What parent doesn’t know the constant sound of his or her own voice admonishing children to “walk!” through the house? Running, jumping, skipping, crashing, banging, breaking–we worry and fuss that our children will learn to crawl and walk on schedule, but we don’t realize that once they start, we will be telling them to calm down and walk for the next seventeen or eighteen years! Even though my older teenagers can be sloths and slugs in many areas of their lives now, they still seem to bound up and down the stairs and tend to raise each other for the television remote control–breaking vases and banging into furniture as they go.
When my children were very young–preschool and early elementary school-aged, we lived in a house that was situated in one long stretch. It had started as a small bungalow and then been build on to front and back over the years and it was an open, straight-through walk from the very front door out the back door–with the bedrooms off of the main stretch of the house along one side. It had a cozy, yet open feel but made it very easy for children to pick up speed as they ran from one end to the other. Without natural curves and turns and barriers, there was really no obvious reason to them why they should walk when they could get there so much faster running–never mind the smooth wood and linoleum floors that they would slip and slide on as they raced, nor the fact that they would crash into each other as well as other things. I was forever harping at my own and other children to “Stop running!”
“Slow down,” “Walk down the stairs, please” and “No roughhousing in the living room!”–what parents doesn’t find him or herself saying those phrases and more several times a day. It seems that even though they get bigger and more mature in so many other areas–this little reality of family life seems to be one of the last things to change!
Also: Playground Safety Tips