The Pussification of Children - Children Posted by Jeff (Saturday March 01 2003 @ 08:36PM EST)

The efforts of special intrest have combined to make bicycle helmets safer than they were 25 years ago. In the 1970s, dorks wearing helmets were beaten up and their safety hats were taken from them. In an effort to make helmets safer for their own children, these dorks banded to become special interest groups in the late 20th Century. By 1987, dorks began to push efforts to enact bicycle helmet legistation. Laws mandating dorkiness were passed under the guise of decreasing damage as a result of childhood bicycling accidents. It worked. Rather than submit to government enforced embarrassment, children have abandoned their bicycles.1 Fewer riders have resulted in fewer deaths. In response to cool kids popularizing inline skating while rekindling interest in scooters and skateboards, activities for which governments did not originally mandate dorkiness, pressure groups like National SAFE KIDS pushed legislature for compulsory dweebiness in all wheeled sports.2 They can send their children out on scooters covered in armor with a ready excuse for their dorkiness. "It's the law." Plus that phrase is less awkward than, "Daddy thought it would be easier to encase me in plastic rather than take the time to show me how to ride this thing." The scars of youth are not limited to wheels. Smitten by lengthy stints on the bench and stung by ridicule that followed habitual fielding errors, today's special interest group members have enlisted support from the Consumer Product Safety Commission to push for softer balls for youth baseball games without sufficient evidence to back the claim that they are safer.3 Efforts such as the inclusion of softer balls and sticks to place them on have helped to lower the bar for increased participation. The result of more unqualified participants has been, ironically, more injuries on the field.4 But these are injuries that could be avoided through the hardening of body and spirit which was supposed to occur through participation in sports. But games which were designed to stiffen participants for the duress of competition have recently fallen under attack.5 Safety is now an euphemism for dork-friendly. The pussification of wheels has caused enough friction to make it more difficult for kids to congregate. Fewer kids yield fewer opportunities for junior to be bullied. The pussification of sports has driven talent off the field--while increasing the number of also rans--by limiting the rewards associated with the triumph over difficulty. No true athlete wants a shelf full of "Everyone Gets A Trophy Day" trophies anyway. As you watch parents encase their kids in plastic armor, pad their playgrounds and eradicate sports which they percieve dangerous or humilating to losers, i.e., dodge ball, you have to wonder how anyone survived childhood prior to the codifation of pussiness. In the 70s, my friends and I used to skateboard steep grade hills, jump our ten speeds over ramps and throw rocks at each other when boredom needed appeased by some simulated excitement. Yet somehow we managed to emerged from childhood alive. (Occasionally when an antic was really butt stupid, we had the good sense to adorn a hockey helmet.) Honestly the stupid things we did on skateboards remain some of my fondest memories of youth. I can't help but think that the dork brigade is depriving a generation of young kids the excitement of risk with their efforts to legislate their parental perogatives. Not only is this sad, but it's dangerous. To fairly assess risk, you must understand the consequences. Skinned knees, bumped heads and raspberry asses are part of that learning process. Full plastic body armor distorts the consequences associated with certain risky behavior. My friends and I learned to assess risks through a series of cuts and bruises. As we developed the ability to assess risk, we learned to say, "Maybe you should wear a helmet" as somebody was about to do something in which you knew he was going to get hurt. With a generation's worth of pussification behind us, George W. Bush wants to send our kids off to war against a nation that God damn doesn't make their kids wear helmets as they bicycle off to school. This would scare me if not for the fact that he's sending mostly poor kids from inner cities and rural enclaves. You can be certain they are not buying bicycle helmets in Appalachia. 1. Less than one percent of children ages 7-15 now ride a bike to school a decline of 60% since the 1970s, according to Richard Killingsworth of the CDC. The Caught In the Crosswalk Study cites evidence from the US Surgeon General's office which notes a decline in 5% decline in youth walking or bicycling for a period of 30 minutes or more between 1992 and 1995 and the Bicycle and Pedestrian Program funded by Oregon DOT which demonstrated a 40% decline in youth cycling from 1987 to 1997. Bicycle related deaths have declined over this period at a rate which seems to mirror the decline in adolescent ridership, 1003 deaths in 1975 and 657 deaths in 2000 according to the Bicycle Helmet Institute. 2. A National SAFE KIDS point of action includes "[p]assing bike helmet laws in the remaining 31 states and broadening existing laws to include scooters, skates and skateboards." 3. CPSC Monitor cites a study by David Janda, an orthopedic surgeon from the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine that "[a]ll the tests and comparisons failed to demonstrate a significant advantage with respect to impact force reduction using softer core baseballs[,]" and that softer balls sometimes" exacerbated the baseball impact effects. 4. CNN reports exactly this phenomena, increased participation and increased injuries. The CNN observation occurs at a time when adolescent obesity is at an all time high. 5. While the point of games is to place multiple players in competition for a single prize, dodge ball has under fire apparently because of its Darwinian nature as the weak tend to get eliminated first. In other words, it's a good life's lesson and for that it has been banned in schools throughout the country.

