kids need playgrounds dangerous enough to remain challenging

Page 287 kids need playgrounds dangerous enough to remain challenging. People, including children, don’t seek to minimize risk. They seek to optimize it. They drive and walk and love, and play, so that they achieve what they desire, but they push themselves a bit at the same time, too, so they continue to develop. Thus, if things are made too safe, people, including children, start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.

— from The Flight Plan (Purpose/Wisdom/Risk) · 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson

In the book

The opposite error is just as deadly, and quieter: the refusal of all risk, the life spent on the couch avoiding every stress and every pain — which is its own slow way of going down, because a life with all the danger removed is not safe, it is merely unlived. We do it to our children, too, smoothing every playground until it is so safe it can no longer teach them anything, when what they need is ground challenging enough to grow on. And some of us simply keep searching, year after year, for the elusive perfect job, the perfect plan, the perfect moment — until we finally see that the searching itself was the avoidance. — The Flight Plan (Purpose/Wisdom/Risk)

Children are not actually trying to be safe — they are trying to become competent, to triumph over a little danger, which is why a playground has to stay challenging enough to matter. Make things too safe, and children will simply invent new ways to make them dangerous again. So you must let them fail, on occasion — not get hurt, but fail, and feel it, and learn that they can get back up. — Family & Parenting (Family/Parenting)

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