Are Trees Too Dangerous for Kids These Days?

School inspectors have decided that a child care facility in Moorsetown, NJ is just too dangerous to let well enough alone. The danger is not in water quality or lax staff background checks. The threat can be found in the playground.

Specifically, they've ordered any tree with branches below 7.5 feet from the ground to be removed. The inspectors have decided that these branches are a danger to children who might run into or trip over them. It's a piece of logic that makes about as much sense as a set of two-foot-tall monkey bars.

Set aside the fact that New Jersey does not, in fact, have children so tall they are in danger of tripping over a branch five feet off the ground, and you still have the obvious objection: We're talking about trees.

Childhood and tree-play has gone together since time immemorial. We have nursery rhymes that place babies in treetops. This order is another in a long line of parental friendly-fire decisions that would damage a natural resource for the sake of perceived caution.

For the children's sake, sign this petition telling the Supervisor of the Child Care Quality Assurance Inspections at the New Jersey Office of Licensing to chill out.

Free, child-driven play is so essential to the development of our children that, as reported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, "it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child." If given the proper freedom to explore their environment, children develop the ability to work in groups, share, negotiate, resolve conflict, and overcome challenges. Even, or perhaps especially, children who are bombarded with what the AAP calls "enrichment activies" need time for creative growth, self-reflection, and decompression. To deny children this chance begs the question: When else will they have a chance to explore themselves, each other, and their environment.

KaBOOM! is the organization that started the petition for this article. Founded by Darell Hammond to provide a play area to every child in the US, KaBOOM! offers a product called the Imagination Playground; it comes in a set of unfolding boxes that reveals interconnected, foam pieces. Kids can take these and arrange them in any shape or structure they like. It's brilliant, but the true stars of the Imagination Playground are the same elemental materials that have unlocked childhood imagination forever—water and sand.

What more elemental tool than sticks is there? While they may provide a tripping hazard, without them no child would have a scepter, wand, or fishing pole. What was baseball before it was a multi-billion dollar industry? I rest my case.

In her popular book of parenting heresies, Free-Range Kids, Lenore Skenazy proposes that children are in no less danger today than they were fifty years ago, and in fact may be safer (cell phones, vaccines, television). It may just be, as she suggests, that children are a little too safe. True, she was speaking to a suburban setting, and there is all manner of well and ravine for children to plummet into in the country; but perhaps if they learn how to navigate nature's obstacle course they might not be so prone to suggest clear-cutting it when they get older.

And they may even have fun in the process.

Please support these children and their right to behave like monkeys (or wizards). Sign the petition, and pass it on.

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Photo Credit: pupismyname