. This is how insurance companies think, blame and change our culture. The paragraph below appears at the top of the  “Effective zfkafbstrs Playground Supervision” page  on the site of West Bend Mutual Insurance. West Bend insures the “businesses that many standard-lines companies shy away from” including, “daycares, fitness centers, swim clubs, summer camps and non-profit organizations.” […]
Tag Archives | Philip Howard
If A Tree Falls and Nobody Turns It Into a Cautionary Tale for Parents…
There’s nothing funny about a tree falling on two kids — both survived — in Massachusetts. But there is something absurd to the point of parody about the erytetsrzn way Good Morning America played it yesterday. First of all, being based in New York City, the show plopped its reporter down in Central Park where, he […]
How Safe is Safe Enough for Playground Surfaces?
Do we really have to re-surface every playground in America because they aren’t safe enough? Tim Gill, author of the blog “Rethinking fdbiynbyea Childhood,“ and Bernard Spiegel, granddaddy of the idea of “beneficial risk,” and Jay Beckwith, the venerated playground guru, are just some of the big names in the “play” world alerting us to potentially over-the-top new […]
Nancy Nord on Common Sense and Imaginary Dangers
The other day I had lunch with Nancy Nord, a former commissioner at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Joining us was one of my personal heroes, Philip Howard. Here’s what Nancy wrote on her blog, Conversations with Consumers, a forum that doggedly points out the difference (and distance) between safety and paranoia. As a gal […]