I love my kids and consider them very smart, but we need to be very honest with ourselves: kids are dumb. Before I was a parent I thought of kids like rats in a psychology experiment. Give a little shock, they learn, rinse, repeat. I was actually quite an eye opener to realize how the mind of a wee child works. They can hurt themselves over and over and over again doing the same stupid thing and not necessarily learn. They can also be notoriously scattered in their focus... they aren't total morons, but learning to assess an environment and pay attention to the important bits is a skill that takes time. The number of times my kids – who know to walk up the side of a hill – stand in the middle of it simply astounds me. Even if your kid knows what he/she is doing, there's no garauntee my little idiots aren't going to cause a knee-to-head collision.
I'm part of the crowd that thinks a mitigated amount of risk can be a benefit to a child. I let my kids do stupid stuff all the time that can result in them falling a few feet or scraping a knee. Sledding though falls into a category similar to snowboarding or skating in my opinion. You're going at a pretty good rate of speed and smacking a head could be a serious problem.
As for your Facebook friends, I think there's a way to bring it up respectfully and there's a way to be an obnoxious tool. Hopefully they were the former.
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