Cartwheeling into School yard Dangers

Yesterdays news broke with an astounding discovery that a North Queensland School has banned children doing cartwheels.

For reports on this go to :

ABC Report

Brisbane Times Report


At first I thought it may be a knee jerk reaction to a playground tragedy that may have occurred –but none such existed.

Sadly it shows that our commonsense has been saturated with fear. Many bloggers in Australia have commented on this incident and I can only add to the disgust and hopelessness of the whole situation.

Will banning this stop kids doing stupid things? I doubt it. As a school kid, we weren’t supposed to climb trees or walk on the fence or tease the bull over the road – but did we? You bet!

By banning a quintessential activity such as doing cartwheels, it sends the message that children don’t know their own boundaries, they are never allowed to explore them and gather no experience when pushed to test new grounds. We are wrapping them up in cottonwool, never allowing them to grow up, to get hurt, to get over it, to suck it up and get on with life....I never did cartwheels at school or anywhere else – not that we weren’t allowed to – I was just unco-ordinated and pretty non sporty – but I tried, fell on my face a few times and worked out my boundaries were pretty low on the athletics side of the game.
If a child gets no sense of their boundries, they don’t learn about challenges, they never learn to fall and get up again, never get a sense of what their body is capable of.

Many commentators have be cried this decision as Queensland especially faces huge childhood obesity rates and this seems to fly in the face of the move it groove it state where children are meant to undertake physical activities.

The school, education department and State Government have been quick to back up their ban citing child safety as the main issue and that litigation was not a concern at all. There is a report about "Mellennium Kids" being disruptive, inattentive and undermotivated. On the one hand we are told that children need to get away from the computer games and television, get outdoors, exercise and actually engage with another human being. But on the other hand we are being told that exercise is being restricted or eliminated because of litigation and insurance fears

What sort of injury risk is really there? Thousands of children across Australia cartwheeling their way through the schoolyard every day with very few reported injuries.

A study on childhood school based injuries can be found

Here

The department is citing the cartwheel as an unstructured and unsupervised gymnastic activity. Perhaps this is so – but are they suggesting that there will be no free time for children to explore their capabilities? Some have suggested that activities be put in place at the break times. As a past teacher I shudder – for the children and for the teachers. They both need time away from each other to gather wits and to breathe….It’s a sad day when child's play becomes "unsupervised gymnastic activities".