Gever Tulley Quotes

Children can only learn to take responsibility when given a chance to assess and mitigate risk for themselves.

Avoiding guilt is not the same as making rational decisions.

The more opportunities we have, the more likely we are to be able to handle the unexpected.

Tiny risks are a part of life and most of them can be further reduced (or virtually eliminated) by the simple application of common sense.

Violent crime is at an all-time low in our country, yet numerous studies show that crime is a significant portion of news coverage. By some accounts, violent crime constitutes just 3% of reported criminal activity, yet is responsible for as much as 43% of news coverage. To make matters worse, a survey of news stories about children revealed that 48% were in the context of violent crime7. This pathological fear-mongering on the part of the networks creates the impression that we live in a dangerous world.

Exploring the dangerous margins of creativity is as essential as the safe, frequented center.

Like learning to tie your shoes or dress yourself, learning to be responsible for yourself is one of the things kids are supposed to do while they are still kids.

Children who are protected from every possible source of danger never learn to deal with risk. Lenore Skenazy puts it this way, “If kids never encounter even tiny risks, they never develop that thing we call common sense.

When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be.

Send your kid to a summer camp focused on free play. One such place is Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School—a sleepover summer camp in Half Moon Bay, California (half an hour south of San Francisco, on the Pacific coast). • Consider schools that value student-driven learning and play, such as Montessori schools, which exist nationwide. 10.

One such place is Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School—a sleepover summer camp in Half Moon Bay, California (half an hour south of San Francisco, on the Pacific coast).

The Tinkering School. More of a lab than a school, this summer program, created by computer scientist Gever Tulley, lets children from seven to seventeen play around with interesting stuff and build cool things.

Licking a 9-volt battery, learning to whittle, riding a bicycle, climbing trees: we may not see these as necessities like learning to read and write (until you need to make a marshmallow roasting stick or escape a mad dog); however, they are some of the thousands of experiences that build self-confidence and make up a life lived fully. It’s tempting to let our fears keep us from allowing children to have these kinds of experiences, but as parents and caretakers we need to confront our biases just as kids need to face their own challenges.

As individuals, and as a society, we can choose to take responsibility for ourselves. In doing so we have to accept that sometimes when things go wrong, it is just an accident. In order to change how we lay blame, we’re going to have to change our over-protective habits; children can only learn to take responsibility when given a chance to assess and mitigate risk for themselves.

The best reason to examine the pervasive influence of dangerism is to ensure we aren’t hindering our children’s development by limiting their experiences in the name of keeping them safe. This is becoming an increasingly complex world; we need bold, creative, independent thinkers and explorers who are able to overcome the unknown challenges they will face as they invent the future for themselves.

Christie Barnes13 has surveyed what parents are most worried about14: Kidnapping School Snipers Terrorists Dangerous Strangers Drugs Scary stuff. And all of these things have happened at some time; in every case it is a real tragedy that should not be trivialized. Now, compare that list to what is actually hurting and killing children: Car Accidents Homicide (almost two-thirds of the time by a parent) Abuse (more than two-thirds of the time by a family member) Suicide Drowning These are real, sobering problems. Each of them equally as tragic as any on the first list, but each of them is orders of magnitude more likely. Why is there no overlap between what parents fear most and the things that are actually harming children? The real danger here is that most of the time spent talking to children about stranger-danger (almost 40 hours by they time they graduate high school) would be better spent teaching them to swim and having them walk to school.

Lick a 9-Volt Battery” was chosen as the first topic in Fifty Dangerous Things because we thought that most parents would have already done it, and they would feel comfortable guiding their children through the experience. And what simpler way to give an intuitive sense of electricity than experiencing that tingle-in-the-tongue firsthand?