This is a boomer-ass take, but knowing how to deal with a situation where you or someone else gets hurt is a really important skill and reading about it can only get you so far
It’s not so much the getting hurt itself that needs to happen, but being put in situations where you could get hurt so that you learn to evaluate risk.
I’ve forgotten about plenty of situations where things could’ve gone wrong but didn’t but I can still vividly remember accidentally hitting myself in the dick with my bike handle.
(Since I know someone will want to know: I misjudged my speed and the impact a wet wheel had on my braking power. When I noticed I was going too fast to take a corner I braked and the front brake locked the wheel immediately. Inertia did the rest.)
That and a (thankfully merely scary) run-in with aquaplaning a few years later taught me to be wary of wet driving conditions, especially of braking in them.
In my case I wasn’t paying enough attention to where water had pooled in the tracks cars had worn into the road. Gentle taps on the brake handles were enough to decouple my scooter’s wheels from the road and give me a two kilometer braking distance. Yikes.
Adults who can recall experiences of ultimate freedom to play in their own childhoods find it difficult to give their own children the same room for exploration [10]. In this context, research shows that if children are free to select the level of risk in their play activities, they will frequently choose a higher level than the guiding adult would predict and consider acceptable [11]. A lack of opportunities for risky and challenging play has negative consequences for becoming a healthy adult, such as learning to trust oneself, recognizing one’s limits, and knowing when it is better to ask for support [12].
This, but unironically
This is a boomer-ass take, but knowing how to deal with a situation where you or someone else gets hurt is a really important skill and reading about it can only get you so far
It’s not so much the getting hurt itself that needs to happen, but being put in situations where you could get hurt so that you learn to evaluate risk.
Getting hurt a little bit is very useful.
I’ve forgotten about plenty of situations where things could’ve gone wrong but didn’t but I can still vividly remember accidentally hitting myself in the dick with my bike handle.
(Since I know someone will want to know: I misjudged my speed and the impact a wet wheel had on my braking power. When I noticed I was going too fast to take a corner I braked and the front brake locked the wheel immediately. Inertia did the rest.)
That and a (thankfully merely scary) run-in with aquaplaning a few years later taught me to be wary of wet driving conditions, especially of braking in them.
That last bit is why I think every new driver needs to spend a few hours on a skid pad.
In my case I wasn’t paying enough attention to where water had pooled in the tracks cars had worn into the road. Gentle taps on the brake handles were enough to decouple my scooter’s wheels from the road and give me a two kilometer braking distance. Yikes.
A few years riding a bike will do the same.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10671218/
My dad always said my sister and I both graduated top of the class from the School of Hard Knocks.
My aunt used to say that children’s souls didn’t fully anchor into their bodies until they’d fallen hard on their heads for the first time.
She’s Hungarian, I don’t know if that’s like a cultural myth to make people feel better about dropping their kids or just her own thing.
I wasn’t being ironic. I think knowing how to assess a situation for danger and deal with the consequences of your decisions is very important.
Bones heal, chicks dig scars, and glory is forever.