Author: Ariana Peters

I skipped through a lot of this book. Just sort of reading some of the section headings and a few sentences here and there. I thought it was pretty dry. But that could be because a lot of the information I feel like I already read in “There’s no such thing as bad weather”.

But there was a lot of good information and some very interesting things. I found it really interesting where they talked about how many teachers now have to tell kids no to so many things on the playground that they can’t do anything during recess. There was a teacher in New Zealand who decided to get rid of all the rules for recess and just let the kids go wild like they used to and they saw a bullying go down, concentration go up, etc

Another thing that was really interesting and I saw translated to our real life is talking about how kids used to play in the early 1900s and even late 90s and how strong the kids were because they weren’t restricted to what they could do on playgrounds or at recess and they were climbing on top of things, around things, swinging, and going crazy. I actually had a mom in my son’s gymnastics class, be somewhat amazed at how strong my son is. And how his gross motor skills are so well developed for a two and a half year old. And I think that’s because we don’t restrict his play. We let him climb on things we let him run around. We let him be crazy. We try and do it as safely as possible but we do not restrict or overly helicopter parent.

I do see how in America we have become more and more restrictive on what we deem safe for our children. And as a mom, I absolutely understand that it’s a balance between raining in my own fear and keeping them safe. We’ve also become a very litigious society which makes it so difficult for caregivers to give children that freedom to be children and run around and climb and jump and bounce and be crazy.

It’s overall I found it to be a very dry book and I skipped and jumped through a lot of it. But I think it’s definitely worth parents taking a peek at it and maybe doing the same kind of skipping, jumping, and stopping and reading where you are interested and skipping the parts that you find boring or redundant.