I grew up in a rural area and spent most of my childhood in creeks with no parent supervision. No one worried about this because we all knew when it was safe to enter the water and when it wasn’t. Living here, I’ve often been saddened that so much is walled off “for our protection.” This just encourages a situation where natural hazards become invisible to adults and a threat to children who don’t know how dangerous they are.

I want to be clear that I am not suggesting the parents of these boys should have had some prior conversation with them about avoiding the creek. There’s no way to predict what kids will do, and it’s not as though the creek is an obvious source of danger. Most of the time, it’s a sleepy trickle, and (as noted above) hardly even visible in most places.

I do want to suggest, though, that overreacting in a time of communal grief and throwing fences around everything that hasn’t been fenced already would be a bad idea. You can’t protect children from everything, and trying to just makes them less equipped to protect themselves.

Instead of getting hung up on whether a sign says “restricted” v.s. “prohibited,” why not simply replace both with a sign that says, “Creek contains hidden hazards. Unsafe for boats or swimming.” Forbidding children to do something just makes them curious. Spelling out what the dangers are at least gives them the ability to make intelligent choices for themselves, just the way my friends and I used to do when we were growing up in the sticks.