The idea that we can make all things safe for all behaviors is in itself a dangerous and slippery slope.
I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids to learn how to build the things that they think of.
Tinkering is a way of understanding difficult problems, of wrapping our heads around them and quantifying the unknowns.
Kids who grow up in radically different environments are always going to have different comfort levels with regard to a topic. If you don't live near a train track, it's hard to squash a penny that way, and if you live in an apartment in New York City, it may be difficult to get to drive a car.
The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid.
When we protect children from every possible source of danger, we also prevent them from having the kinds of experiences that develop their sense of self-reliance, their ability to assess and mitigate risk, and their sense of accomplishment.
