A Detroit area park recently shut down a slicky-slide, a very large slide, because kids were flying up into the air due to hitting the humps in the slide at high speeds.
We’d have loved this as kids. The higher you went, the more thrilled you’d be. The fear factor was a big part of that enjoyment.
Not this time. Society’s changed. We have helicopter and lawnmower parents who’d wrap their kids in Bubble Wrap if they could.
Did we even hear of bike helmets, much less wear them? And we were gone on our bikes all day in the summer. All over town, on good roads and bad, we were adventurous and unprotected.
And you know what? We survived.
We climbed trees, ate sour green apples, jumped off the high dive, rode sleds down roadways in the winter and much more. We always kept a kid or two at the bottom of the road to warn us of any oncoming traffic, warnings we hoped didn’t come after we had started down the hill.
In calls to the show this week city-raised kids told me tales of kids jumping from one rooftop to another in their adventures.
We played hide and seek after dark and “Army” in the woods. We played tackle football with the bigger kids and basketball on outdoor blacktop courts. Only the bravest of us took a charge in those conditions.
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Kids raised in Florida talked of navigating the rivers and the ocean for hours at a time. Others talked of makeshift go-karts or other “rides” that were not built to anyone’s safety specifications. Some even made their own fireworks.
We made potato cannons out of Pringles tubes and chemicals that built up pressure under the right conditions, which we were happy to create. The potatoes or tennis balls would deter those “attacking” our kid-made forts.
More than once I lost valuable skin on my knees and hands wrecking my bicycle by riding off a hill down a dirt road that would be more accurately described as one with major rock hazards.
We swung on rope swings that were mostly well affixed to the sturdy tree in the back yard. We jumped with little to no concern of injury.
We didn’t have video games and may not have even been allowed in the house on good weather days. The woods we played in had snakes and maybe other potentially dangerous creatures lurking about, but we didn’t care … unless we saw one.
At the playground, we’d swing as high as the swing would go, often rocking the set’s legs out of the ground. We’d see just how fast that merry-go-round would go and jump off seeing how far we’d go! Our slides were not as big as the one in Detroit, but we’d do what we could to make the trip as fast as it could be. We only wished for humps in it that would toss us into the air.
Maybe the Detroit kids feel the same way, but they aren’t getting that chance, and maybe that’s a good, safe thing. But it’s surely different.
Kids may still be kids, but are they having as much fun as we had?
Let’s talk after they bring back monkey bars.
Bill Mick is program director and host of “Bill Mick Live” on WMMB-AM. Read more at billmick.com. Support local journalism and become a subscriber. Support local journalism and become a subscriber. Visit floridatoday.com/subscribe
