What’s next, a waiver to allow kids to meet Santa at the mall?
Children were not allowed to participate in an Easter-egg hunt at the University of California, Berkeley without their parents’ first signing a waiver — due to the apparent risk of injury or even death.
According to Reason, parents had to stand in line for up to half an hour to hand in the waiver before their kids could attend the 25th Annual Easter Egg Hunt Learning Festival. The waiver, which was obtained by Reason, listed risks including “minor injuries, such as scratches, bruises, and sprains,” “major injuries such as eye injury or loss of sight, joint or back injuries, heart attacks, and concussions,” and even “catastrophic injuries including paralysis or death.”
Yes — death. Truly, reading this waiver would give you the impression that these parents were about ready to send their children off to a swordfight to the death, and not an Easter-egg hunt.
What’s more, it’s not even like the hunt took place on any kind of dangerous terrain. Robert Strand, executive director and lecturer at the Center for Responsible Business at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, told Reason that he was at the event with his wife and two kids. He said the hunt took place in “three different roped-off areas for kids of different ages and literally it was a flat grass surface where they would just place the eggs,” rather than, say, an area that was heavily occupied by ISIS. He added that each child was allowed to pick up only five eggs, which meant that the whole thing “was completed within a minute, because they were just placed there.”
Up to 30 minutes in line for one minute of walking around on the grass? Seriously?
Apparently, the ridiculousness of it was not lost on Strand.
“We’re in Scandinavia for a chunk of the summer, and our kids just run around at parks,” he said. “They’re jumping off things, and some of our friends there say we should be grateful for the small accidents, because then we learn from them, and that prevents the big accidents.”
Life is busy for most people, and I’d imagine that this would be even more true for people with children. If I were a busy mom and had to waste 30 minutes of my life to sign a waiver before my five-year-old was allowed to walk around on grass, I would be pissed. In fact, this Easter-egg hunt seems like the least dangerous thing that kids could possibly be doing. After all, it seems like the kinds of games that younger kids enjoy making up the most include things like “let’s jump off of some really high stuff into the dirt and rocks!” or “let’s roll around and punch each other — with biting!”
Yes, I understand that UC Berkeley was probably just trying to cover its behind, but it’s the kind of thing that’s so ridiculous it makes me worry about what might happen next. Lines for waivers before kids and parents can wait in line to meet Santa, perhaps? Actually, the way things are going, I probably just gave some mall an idea.