“The Right Number of Bloody Owies”

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"The Right Number of Bloody Owies."

Early in the school year back in 2014, Teacher Tom wrote a follow up blog post titled "The Right Number of Bloody Owies." I laughed out loud, and that very day I shared it with the children…again. It became our mantra. The children began proudly showing off their wounds. The original post came out in 2009 (,Teacher Tom Bloody Owies) and I what made me laugh so much this time, is that I had done the same thing back then. Different classroom, mostly different children, same theme.

"If you have no bloody owies, then you are being too careful. If you have three or more bloody owies then you're not being careful enough. The right number of bloody owies is one or two. That means you're not being too careful or too careless.” -Teacher Tom (2014)

Emily then pointed to her scraped shin and shouted across the creek. Fiona chimed in, “I’ve got two!” pulling up her leggings to look closer. Somewhere along the line, they had absorbed what Teacher Tom so perfectly articulated: if you have no bloody owies, you're being too careful. If you have three or more, maybe not careful enough. The right number is one or two.

This isn’t cavalier. It’s biological. Children are built for this.

We’ve come to think of childhood as something to bubble-wrap. We measure good parenting by how few scrapes a child endures. But what if that metric is backward? What if the goal isn’t to eliminate risk, but to raise children who know how to navigate it? How to fall well, assess the damage, and get back up?

It is adults who recoil, who panic, who pave every path and sand down every edge. We create a world of soft landings and no heights, and then wonder why children climb fences.

The impulse to protect is good. But overprotection has its costs. It tells children the world is more dangerous than it is. It tells them their bodies can’t be trusted. It tells them they’re fragile.

What if, instead, we trusted that some bumps and bruises are part of learning? That falling is not failure but feedback? That a scraped knee is a sign of experimentation, adventure, risk-taking—all of which are essential to human growth?

The city may remove the leaping rocks. The dome may be gone. But the instinct to climb, to test one’s body, to get a little too close to the edge—that remains.

Because as Teacher Tom said, “the only way to learn about asphalt is to fall on it. You might think I’m joking about this. But I’m not.”

Inspired by Teacher Tom’s blog post “The Right Number of Bloody Owies” (2014).