There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge)

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

from a tree. Ironically, in a time when our children are statistically safer and more secure than ever, removing all perceivable risk from their lives has become a mainstream parenting strategy. Human ecology researcher Ebba Lisberg Jensen at Malmö University believes the anxiety over so-called risky play is a result of the fact that society has become so safe and secure. “The safety becomes a little bit of a trap. We want more and more safety, and it’s just never safe enough. This is what we call ‘care anxiety,’” she says. “Once you’ve secured your children’s safety, you somehow feel like you’ve succeeded, and that in turns creates positive reinforcement.”

“If every surface around a climbing structure is soft and spongy, it gives children a false message that they can fall and they may climb higher than they actually should. They don’t learn how to assess risk,” she says about the ever-stricter safety regulations for playgrounds. “As a culture, we don’t trust our children at all—we basically live their lives for them. Up until age seven or eight they’re so bubble-wrapped and helicoptered that they don’t get to practice any of their physical skills, and now there’s huge fallout. Public kindergarten teachers are reporting that kids don’t even have the hand strength to hold a pencil. Eighteen-year-olds are in physical therapy because they don’t have any upper-body strength. It’s shocking.”