Dangerous things (parents should let their kids do)

Play with a pocket knife. Break glass. Throw things from a moving car. Drive a nail. Find a beehive. Glue your fingers together with superglue.

Gever Tulley

Gever Tulley

Many parents would forbid their kids from doing these activities. They’d keep the superglue locked in a box where little fingers could never find it.

But Gever Tulley thinks these are exactly the sorts of things children should be doing (with adult guidance and supervision, of course). From these “dangerous” experiences, Tulley says, children learn how the world works. They learn about safety and how to assess risk. They gain responsibility.

Tulley feels so strongly that children should have the opportunity to discover the world that he wrote a book with his wife, Julie Spiegler. Released last month, “50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)” features easy-to-follow instructions for “dangerous” activities parents can do with their kids such as licking a battery, which is a great activity because the little jolt you’ll feel leads in to a lesson about shock and electric currents.

“It’s a guidebook for overprotective parents,” says Tulley, who lives with his wife in Montara, just north of Half Moon Bay. “It will help them think more rationally about danger and risk. And it’s also a source book for adventurous parents who are looking for new things to do with their kids.”

Tulley got the idea to write the book through his work at the Tinkering School, a sleep-over camp for kids that he founded in 2002. In the summer, 16 lucky kids get to build stuff on a farm owned by the University of California in Half Moon Bay. They do all sorts of dangerous things, pounding nails, bending wires, playing with electricity.

Kids having fun in one of their creations at the Tinkering School.

“We’re sort of famous for the roller-coaster we built the first year,” Tulley says. “We used 120 feet of track and on the last day of camp parents and kids rode in it. We have built sailboats, cars, a hang glider.”

Tulley is opening schools in Seattle and Baltimore. He has also heard from people in Dubai and Belgium who want to open Tinkering Schools. Last year, he left his job at Adobe to focus on the school and the book.

Tulley also got inspiration from his childhood growing up in Mendocino. He and his big brother were free to explore their environment and invent their own projects in the wide-open rural environs.

Tulley worries that today’s parents don’t give their children enough freedom. He recently had a conversation with a mother who wouldn’t allow her child to ride his bike on the street in front of their home in the suburbs. The mom drove her son to a “safe” empty parking lot on weekends where he could ride.

“Kids needs to experience that sense of freedom and entitlement you get when you leave the driveway on your bike and go on an adventure,” Tulley says. “Today’s parents are propagating this fear-based culture where they scold each other for letting their kids do dangerous things.”

5 dangerous things you can do at home with your kids

Here’s a sampling of a few “dangerous” things Tulley recommends parents let their children try. Of course, he means with appropriate adult supervision and instruction. The idea is that through these experiences parents will be given the opportunity to teach their children about safety–so kids don’t sneak off later in life and experiment with things in an unsafe way, i.e., light the neighbor’s house on fire.

1) Play with fire. “Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child’s personal history,” says Tulley. “It’s the first time we get control of one of these mysterious things. And the open pit fire is a laboratory. By playing with fire, children learn about about ‘intake,’ ‘combustion,’ ‘exhaust.’ Fire stimulates the imagination and kids who play with it keep thinking of new ways to experiment with it. It creates a wonderful context for self-directed learning.”

2) Throw rocks. “Our brains are wired for throwing things,” Tulley says. “And like muscles if you don’t use parts of your brain they tend to atrophy over time. When you exercise them any given muscle adds strength to the whole system and that applies to the brain. Children need to practice throwing things because it activates the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, which help with visual acuity, 3-D understanding, reasoning and structural problem-solving. Throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skills, so it’s good for whole-body training.”

“You learn from each toss,” Tulley adds. “Each toss teaches you about the physics of rocks and their trajectory. And you gain a basic understanding of distance, which later in life helps you estimate how far it is from here to there.”

3) Deconstruct appliances. “Children grow up with these magical boxes all around them,” Tulley explains. “The dishwasher washes dishes. The microwave cooks thing. By taking the appliances apart, kids realize that these things weren’t built by magic. They were built by people. Even if they don’t know what all the individual parts are, they can puzzle out what they might be for. They get a sense that they can take things apart and no matter how complex the thing is they can understand parts of it. They gain a sense of knowability–that something is knowable.”

4) Drive a car. Many parents keep their kids away from the driver’s seat for fear they might take the car for a spin before they turn 16. But Tulley argues that allowing their kids to drive–in a big empty parking lot with an adult–helps them realize just what a big responsibility it is to be behind the wheel. It also sates their desire to drive. He also says, “Driving a car is an empowering act for a young child. It gives them a handle on the world in a way that they don’t often have access to.” Tulley says that kids as young as 5 or 6 can sit in their parents lap and pull out of the driveway.

5) Put strange stuff in the microwave. “Every day you do a scientific experiment in your kitchen,” Tulley says. “You put stuff in the microwave and ding! your food is cooked. But no one ever thinks about what a microwave is and how it works. By experimenting with it, children learn boundaries for what’s safe and not safe to put in the microwave.”

But what strange stuff should you stick in there? Tulley recommends a CD, which is a thin piece of foil wrapped in layers of plastic. You place it on a paper towel and run the microwave for 3 seconds. “It creates a spark pattern for one second,” Tulley says. “It’s a beautiful visualization for why you shouldn’t put metal in the microwave.”

Another fun experiment: Slice a grape partially in half, so it opens like a book. Zap it for 3 seconds on full power, and you’ll see a beautiful and very safe arc of electricity form between the two halves.

What dangerous things did you do as a child? What did you learn from these activities? Do you let your kids do things that most parents would deem unsafe?

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Amy Graff