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I have been writing recently about why children need risk. In The Sunday Times (4 July 2010) there was an article about an interesting aspect of this. Two parents had decided to let their children, aged 8 and 5, cycle to school alone. They live in Dulwich. They were cycling along pavements and only crossed one road, with [...] My last two columns for Nursery World have been about why children need to experience risky and challenging play. In January 2010 I went to a seminar about the importance of adventurous play at the Nursery World Show. The speaker, Helen Tovey, explained the theory; if children are not exposed to risk, they cannot learn how to [...] For three days last week my son B (3) was ill. Nothing serious, he was bright in himself, but enough to keep him from his mornings at nursery. Apart from the school runs that top and tail the day, I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t go outside the village boundary. That might sound limiting, [...] It’s typical of my over-active mind that a five minute ponder about where we could possibly fit in any new toys the children might be given at Christmas has turned into an analytical self-questioning blog! The day after I’d stood in the boys’ room wondering how I could shuffle things around to make more space, I [...] In his book Superpowers for Parents (click here for my review), Dr Stephen Briers writes “The pace of our modern world conditions our children to expect everything instantly…most children play computer games that deliver a rapid succession of satisfying “hits” in return for very little sustained effort. One drawback of this is that today’s children [...] Following on from my frustrations about my eldest son not playing independently, I tried a little experiment. The idea was to encourage him to push the physical rather than verbal boundaries. I sent him, B and a friend off into the field next to our house; the challenge, to pick blackberries. I was not completely [...] A recurring theme in my thoughts is why my eldest child is not good at playing by himself – it’s something I’ve written about before in The Shame of a Modern Parent. “My Bob used to be out in the garden all day at his age, I had to call him in for his dinner” someone [...] Last night I was reading a section in Steve Biddulph’s “Raising Boys” titled “Why boys scuffle and fight”. The answer is testosterone. “There’s no doubt it causes energetic and boisterous behaviour…Boys feel insecure and in danger if there isn’t enough structure in a situation…they begin jostling with each other to establish the pecking order.” This [...] We have been lent some garden toys by a friend who’s having an extension done and can’t currently use them in their garden. They arrived at the weekend, a slide and a plastic caterpillar tunnel. B, the three year old, immediately climbed on top of the tunnel and said “it’s a pirate ship” and the [...] |
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