Gever Tulley Children Quotations

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.

We put suffocation warnings on all the - on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States or for sale with an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10.

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.

Being able to jump off a swing is actually a useful and meaningful thing for a child to do... those are the tests that help us understand the limits of our body. That's a positive learning experience that we deny children on a regular basis.

Every day, new laws are created that further hamper the ways children can engage with the world.

As individuals, and as a society, we can choose to take responsibility for ourselves. In doing so we have to accept that sometimes when things go wrong, it is just an accident. In order to change how we lay blame, we’re going to have to change our over-protective habits; children can only learn to take responsibility when given a chance to assess and mitigate risk for themselves.