The Buzz in Play

We at KaBOOM! are big fans of the high five. After all, we work for an organization with an exclamation point in its name -- naturally, we're an enthusiastic and positive bunch. But it wasn't until our recent annual Play Academy that many of us realized our high fives just weren't up to par.

Luckily, staffers Naudy Martinez and Allie Farrington stepped in to save the day. Their enlightening presentation taught us common high five pitfalls as well as advanced high five techniques.

As we're sure you're aware, today is National High Five Day. So before you go around doling out potentially defective and artless high fives, please take a moment to perfect your skills:

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Did you have a best friend growing up? These days, you just might be breaking the rules. That's right -- according to our friend Tim Gill at Rethinking Childhood, at least one UK school has enacted a "best friend ban."

Educational psychologist Gaynor Sbuttoni told The Sun, "They are doing it because they want to save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend. But it is natural for some children to want a best friend. If they break up, they have to feel the pain because they're learning to deal with it."

Let's face it: Pain is part of growing up. Skinned knees teach children valuable lessons about their physical limits, just as a waning friendship helps to emotionally prepare them for future losses. Trying to protect them from either is not only fruitless, but can actually do more harm than good.

And while it's clearly beneficial for children to learn how to play in groups, no one should have to sacrifice a close friendship to do so. Rather than criminalizing a normal, and often healthy, element of growing up, why not gently encourage more group play by teaching collaborative recess games? (Our good friends at Playworks are experts in this realm.)

What would you tell your school if they implemented a best friend ban?

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Signs like this make us sad. Why should a perfectly good playground sit unused?

If there's a playground in your community that's all locked up, download our Joint Use Toolkit to learn how you can open it to the public after hours and on weekends.

Photo by Matt Hutter. See our original Tumblr post about this photo.

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Would you let your kid climb a tree? What about jump off a roof?

Over the weekend, in light of our recent conversation about risk aversion, we asked our Twitter followers and Facebook fans about their favorite “dangerous” playtime activities growing up. There was a lot of gleeful jumping, climbing, and (almost) falling involved. Here's just a sampling:

We didn't just hang upside down on the monkey bars, we used to play "tag" and run across them like it was nothing. I don't think I could even step on one of them today - amazing how fearless children are!
- Stacy Towers via Facebook

Jumping roofs! Dangerous but fun. We jumped from house to house. In LA, they are built very close.
- @1AKA_VS via Twitter

Jumping off the roof of a ranch house garage into a pile of leaves.
- Eva Spera-Gauthier via Facebook

Um... climbing high into trees and jumping down... (we thought we could fly!). 
- @hipmamasociety via Twitter

Falling out of trees. Luckily I was a bouncy kid.
- @WayfarerGlyn via Twitter

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