Turning America's suburbs into 'playborhoods' for kids to cope with fear

2016-10-25T13:31:00-04:00

They were living in San Francisco, but they wanted to move out of the city to a playborhood — a version of American kid life featured in shows like “The Little Rascals” and “Leave It to Beaver,” in which kids build forts and ride bikes outside, unsupervised — free, skirting danger, but ultimately always lucky. [...] Dangerous play is how kids learn how to titrate fear. [...] “If the instinct wasn’t of evolutionary benefit, the behavior would have been rooted out.”

This piece is ostensibly about parenting, and one Silicon Valley-dad who is trying to teach (and trust) his kids to take physical risks. But in defiance of the "helicopter parent" method, Mark Laska, the piece's subject dad, elects to modify his own environment rather than coaching his individual kids. He changes his home, yard and (he hopes) his city to create environments that all kids can learn test their own limits in—without parents presence, but with their parents' trust.

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Turning America's suburbs into 'playborhoods' for kids to cope with fear