Juvenile risk homeostasis

“I was climbing on the outside.” A girl told me this about my son as he was leaving the play area of ​​the fast food restaurant. My first instinct, which I followed, was to tell Tommy we weren’t coming here anymore. This didn’t cause him much dismay, but I kept thinking about it later.

Let’s put aside the obvious fact that I have a responsibility in this matter, being the father who did not supervise his 8-year-old son on the playground. It’s about Tommy’s behavior. I want my children to get along with other people, to enjoy life, to obey the rules, to think for themselves … but it occurs to me that wanting them to obey the rules and think for themselves must create a conflict constant.

It would be easy enough to put all the emphasis on following the rules. Rules can be measured, so accountability is pretty easy. However, if we are perfectly successful in training our children to follow the rules, they will always depend on a system in which the rules are clear, fair, and applied correctly. I have tended to prefer a model in which children use their best judgment and treat others as they would like to be treated. This works well in most situations, but of course it depends on the children acting with good judgment, which is not guaranteed.

Here’s where the confusion comes in: Tommy probably knew he was breaking a rule by climbing around the outside of the playing venue. However, it was not causing any harm that was obvious to him. I can see that by behaving like this, I could encourage other children to do the same, and someone could get hurt or the parents could be inconvenienced. I think I would like my son to be more cautious. “Ask for forgiveness, no permission” may be an impractical concept to teach your children, but if they can already practice it with some subtlety, it may be best not to discourage it entirely.

Children learn things by doing and discover their limits by testing them. If their only opportunities to play are on playgrounds designed by lawyers, they won’t learn much. These playgrounds typically invite more aggressive play than their design intended. Playing outside or jumping is the way children have fun when the planned activities are too safe and sterile. The term for this behavior is “risk homeostasis.”

Risk homeostasis describes normal human behavior with respect to risk. To summarize, accidents don’t decrease when you design things to be “safer”, they stay more or less the same. When the roads widen, people drive faster. When playgrounds are safer, children will find new ways to test their limits. I am not prepared to destroy this instinct in my children. I will explain to Tommy why that behavior was appropriate in that setting and hope that he will make good decisions in similar situations in the future.

With these things in mind, I let my kids and their friends walk around our recently frozen pond. Water in North Carolina rarely freezes enough to walk, so we weren’t sure what was going to happen. However, our pond is only about 3-4 feet deep in the center and less on the sides. I was prepared for the children to fall. They were excited for the opportunity to walk on ice; it cracked and gave in places, and they were able to experience its relative strength and weakness. They trampled on it and, at times, it pierced their foot. Nobody fell, but we were prepared for that to happen.

The children have learned something through experience and I have gained something even more valuable: when I tell them that something is too dangerous, they will take me seriously because I do not tell them that all.