Analysis Of The Overprotected Kid Hannah Rosin

Do you remember being a child and playing on the playground? Was your parent always close by and did you feel safe? According to Hannah Rosin’s article, “The Overprotected Kid,” some people believe having caring parents and playing on a safe playground is having a negative effect on the children by making them weak with little confidence. I think parents should be involved in our lives, as well as trying their best to keep us safe.

In “The Overprotected Kid”, Rosin states that throughout the years the guidelines for playgrounds put into place by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission have gotten stricter with each year passing. Theodora Sweeney and his consultant, Joe Frost, are two men who are passionate about playground safety and

The “Handbook for Public Playground Safety” was published in 1981 in correspondence with the federal governments research. The Land is a playground that was created to go against playground guidelines. However, I think the idea of allowing children to use their imagination is good. I like that the children can run around and have free will to change the way the playground looks, but I think it should be safer. By safe I mean not having the children jump around on dirty mattresses, or being allowed to play with fire. Just because the likelihood of a child getting hurt is minimal, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. I also think the location of The Land should not be right next to a creek. The fact that the children can rope swing across the water blows my mind. There is always a chance that one of them could drown there, and I don’t think there is enough supervision around for then to be able to rope swing across. When I was about seven years old, we had a big playground at my school that was supervised by three women who stood around in one

The Land appears to be muddy and old, with slopes all over. Even Gideon, Rosin’s five-year-old son asks, “Is this a junkyard?” (Rosin 76). The Land is made up of mountains of tires, broken chairs, wooden pallets, filthy mattresses, and chaos. The children there run free with little adult supervision. The Land is only supervised by “playworkers”, who watch over the children when the parents are gone but only intervene when absolutely necessary. However, to the playworkers, even the kids starting fires isn’t reason enough to intervene. There is also a creek nearby that the children can rope swing over onto the other side. I feel like the objective of The Land is to prove a point: that kids can have more risky playgrounds and be okay. In the article, it states that “in the two years since its opened, no one has been injured outside of the occasional scraped knee” (Rosin 77). Obviously when you show the statistics of only one playground, the probability of a child getting hurt will be low. If you were to compare that to a much larger scale I’m sure the number would increase greatly. When you’re young, you have a wild imagination and don’t pay attention to how “boring” your playground is. Lady Marjory Allen was claims that playgrounds are “asphalt squares” with “a few pieces of mechanical equipment” (Rosin 77). In the eyes of an adult, sure a playground may seem boring,