Germany is adding greater risk to its playgrounds. Some of its climbing structures are now three stories high. And who is requesting this?

Insurance companies. They want kids to grow up "risk competent." Ironically, "safety" culture is stunting kids' risk assessing abilities, in their estimation.

"This is fantastic progress in understanding childhood as the right time for children to learn to recognize and mitigate risk," says Gever Tulley.

Tulley should know. He's founder of the San Francisco Brightworks School author of 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do). //

Perhaps out of fear of just that kind of thing, one school district—Richland, Washington— just plain got rid of its swings, arguing that "swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment."

That's only because all of the merry-go-rounds, and see-saws, and monkey bars have already been uprooted.

Thus does American childhood remain, for the most part, a mulch-chip, no-slip, primary-colored plastic safe space. Or, as a German insurance exec might put it, a risk-ignorance breeding ground.