![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerPeggy Rathman's Officer Buckle and Gloria, the 1996 Caldecott award winner, is full of delightful visual gags. Our hero, Officer Buckle, gives safety talks at schools, sharing safety tips like "Don't stand on swivel chairs." Which he discovered, just that morning, when he stood on a swivel chair and it slipped and he went flying, which is the very first illustration of the book.
However, Officer Buckle's talks have none of this kinetic energy - until he teams up with a police dog, Gloria, who illustrates his tips by, say, pretending to be electrocuted when Officer Buckle says "Don't swim during electrical storms."
This book is a super nostalgia trip for me, even though I didn't read it when it first came out, because it is Peak Nineties. The illustration style! But even more, the overwhelming obsession with safety! It didn't show up too much in my real life, aside from the fact that we weren't allowed to play on the hill behind the playground because one time someone tripped and broke her arm, STILL BITTER, you can trip and break your arm anywhere, I am just saying.
But it was all over children's media, and it led to massive playground overhauls where they started, in the opinion of my eight-year-old self, ruining all the playgrounds by getting rid of the fun playground equipment that could kill you. All the teeter totters disappeared, and a lot of the merry-go-rounds, and those awesome swings at the school near my grandparents' house that looked kind of like horses and probably knocked out the teeth of unwary students who walked behind the swing at an inopportune moment.
I read an article recently in The Atlantic, The Overprotected Kid, which is worth reading in its entirety - but the part that relates to this book is that this massive and extremely expensive playground overhaul has, at best, only marginally lowered playground accident rates. Kids have an extremely fertile capacity for wringing risk and danger from unpromisingly safe playground equipment. Just ask me about the time we started climbing out of the twirly slide, twenty feet off the ground, for the pleasure of shimmying down the playground pole instead.
However, Officer Buckle's talks have none of this kinetic energy - until he teams up with a police dog, Gloria, who illustrates his tips by, say, pretending to be electrocuted when Officer Buckle says "Don't swim during electrical storms."
This book is a super nostalgia trip for me, even though I didn't read it when it first came out, because it is Peak Nineties. The illustration style! But even more, the overwhelming obsession with safety! It didn't show up too much in my real life, aside from the fact that we weren't allowed to play on the hill behind the playground because one time someone tripped and broke her arm, STILL BITTER, you can trip and break your arm anywhere, I am just saying.
But it was all over children's media, and it led to massive playground overhauls where they started, in the opinion of my eight-year-old self, ruining all the playgrounds by getting rid of the fun playground equipment that could kill you. All the teeter totters disappeared, and a lot of the merry-go-rounds, and those awesome swings at the school near my grandparents' house that looked kind of like horses and probably knocked out the teeth of unwary students who walked behind the swing at an inopportune moment.
I read an article recently in The Atlantic, The Overprotected Kid, which is worth reading in its entirety - but the part that relates to this book is that this massive and extremely expensive playground overhaul has, at best, only marginally lowered playground accident rates. Kids have an extremely fertile capacity for wringing risk and danger from unpromisingly safe playground equipment. Just ask me about the time we started climbing out of the twirly slide, twenty feet off the ground, for the pleasure of shimmying down the playground pole instead.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-25 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-26 02:08 am (UTC)Slides are only worth sliding when they are those gigantic fairground slides that you slide down in a burlap sack. Otherwise they are never tall enough and also if there's no sack, on hot days the plastic sticks to your skin.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-25 02:28 pm (UTC)Related (have I mentioned this story before?), a year or so ago I was walking home from the store, and a young kid of maybe seven or eight was cruising down the sidewalk on his bicycle, as such kids are wont to do. He crossed an alley ahead of me, and said alley had a crack down the middle of it that was just the right size to eat his tire a la a railroad track - but instead of crashing on his head like one might expect, he did an almost perfect flip over his handlebars and landed on his feet, nonplussed but unharmed. A woman coming the other way rushed up and began scolding him for his inattention and for not wearing a helmet; I caught his eye and gave him a thumbs up as I passed. I guess the same fearlessness that drives kids to try new and dangerous things means they also have less fear-based baggage when it comes to doing sweet flips, haha.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-27 02:46 pm (UTC)We were all pretty sedate children and we still wanted more danger, please.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-25 03:50 pm (UTC)I understand the Safety Revolution a little better now that I'm an adult; as a kid I resented it (even though I was actually a pretty retiring and risk-averse kid by temperament; it was the principle of the thing). My sister's very much of the Let Them Eat Dirt school with her own kids, probably because she's the same age as me and grew up hearing the same annoying safety PSAs.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-26 02:15 am (UTC)On the bright side, this def. adds more evidence to my feeling that this style is super nineties, because the Magic School Bus might in fact be the true Peak Nineties experience.
I too was a pretty retiring and risk-averse child and I also found the Safety Revolution irritating. There must be a way to give these safety tips in a way that doesn't make kids want to, say, jump off a slide just to show that you're not the boss of me, safety tips! but clearly the nineties did not find that way.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-27 04:04 am (UTC)There must be a way to give these safety tips in a way that doesn't make kids want to, say, jump off a slide just to show that you're not the boss of me, safety tips! but clearly the nineties did not find that way.
YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, SAFETY TIPS. >:P
There should be a way. I don't really know what it is, though. Setting rational boundaries as needed and not harping on them too much otherwise? I'm glad the babies in their bike seats have little helmets now, unlike in my day where we just rode around bare-headed looking quizzical (I've got pictures). The Safety Revolution wasn't all bad!
no subject
Date: 2017-09-27 02:43 pm (UTC)Hahaha I know EXACTLY the look you mean! Small children in itty bitty bicycle seats always seem to have that confused look. They're not sure about this bicycle business - and rightly so, when they don't even have a little helmet!
no subject
Date: 2017-09-25 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-26 02:12 am (UTC)