warehouse to show off "the good stuff".

I did an afternoon of child wrangling a while back. I had not realized I was not supposed to let the kids play in the dirt in the back yard. Their mom had very mixed feelings: she was peeved because her kids were grubby and tired, but they were also much much happier than they had been in a long time and very exited about the bugs they had seen and touched, and the leaves and twigs they had collected, and the holes they had dug and filled with water. Somehow they had had a great afternoon, without an edu-toy or a deliberately structured edu-experience.
I only wish I had had a little more time to utterly corrupt them with a Fiddlers Green or Canon model, a pair of scissor and a bottle of Elmer's.

[whulsey]

John, you're probably preaching to the choir here; especially since I grew up on a farm. But with that can I get a loud "AMEN!"

[hawkman67]

Hear, Hear, John;
I feel myself it is a sad turn of events that you have described, I grew up a lot like you did... erector sets, very fun chemistry sets, and Lionel trains, and many other things people now adays freak out about.. I got lucky and both of my sons are into models, making things from scraps and other junk and they are certainly not afraid to get dirty or wet. Heck our driveway still has tiny trenches for their green army men. Last year I was able to intro my youngest son's class to card models during the 3 day WW2 field trip, FG models were a lot of fun for those kids..
Jeff

[Mr. Hawley]

I don't have any kids of my own but am very happy that both my sister and her husband have the same "grew up on a farm" working class background because I don't have to worry about catching hell when my 15 year old Nephew goes home from Uncle's house with scrapes and grease from working on cars and tractors.

He and I built a Jacob's ladder (see Spark Gap and Jacob's ladder) for his school science fair. They made him take it home, he couldn't even display it unplugged. WTF?!?

[SCEtoAUX]

Yep, I used to crawl around in the chicken yard picking up and eating stuff. Us kids later on had a favorite swimming hole in a creek that probably worked as a dumping ground for the city sewer. We would go to contsruction sites and get the left over and discarded bits of metal and wood and make all kinds of toys out of them. We all survived to adulthood and did not get as sick as the kids now seem to get. Sure, I had a broken arm and some fingers, and a few stubbed big toes from all of the cwrap we used to get into, but it was all part of the learning experience.

[ct ertz]

This is one thing that does get me bent a bit about cub scouts. They do regulate the heck out of fun. I agree with John so much here. I was born in 71 and I carried a lock blade pocket knife from age seven on. Also carried a Swiss Army Knife during my high school years as well. Dirt is fun. Sticks and rocks. These things are needed in a kids life. Did I sometimes get hurt. Hmm, let me see? Like maybe when I forgot to tighten the bolts on my bikes front wheel after changing a flat by myself, then trying out the plywood ramp! Of coarse I got hurt. You know what, I never forgot to tighten a loose bolt again though! I was encouraged to do things myself. I went crabbing off the piers in Washington State when I was 12. I also went clamming, and picked buckets of black berries. In Long Beach I used to catch lizards when I was seven or eight.

My kids do more then most, as I want then to grow up with a good degree of practical knowledge. My youngest has been shooting from his sixth birthday on. All my kids can blast a watermelon size target from 30 yards with an old cap and ball pistol and all have gone camping, fishing and so on. All of the boys are capable of using my exacto knives with out drawing (too much) blood. I fear that they are in more danger when they have friends around that have grown up in a bubble wrapped environment.

CT

[Yale]

These memories resonate with me, too. Nobody thought that there was anything wrong about drawing pictures of guns -- this merely reflected boys' natural interests. Far from being dangerous alternatives to scissors, X-Acto knives were considered safer tools than razor blades for building model planes of balsa or plastic. (Even so, my fingerprints resemble fault lines in geologic strata.) In the 1960s, Washington High School (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) even had a rifle club, with its own range and several .22s. Many friends and I were amateur spelunkers in caves near Dubuque, so we had carbide lamps for our helmets. Yet today, the government has declared calcium carbide to be a dangerous explosive -- prohibitively complicated for ordinary folks to obtain.

As posts in this forum are not supposed to be political, we cannot rant much here. I'll merely point out that once you accept the idea that government is supposed to keep us safe from all possible harm, all the excesses of this thread become natural, if not inevitable. Perhaps more seriously, rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. The more willing citizens are to turn over such fundamental responsibilities as home safety to the government, the more traditional rights the government will take away.

[Darwin]

John, welcome to the home of the regulated and the home of the timid. Stick a fork in this country.....it's done....and we have nothing but our generation to blame for having allowed the frog to boil. I've advised my kids to learn Chinese and how to kowtow...those are skills they are going to need in the coming Brave New World. Your posting hit particularly close to home....my grandson's 12th birthday is coming up, and I was thinking of asking my daughter if it would be ok to send him a set of hobby tools. Screw it...I'm going down to the store and buy him the biggest Xacto tool set I can find and send it to him....may even include an entry-level Dremel set.

[whulsey]

Now that's the right attitude, Darwin.

From having worked in and around hobby shops for many years I saw many times were a kid was just begging for a model. But mom didn't want any glue or paint in the house; and would it help get into a better school to make more money or status; and you don't want to get your hands dirty like those low class people that have to work with theirs. And the biggie: That's something your -fill in blank- dad (now ex) would do, no way.

Don't have any solutions and once again as Darwin mentioned we have our generation to blame for a lot of it. Most wanted their kids to have more, bigger, better and safer that they didn't really get to be grubby, noisey, curious kids.

[ct ertz]

"grubby, noisey, curious kids." Sound like my three youngest boys! I must be on the right track.