As a child, I loved to climb trees. From the small dogwood whose death my climbing likely precipitated to the sturdy maple that towered outside my bedroom window, no tree was off limits.
Except, of course, for one.
Behind the shed in our backyard, a pine tree much taller than our two-story home separated our plot of land from our neighbors’. Its imposing size blocked the sun from the yard during certain parts of the day. The tree, despite its apparent strength, was not to be disturbed.
Except, of course, an elementary-school-aged child who thought her expertise trumped her parents’ (when was the last time they climbed a tree, anyway?). For me, the temptation was too great to resist.
So one afternoon I found myself approaching that great pine with a gaggle of neighborhood kids. I confidently put one foot above the other close to the base of each thin branch. It was going well: clearly my parents had underestimated my tree-climbing skills. How could they even think of holding back such greatness?
But then I encountered my nemesis: sap. The branches became sticky; I struggled to get my grip and it struck me just how high off the ground I now was. I felt myself start to panic and my thoughts turned to the firefighters-rescuing-cats scenarios I’d seen on many a rainy afternoon watching cartoons. Would they come for me, too? I couldn’t let one of my friends run to get my mother — that would be admitting defeat and endanger my TV-watching privileges (inconceivable).
What happened next, with help from my friends who scouted out safe branches from below, was a concentrated effort to get me back on solid ground. My hands were covered in sap and my hair a rat’s nest of pine needles, but my main concern was that my mother was not watching from our dining room window. I made it to the ground sticky, scraped and still slightly scared.
Little did I know at the time, but my tree-climbing adventure was teaching me valuable life skills essential to my development.
In this issue of Valley Parents, we have focused on play. In an increasingly organized and technology-based world, correspondent Jaimie Seaton reports experts are concerned that free-range play — allowing children to play among themselves without scheduled activities — is being neglected, taking with it the skills of social interaction, problem solving, conflict resolution, self-advocacy and leadership. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who has long studied play, says that those skills can’t be taught by adults; they must be learned by kids themselves.
In two accompanying pieces, Seaton also examines the purpose of educational toys and the importance of having free time. Staff writer Aimee Caruso compiles a list of technology-free activities children of all ages can take part in. The edition concludes with a calendar full of family-friendly activities in the Upper Valley.
There is concern that unstructured play may be a thing of the past, that technology has replaced games such as hide-and-seek, that structured activities have taken the place of made-up games that are the building blocks of imagination.
We hope to show the creativity that stems from leaving kids to their own devices and the skills they develop from seemingly commonplace activities.
