“I was climbing on the outside.” A little girl told me this about my son as she was leaving the fast food restaurant playground. My first instinct, which I followed, was to tell Tommy that we weren’t coming here anymore. This didn’t cause him much consternation, but I kept thinking about it later.

Let’s leave behind the obvious fact that I bear responsibility in this matter, being the parent who failed to supervise his 8-year-old son on the playground. It’s about Tommy’s behavior. I want my children to get along with other people, enjoy life, obey the rules, think for themselves… but it occurs to me that wanting them to obey the rules and think for themselves must create constant conflict.

It would be easy enough to put all the emphasis on following the rules. The rules are measurable, so accountability is quite easy. However, if we are to be perfectly successful in training our children to follow the rules, they will always depend on a system in which the rules are clear, fair, and well-enforced. I have tended to prefer a model where children use their best judgment and treat others as they would like to be treated. This works well in most situations, but of course it depends on children operating with good judgment, which is not guaranteed.

This is where the confusion comes in: Tommy probably knew he was breaking a rule by climbing on the outside of the playground. However, he was not causing harm in any way that was obvious to him. I can see that by behaving like this, he could encourage other children to do the same, and someone could get hurt, or the parents could be inconvenienced. I think I would like my son to err on the side of least caution. “Ask forgiveness, not permission” may be an impractical concept to teach your children, but if they can already practice it with some subtlety, it may be best not to discourage it altogether.

Children learn things by doing and discover their limits by testing them. If their only opportunities to play are on playgrounds designed by lawyers, they won’t learn much. These playgrounds typically invite more aggressive play than their design intended. Playing outside or jumping is how children have fun when the planned activities are too safe and sterile. The term for this behavior is “risk homeostasis.”

Risk homeostasis describes normal human behavior with respect to risk. Long story short, accidents don’t go down when you design things to be “safer”, they stay more or less the same. When roads are widened, people drive faster. When playgrounds get safer, kids will find new ways to test their limits. I am not ready to destroy this instinct in my children. I will explain to Tommy why that behavior was inappropriate in that setting and hope he makes good decisions in similar situations in the future.

With these things in mind, I let my children and their friends walk on our freshly frozen pond. The water in North Carolina rarely freezes enough to walk on, so we weren’t sure what was going to happen. However, our pond is only about 3 or 4 feet deep in the center and less on the sides. I was prepared for the children to fall. They were excited for the opportunity to walk on ice; it cracked and gave way in places, and they got to experience its relative strength and weakness. They trampled on him and sometimes his foot pierced him. Nobody fell, but we were prepared for that to happen.

The children have learned something through experience and I have gained something even more valuable: when I tell them that something is too dangerous, they take me seriously because I don’t tell them that mostly.