KIDS THESE DAYS:Government shouldn’t regulate play

In case you missed it, Sunday’s editorial sharply criticized the Costa Mesa City Council for designating Paularino Park a “passive park,” which means it won’t be good for much more than sitting on an empty bench if you can find one.

The editorial cited a “vocal minority” that was credited for the park’s designation.

I see the park’s designation as a “no fun” zone not as a singular event but in the context of an increasingly restrictive city.

What is happening in Costa Mesa is not law and order, it is order by law; it is an attempt to appease the loudest voice instead of embracing common sense because it is the easy way out.

We’ve all been guilty of this at some time in our lives, whether it is giving in to the persistent solicitor who wants us to buy that automatic bagel slicer, or the annoying kid who nags for a toy.

Anything to stop the pestering.

“When we were growing up,” starts one paragraph in the editorial. When I was growing up, child obesity was not an epidemic. When I was growing up, gates and rules never stopped my friends and me from paying in a park of public school. If the gates were locked, we climbed the chain-link fence.

Yes, our group of pre-teens and young teens was probably breaking some law.

Oh, no!

But fat kids were almost as rare as GameBoys, which weren’t even invented yet.

In all of my years growing up in Chicago and Los Angeles, not once was I ever confronted by any official or any resident for playing in a schoolyard or playground with locked or unlocked gates.

Now there is more talk about banning legal and safe fireworks so kids won’t have access to the one fundraiser that is the lifeline for many youth groups.

Costa Mesa officials are bent on making it a place where sitting on one’s hands indoors is as good as it gets. So here’s my short list of activities the City Council must ban immediately:

1)Trampolines. Visits to the nation’s emergency rooms from accidents due to trampolines have doubled in the last 10 years. Trampolines are so dangerous that in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics urged parents not to buy trampolines for home use. How the city can permit their continued use is an outrage.

2)Bicycles. These contraptions are a menace. In 2005, 485,000 people were hurt in bicycle accidents. We must stop this danger in the city before we all suffer.

3)Skateboards. Forget about the nuisance aspect, we need to protect our local children from becoming an injury statistic the way 112,544 people did two years ago.

4)Basketball. The nation’s leader in sending Americans to emergency rooms for sports-related accidents, basketball was responsible for 512,213 hospital visits in 2005. I was one of them. Basketball must be stopped here and now.

The list goes on and on, all the way down to golf with golf-related accidents accounting for more than 47,000 visits. No wonder the city wants to turn part of one local course into a parking lot. Those golf courses are a menace!

But there is hope.

There is a growing chorus of people who understand that the city’s challenge is not legal fireworks, but illegal ones, not passive or active parks but reasonable activities in a public area.

These people know that we are all old enough to sort these things out for ourselves — even the youngest among us — and we don’t need the government telling us how to play or not play in a park.

Kids and adults need more places to play outside, not fewer. But when two out of three of the majority on the City Council cannot call themselves parents, it’s easy to understand why kids are once again getting punished.