I get worries over liability. I get the intense fear that parents experience when their children get injured (my toddler suffered a dog bite to the cheek, just below his eye, at just shy of one year old). I don’t get the compulsion to ensure that children never experience injury. There’s do no harm, and then there’s … live no life, you know? Balance, people. Balance.

This week an Ottawa school, D. Roy Kennedy Public School, has been in the news and featured on the Free Range Kids blog because a group of students started a petition to reverse a ban on playing with balls at recess in the winter. Students are allowed …

We had different situations at different schools. In elementary school, I don’t think we had balls outside, but there was a huge hill on the side of the school and we made ice slides to slide down. Those would probably be considered too “dangerous” today. I’m assuming sticks and rocks and things we played with might be off limits in a lot of schools these days too.

In grade 5-6 (we were at a separate school then), there were balls and we played a variety of different games outside with the balls. Some people used them, some did other things. Even when we were playing with the balls, we weren’t necessarily playing a defined game with rules. We would make up our own games, which also encourages creativity.

Kids play. Kids get hurt sometimes. That’s life and how it should be. It may not be fun when kids get hurt, but overprotecting them is not helping matters.

If those same kids played with a frozen basketball at home and got hurt, there’d be no one for the parents to blame. Would they consider themselves bad parents for letting the ball stay out so long it froze? I doubt it.

Really? I’d have thought a more accurate statement would be ‘you can never elimate risk’. There’s risk in everything. Kids or no.

I wonder if marbles count as balls. We used to play marbles in school. But I guess kids could choke on them. Are marbles still allowed?

This stuff drives me mad. Like the new study of school lunch boxes in the UK that has led to the question of whether schools should monitor childrens lunches when brought in from home. Puh-lease.

However, I understand what you’re saying about allowing kids to explore their limits. Kids will get hurt, and while it’s not much fun it’s normal and expected and can’t possibly be prevented in any case. So this one rule may be somewhat arbitrary and unnecessary.

If frozen balls really ARE a problem it seems like it should be addressed at a higher level, with a district policy. If other schools don’t see the problem, then that may be a good sign that the rule is not reasonable in the first place.

And, and, and, I flew off a tobbogan and landed on my face on a slilppery hill. Let’s put salt on the hills so they’re not slippery!

And hey, people fall on ice rinks all the time! And skates are SHARP! NO SKATING!

Geez, Louise, where does it end, the hysterical response? Most schools do ban snowball throwing, which I can sort of understand in that their only purpose is as missiles, and they can be pretty effective icy little spheres, but even that is a little OTT, really.