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By Pete (Monday March 03 2003 @ 08:27AM EST)

Jeff, I think you are dead wrong on this one. Today sports are much tougher than they were when we were young. I mean, for example, look at John Maddens NFL Football, Tony Hawks Skateboarder Extreme, also SEGA's and Playstation's line of sports is way more dangerous than anything we have done. Also, these new 21st century sports are more inclusive too. I would hazard a guess that if you were to find the best athletes in the aforementioned sports they would almost certainly be what we would call "fat". But don't be deceived. These extra layers of lipids and triglycerides play an important roll in providing energy when the players can no longer feed themselves because their thumbs and fingers have been rendered useless because the muscles and tendons have been strained beyond repair. Sitting holed up in their bedrooms for days on end these elite athletes don't have the time for lunch! Obesity is their energy bar. Yoo-Hoo is their Gatorade.

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By Tom (Monday March 03 2003 @ 02:06PM EST)

Even more alarming is this statistic: 18.3% of high school students carried a weapon (e.g., gun, knife, or club) during the 30 days preceding the 1997 survey, down from 26.1% in 1991. How can we expect these kids do handle urban warfare when practice time is going down?

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By Tom (Tuesday March 04 2003 @ 11:08AM EST)

This is the most tortured use of statistics I've seen (outside the Bush administration) in some time. Your first reference(and its supporting references) discuss the decrease in light of traffic and congestion, and the overscheduling of children's time - not some reaction to helmets. Point 4 (increased participation and increased injuries -- CNN) is without value unless it can be shown that the actual rate of injury over time has increased -- I've not found the necessary data to reach this conclusion. What I did note from the supporting CDC data was that half of the sports activity was in "personal sports" mainly biking, skating, trampolines, cheerleading, golf. It hardly implies that the core team sports are being watered down in fact participation levels there seem relatively level. http://www.nyssf.org/statistics1997.html http://www.nyssf.org/statistics1998.html

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By Jeff (Tuesday March 04 2003 @ 12:28PM EST)

The first reference absolutely supports my contention that "children have abandoned their bicycles" beginning in the early 1990s and the trend continued throughout the decade. The footnote explicitly cites both the Oregon DOT study and the Surgeon General's report which are referenced by the Crosswalks study. Rather then include a single link, I should have referenced them individually. Unfortunately, the Surgeon General's report is not free so I used the Crosswalk's study as a second hand reference. Further adding to the confusion is the fact that I don't draw the same conclusion as the Crosswalk's study. It should be treated as a reference to their references. Unfortunately no US studies were conducted (according to the Bicycle Helmet Institute) with regard to children's reactions to helmets and cycling participation. In my original research, I found surveys which were conducted in Austrailia, New Zealand and Iceland which attributre a declined in youth bicylcling to manatory helmet laws. (Oddly Australian adult bicycling popularity increased after the mandatory helmet laws for youth were implemented.) The rate of decline they noted more or less mimics a similar rate of decline in the US. It is my contention that the reduced participation was also a result of this type of legislation. Second hand references to a British Medical Association's opinion that mandatory helmet laws are counterproductive due to reduction of ridership helps to support my contention. (Googling will get you plenty of second hand references, but the original source is elusive. The British note the cumulative health benefit of cycling participation weighed against the increase risk of riding without a helmet.) With regard to your second contention that my point is invalid "unless it can be shown that the actual rate of injury over time has increased." Like you, I was unable to find adequate data. I am relying on a second hand source from the CNN reference in which they cite, "A new study reports that sports-related injuries send approximately 2.6 million young people to hospitals each year. Experts attribute the large and increased [emphasis mine] figure to a rise in the numbers of people participating in athletics more than a drop in adherence to safety measures." If participation is up at a time when adolescent obesity is at an all time high, what conclusion can I draw beside that the ranks of athletes are filled with unqulaified participants?

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By TiGuy (Tuesday August 01 2006 @ 12:07PM EDT)

Yeah, this is old, but the link is appropriate: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20041112-000010&print=1

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