Chemistry sets and the old-fashioned childhood
Can we both keep children safe but also give them the options they used to have?
When my dad was 10 years old his parents bought him a chemistry set. He used it to build bombs. This was back in 1939, when chemistry sets came with all kinds of dangerous chemicals. My dad loved chemistry and he was creative about finding new chemicals in household items and turning them into bombs. I say "bombs" but of course he started with small firecrackers. He got more serious about bombs over the next 2 years, building bigger and bigger bombs, and mixing together increasingly dangerous chemicals. Finally, in 1941, he created his masterpiece, a fairly huge chunk of metal and chemicals. With his best friend Bobby, the two of them went to Central Park (NYC), waited till no one was around, then threw it over a bridge to see what would happen when it hit the ground. Needless to say my dad had not done careful calculations on this thing, so he wasn't aware what a beast he had made. The bomb left a crater in the soft dirt pathway. The noise went through them and shocked them and left their ears ringing for days. It's a good thing they'd dropped it from a high bridge or they might have been badly hurt. As it was, police officers came running from every direction. Bobby and my dad put their hands in their pockets and walked away, doing their best imitation of two "aw, geez whiz, gollickers" innocent 12 year old boys. The police didn't stop them for questioning.
Over the next year, my dad got busy with school and he got his first job, so he had less time to play around with bombs. However, like a lot of children, he didn't realize that he was outgrowing a particular kind of toy, so he didn't clean up that toy carefully, and bombs are the kind of thing one should clean up carefully. He'd previously been experimenting with a kind of chemical which, in solid form, was a dangerous explosive but it could be dissolved in alcohol, at which point it was safe. My dad had several test tubes full of alcohol plus this chemical. They were sitting on one of his bookshelves. He'd thought maybe one day he'd used them to build another bomb, but after awhile he gave up thinking about them.
One night, while he was sleeping, a large truck drove down the street outside his apartment, and the truck hit a pothole, causing a loud bump that went right through the building. Suddenly there was a shattering sound in my dad's room, glass and debris flying everywhere, the door blown open. Before he even got out of bed, my dad knew what had happened: Over the year, some of the alcohol had evaporated, or perhaps the test tubes had been calm and still enough that even with the alcohol some portion of the explosive had crystalized out of the solution and so taken on solid form. It was just waiting for a trigger to explode, and the vibration from the truck hitting the pothole had been enough.
The next day, my dad cleaned up his room. He threw away or stored away all of the explosive material. My dad got into a magnet high school that was sponsored by the textile industry, which at that time was the main employer of chemists in the USA (dyes, coloring, etc). It was the ideal high school for someone interested in chemistry.
My dad was also very creative and he had a passion for photography. This was when photography was a very chemical process, with film being developed in safe "dark rooms." And this became my dad's career. When he graduated high school, at the age of 18, he got a good paying job in a big photography studio, and he got several rapid promotions because he had such a deep understanding of the chemistry. He was comfortably affluent by the time he was 20.
Nowadays, of course, the chemicals that are sold in the USA are much more heavily regulated than they used to be, and no one sells the kinds of chemistry sets that my dad was given. In theory this is to mitigate the risk of children hurting themselves, though there is the irony that it is still considered normal to buy a gun for teenagers, and I doubt a gun is any safer than a chemistry set. Children can still play with dangerous explosives, so long as those dangerous explosives are being fired from a gun. A gun is simply less educational.
I think it is important that 18 year olds be able to get high paying jobs as soon as they get out of high school. We have closed some of the old doors for achieving that, so we need to get much more active in finding new ways to achieve the same thing. I mean this across every possible profession:
if we make it difficult for children to play with chemicals, then we need to invest more in chemistry education in the schools, so that children can still be exposed to the same experiences, but in a controlled environment
the same would be true of biology — kids wandering around all day, in the woods, and becoming fascinated with ants or aphids or fungus or trees or algae, all of which has become more difficult for kids today, therefore we need to do a better job of providing such education in a structured environment such as school
the same would be true with outdoor jobs such as park ranger, to the extent that we limit camping, or we shut down organizations such as The Boy Scouts, then we need better outdoor education offered through our schools
In general, unsupervised outdoor play, for children under the age of 11, has become limited in many areas. When I was a kid me and my friends would disappear into the woods on a Saturday morning and we’d only return home for dinner, but nowadays parents tend to keep children on a shorter leash. But to the extent that we limit children’s play time, then we need to do a better job of providing this in controlled environments such as school
I could make a very long list, but I think the point is clear. Our children live limited, restricted lives compared to the freedom that children had 50 or 100 years ago. So we need to do a better job of providing them with new places where they can learn the things they used to learn on their own.
An article about parenting challenges in america:
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/01/america-failed-parents-rich-countries-raising-kids/677023/