To the Editor:

Re “Childhood for Dummies” (editorial, Nov. 4):

Parents of my generation were taught to remove pain and failure from our lives. “No, you can’t hang upside down on the monkey bars,” and “Yes, everyone gets a trophy.” These are the ideas that guided our lives.

Eliminate risk even at the expense of fun and experience. Failure is wrong, and showing up is the same as winning.

What results is a group of kids who graduate from high school and are afraid to take the risks required to succeed because there is a high possibility of failure.

It’s not that breaking your arm while racing your friend down his stairs on mattresses inherently makes you a stronger person. It’s that the experience teaches you how to stop it from happening again.

Childhood is the time to be cut and scraped and to make mistakes, because it is then that you learn how to handle obstacles and adversity for later in your life when you have no one to bail you out.

Kegan Snyder
Jackson, Calif., Nov. 4, 2007

To the Editor:

You make the necessary point that “The Dangerous Book for Boys” presents childhood things—like making snowballs, hiking in the woods and skipping stones—as technical skills they need to be taught.

Moreover, the book advises that many such childhood adventures, like climbing trees, are so risky that they must be supervised by an adult.

But your hope that “the trend dies out before the next book” misses the essential point that makes this book and its spinoffs so popular: children are no longer allowed—and thus need to be instructed—to do what used to come naturally.

Much is lost with the absence of experiences like tree-climbing, wandering around in the woods and taking public transportation. Many children no longer grow up with the self-confidence, independence and often the competencies to manage major areas of their lives—with often disastrous mental health and addictive consequences.

Stanton Peele
Chatham, N.J., Nov. 4, 2007
The writer, an adjunct professor of psychology at New School for Social Research, is the author of a book about children and addiction.

Note from KBJ: Thank God my mother wasn’t a feminist. She allowed her four boys to be boys. Indeed, she taught us how to (1) shoot guns, (2) drive snowmobiles, (3) play cards, (4) play billiards, and (5) swear. We rode horses, raised animals, built treehouses, hunted, fished, played every sport under the sun, picked berries, blazed trails through the woods, played army, worked on our uncles’ and aunts’ farms, swam, collected bottles and cans alongside the road, hitchhiked, worked on cars, and in general learned how to take care of ourselves. Many young men today, raised by domineering mothers, don’t even know what they missed.