Heights

What could be more dogtired than to sit through eight hours of lecture straight? What I have done, under the circumstances, is to either sleep or read other materials.

When I decided to attend an eight-hour parent educational class last weekend, I knew I have to bring with me quite a number of medical journals, just in case. And when I sat down in the classroom, I knew I should not have carried those journals.

The class isn't a ho-hum parroting of theories; it's a story about real people bringing up kids. I never realised the secret of slides on the playground until the teacher reminded me that children learn to walk upstairs before mastering the skill of going down. The design of a slide for those kids to slide down is great - it's amazing, actually.

And how about the traditional jungle gyms or climbing frames? They're disappearing from most playgrounds. Classical as the seesaws had been, popular as the smart-phone game Angry Birds now seems, jungle gyms have turned into dinosaurs. If the story of jungle gym strikes you as a nostalgic memory, you're not alone. I remember climbing heights - and the laughter - on the metal monkey bars that were arranged like Cartesian coordinates in a three-dimensional jungle. It's fun. I'd like to see my little Tarzan learn the thrills of exploring heights but those jungle gyms don't exist on the planet anymore.

Yeah, yeah. I know playground safety is the main concern. But the point is this: children have to gradually expose themselves to more and more dangers on the playground to conquer phobias. A child who's hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights, I have been told.