Yesterday I brought the boys to the park… There was a mom there that I have never met before with her almost 5 year old that was a head taller than Xavier and a 8 month old babe…

The boys ran around like they always do… going up and down and all around…

At one point the mom struck up a conversation and upon knowing that Xavier was 5 she assumed he was in school… when I told her that we homeschooled she had no idea what it was… she had never heard of homeschooling.

As the boys played, they went down the slide as they often do… it is a double slide and they sit on the middle part and go down that way… or sometimes they go head first or sometimes they sit normally… they also *gasp* climb up the slide…

Well…. yesterday, they were going down the middle and running up the slide and having fun… no one else was on the slide, no one else was near it… the other little boy was playing on the other module and was not even paying attention to them… I got the “look”… my kids were not playing by the “rules”…

what are these rules anyway?

Not let kids explore? not let kids have fun? Why Micromanage every aspect of their life and play?

When the little boy came to the module where the boys were playing they stopped going up the slide by their own accord and started using the stairs.. they did keep on going down the middle though and waited their turn…

The other little boy pushed by Colin at one point and the mom said nothing but she was very quick to react when her son was about to go down the middle of the slide… he did it anyway and she glared at me as my boys went down… then they went and played on the other module… her son continued and she talked to her son quite loudly when he did it and then kept on glaring at me…  (there was no one else there… he wasn’t hurting anyone… he was having fun…why not let him?)  then she said really loudly something like “some other parents let their kids do anything… but you have to slide on one side of the other!”

ARGHHH!!!!

When Xavier came back to slide I told him that the little boy was getting in trouble because he was doing the same thing as him… so maybe slide on one side or the other for now… he went down one time normally and then went and played on something else…

I don’t get it at all… why do parents not let their kids play and explore? Who is going to get hurt by the kids going down the middle of the slide? Who is going to get hurt when a kid runs up the slide when there are not other kids around? Why do parent follow their kid up onto the modules and not let them explore by themselves?

I really don’t get the unspoken “rules”…