Taking Risks...

An article on children's playtime caught my attention this morning. An experiment in Australia brought on by the ridiculous expense of updating playground equipment due to safety regulations and liability concerns led some schools to agree to an experiment that took the "rules" out of the playground. What they discovered was when kids were free to explore, the boredom and constriction that led to bad behavior and bullying all but disappeared. To quote the article:

     AUT professor of public health Grant Schofield, who worked on the research project, said there are too many rules in modern playgrounds.
     "The great paradox of cotton-woolling children is it's more dangerous in the long-run."
     Society's obsession with protecting children ignores the benefits of risk-taking, he said.
Children develop the frontal lobe of their brain when taking risks, meaning they work out consequences. "You can't teach them that. They have to learn risk on their own terms. It doesn't develop by watching TV, they have to get out there."
    The research project morphed into something bigger when plans to upgrade playgrounds were stopped due to over-zealous safety regulations and costly play equipment.
     "There was so many ridiculous health and safety regulations and the kids thought the static structures of playgrounds were boring."

Aside from the obvious lessons to all of us in trying to control our environments so rigidly that our children/youth never learn anything, I wondered what it challenges us to do and be in our practice of faith.

If we are so "rule-conscious" that we cannot allow people to experiment, to make life and faith their own, do we just wind up with religious bullies and non-participation?

And on the other side, I am entranced with the "loose-parts pit," a pile of wood, tires, old fire hose, and other junk with which the children play and imagine, construct and…learn.

The participation in practices of faith, worship, prayer, the study of scripture, the faith community, living generous, fearless lives, all these things are the loose-parts pit of our lives of faith. We don't have to do away with them, but we do have to sometimes put the loose parts in a pile and let folks experiment with how they work and what value they have.

Sometimes the experiments will certainly fail. We learned rather quickly as kids that using ripe persimmons as war weaponry was only good when the "other" was hit. The mess was just gross, not worth the payoff. So we found other ways to play. We discovered through trial and error that you couldn't roller skate on a gravel road and that eating Nandina berries was not a smart move.

So I wonder if we shouldn't stop "cotton-wooling" our faith practices. Like most seven to ten year olds on a playground, I doubt if we have the power or intellect to destroy the world of faith that God has created. And we might just make room for the Holy Spirit to bring some new life and new ideas into our practice.

Here's to the "loose-parts" pit.  Ready. Set. Go!