Over the last couple of days I have been hearing/reading a lot about mistakes, fear, letting our kids fail, learning through disastrous catastrophe (supervised of course) and it got me thinking. Are we protecting our kids too much? Here are a couple videos I would like to share with you.

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do!

The first one is from a really interesting, paragliding, software engineer that gives kids power tools to play with. His website is http://www.gevertulley.com/ which is quite a place to kill a couple of hours, reading some of his ideas, but what I want to share with you is this video that I saw about 5 dangerous things you should let your children do.

I think it is amazing; the work that goes on inside the brain when we take the bumper guards off and allow our children to really learn.Throw something, light something on fire, drive something, the brain cells that are created during these exercises will be used many, many times in their adult years. What a great gift to the children of the world. Thank you Gerver.

So the whole theory about letting your kids fail comes into question. I found another video blog about letting kids fail that I found kind of interesting too. This one comes from a couple of parents up in Berkeley, CA. Their website is Science for Raising Happy Kids.

Should We Let Our Kids Fail?

A point of discussion that is not made during the video is that repeated failures are a concern, as well as protecting our kids too much from failure so much so, that they become afraid to try new things, or even worse, how to handle the disappointment of a failed attempt.

These all sound like really good ideas and I think I mostly agree with both of them. Letting our kids learn through creative play is crucial to their development. My kids certainly did their fair share of falling down, stitches, black eyes, burns, ER visits.

I encourage kids to get OFF the computer and get out and play, (which reminds me – ClubTUKI.com is in the process of developing off-line activities that kids can do and earn Moola for. Yep, that’s right, CEN is figuring out a way to make your kids WANT to clean their room, your very welcome! – We will post an update when it goes live.)

So what do we do as parents? Do we encourage our kids to fall down? or Do we encourage our kids to try as many new things as they can while still being cautious? Do we let them try on the world without bumper pads? or Do we keep them in a rounded little box where the sun always shines and everyone’s always smiling?
When you figure out the right balance, please let me know!