Today's lesson: testing physical limits

While supervising my son on a playground designed for toddlers, he was playing alongside a friend who is also a confident crawler. Wait, crawler? Yes, two confident crawlers were getting on to every part of the climbing structure designed for beginning climbers and confident walkers while their mothers hovered using the best of their abilities to prevent a trip, fall, and/or tumble. Thankfully, it never happened, but as we watched we discussed the potential dangers of this confident mobility and the chaos and ouchies that are sure to ensue once the dreaded next step in mobility occurs. To quote my friend, "walk is a four letter word in our house." My son's friend had a teeny owie so then we discussed teeny owies, which lead me to reminisce about my BIG owies I witnessed as a preschool teacher. Children are constantly testing their physical limits...they have a sense of invincibility and as babies have 100% trust that even when their caregiver is out of arms reach, if they fall or get stuck, that caregiver's arms will magically grow and save them immediately. They cannot fall because their caregiver would never let that happen and can defy all physical limits to prevent ANY physical harm, and so they push their bodies to it's absolute limit to learn what it is currently capable of, to find out what else it can do, to figure out what they need to do in order to achieve their next physical goal, to develop confidence, to build socialization foundations, and observe cause and effect relationships. In order to do all of that they will climb up pseudo-rock walls, go head first down slides, go up and down stairs, climb up slides, find the smallest crevice possible and squeeze into it, crawl/walk/run through tubes and molded cut outs in the climbing structure, and they will swing as high as they can. They are not doing it to give their caregiver a hear attack or to turn his/her hair gray or to test him/her. They test their physical limits to learn. Best way to learn about and understand physics. When your little thumps down at the bottom of a slide and then tries the big slide and thumps a little harder on to the rubber/sand/tan bark padded surface, they've just learned that F=ma. Oftentimes there will be teeny owies that a little soap and water won't fix. There will even be a good amount of bandaid-worthy owies. Every once an while there may be alarming owies that causes both caregiver and child to take pause and rethink a plan of action. And rarely, and for some never, there will be ambulance calling/ER visiting owies that result in stitches or a cast. Our job as caregivers is to let a child learn. There has been a movement lately towards sacrificing the learning opportunity for the sake of possibly preventing what maybe could have been an action that maybe could have caused an owie. I'm all about hovering; the younger they are, the closer the hovering is required, but not to the point of sacrificing the learning experience of testing physical limits and maybe even one day becoming the next great physicist. It all starts on the playground.