Tobogganing a target of the risk-averse bubble-wrap generation

When I was a kid in Calgary, we used to toboggan on a tall, steep hill behind the neighbourhood public school. The slope had been terraced in two places, creating a couple of thrilling little jumps, especially the lower one, because you’d build up a lot of speed by then.

It was fun catching big air, especially if there was more than one person on the sled and you were really moving, but spills were inevitable. I remember slamming down hard once, slightly off balance. I banged my tailbone hard and then pitched forward, slashing my lip on the front of the toboggan.

I limped home to relative parental indifference. No one called the school board to complain the hill was a death trap, or a lawyer to initiate a negligence suit.

But those were different times. My best friend and I both had .22-calibre rifles we’d take to a gravel pit to shoot at tin cans. We were what they might now call “free-range kids.”

Just how different we were is illustrated by increasing restrictions on tobogganing on public property, especially in the United States.

The National Post reported Monday that several U.S. cities have banned snow sliding in municipal parks. In Canada, Hamilton has had an anti-tobogganing bylaw in place for 15 years, while other Canadian cities, including Ottawa and Toronto, have curtailed where you’re allowed to go sliding.

The restrictions are largely out of concern for legal liability, should someone get hurt. But Hamilton’s ban didn’t stop it from getting sued by a grown man who suffered a crushed vertebrae after he and his wife were thrown from their toboggan when it hit a snow-covered ditch at the bottom of the hill. Ironically, Bruno Uggenti’s kids had just made the same run safely.

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Uggenti claimed he wasn’t aware of the ban and argued the city was still responsible for his injuries. In 2013, he was awarded $900,000. In the ruling, the court said that despite the ban, the city was still obliged to warn law-breakers of the danger from the hidden ditch on the slope they weren’t supposed to be using. Not doing so placed the liability on the city, not Uggenti.

Eliminating risk poses long-term danger

Experts are beginning to argue that this impulse to cocoon ourselves and our offspring in bubble wrap for fear of the consequences is unhealthy and even dangerous in the long term.

“In a sense, we have been sold a risk-averse lifestyle. We insure everything,” says Michael Ungar, a professor at the Dalhousie University School of Social Work who researches resilience.

"There’s this constant gloom and doom, and people aren’t necessarily assessing the real risks either in terms of what really is a risk and what isn’t, or what’s a reasonable amount of risk."

Ungar, whose latest book is I Still Love You: Nine Things Troubled Kids Need From Their Parents, argues it’s potentially damaging to try and minimize the risks children face.

“We’re taking away the opportunity for our kids to develop the competencies that they actually need,” he told Yahoo Canada News.

"That’s the thing that worries me, that if we don’t give them the opportunity to develop those competencies, they don’t magically learn them unless they experience them, especially when the risks are relatively low.”

The tobogganing ban is ridiculous “and yet we’re going progressively in that direction,” he said.

Schoolyard snowball fights are out too, by the way. You could put someone’s eye out. Ungar said he recently spoke to a conference of Ontario high-school principals who couldn’t understand why they should allow such a dangerous pastime.

“I said, ‘don’t you want to teach kids — while there’s adults watching — the difference between a nice, soft, fluffy, fun snowball and an icy, vicious snowball?’“

Maybe parks and yards should be clear-cut of all trees, he suggested.

“A child could climb a tree and fall out,” said Ungar, who has a blog on the Psychology Today site.

Not far off, apparently. A mother in Vaughn, Ont., petitioned to have oak trees near her child’s school cut down because their acorns presented a risk of anaphylactic shock to kids with nut allergies, according to the Globe and Mail.

“It just gets more and more absurd, the examples that we’re pushing towards,” said Ungar.

“Are we giving kids what I’ve called in my books “the risk-taker’s advantage,” this notion that when you’re doing these kinds of activities there’s a lot of intrinsic learning; how to keep yourself safe, how to monitor risk, how to play with others in unstructured play,” he said. “There’s all kinds of things that you’re learning to do.”

[ Related: Parental Fears About Safety Prevent Kids From Being Active Outside: Report ]

It’s so unnecessary, he argues.

The problem of reducing risk can be addressed creatively without battening down every legal hatch.

“There’s a lot of places getting around this,” said Ungar. “The way they’re doing it is they’re working with the insurers to create reasonable-risk experiences.”

For example, Ungar last year blogged about a park in Perth, Australia where officials brought on the city’s insurance underwriter to assess and manage the risks while maintaining the naturalness of the space. For instance, rocks could be no higher than 1.6 metres.

“You can fall and break a leg but you’re not going to kill yourself if you’re a child,” he said.

Make it look difficult but not dangerous

Playground equipment can be designed to test children’s skills and create the appearance of difficulty without being really dangerous.

“Really what Hamilton should have done, rather than shutting down the parks, is taken hay bales and put them at the bottom of all the hills,” said Ungar.

"This is a reasonable thing to do. And you put up signs saying this is good tobogganing, bad tobogganing, something like that.”

As for Mr. Uggenti, a little pre-run recon might have revealed that ditch at the bottom of the hill, he added.

Trying to eliminate risk for kids through structured, closely monitored activities is ultimately futile anyway, Ungar said.

As they grow more independent, children will begin testing their limits, sometimes in really dangerous ways their parents won’t like.

“I would rather a kid go down a toboggan run and build up a really stupid five-foot jump and probably get a little bit bruised up,” Ungar said.

"I would rather a kid have the opportunity to experiment rather than being a 16-year-old who the first time they’re really going to be able to do anything is when they’re driving their father’s car and they’re going to run a red light or drag race or something. That’s not such a stretch in the minds of kids who’ve been over-protected.”

Research has borne this out, he said.

“If we don’t give kids the risk-taker’s advantage in one way, then they will seek it out in others.”