It’s always nice when some dedicated group of scientists comes along and “proves” what you’ve been saying all along. In Kids Need the Adventure of Risky Play the UK Guardian reports that “…a major study says parents harm their children’s development if they ban tree-climbing or conkers.”

Conkers of course being an English game played with horse-chestnuts. Basically, two kids tie horse-chestnuts on the ends of strings and then take turns trying to knock the chestnuts loose. But I digress.

I’m wading through more than 600 emails as a result of the recent NPR story, and so far, not a single one has been negative. Last year when the TED video went public, I received about half as much email and a measurable portion were negative to some degree (mostly parents berating me for setting unreasonable expectations on them, but also quite a few folks thought that I was creating an unsafe environment for the tinkerers at our school).

Speaking of press, Dan Hall wrote a nice piece for his syndicated column (that has some very nice things to say about Tinkering School). The New York Times is going to run something in the Sunday magazine this weekend (largely to do with a project I am working on at Adobe, but also mentioning the Tinkering School).

So it seems that the idea that we need to let kids be kids and stop over-protecting them is resonating with more people now. Many parents speak of a sense of nostalgia for their childhood, and of somehow losing their perspective. The TED video and the story on NPR seem to be giving them permission to let their kids play with fire, take things apart, and own a pocket knife.

I couldn’t be more pleased that the message is getting out, and I hope to see your children playing in the empty lot next door, the woods at the end of the lane, the abandoned building beyond the fence, and down in the basement with the broken washing machine.