It's National Playground Safety Week, but I'm not celebrating. In fact, I'd like to propose a National Playground Danger Week instead.
Don't get me wrong: I appreciate playground safety. As the CEO of a national nonprofit that has built over 2,000 playgrounds in 15 years, there are certain precautions I'm glad we take. For instance, I'm glad we surface our playgrounds with engineered wood fiber instead of, say, cement. I'm glad that we follow guidelines for swing set placement so that a kid doesn't jump off a swing and sail smack into the side of a building.
That said, we as a country have taken playground safety too far. We have crossed the line from common sense (don't place a swing set next to a building) to that murky "What if?" territory in which we imagine every conceivable accident that could ever take place on a playground (what if a finger gets caught in a see-saw?) and try to guard against it.
The result? Boring, uninspired playgrounds that lack whimsy, risk, and -- yes -- see-saws.
We all have a natural instinct to protect children from harm. It's never fun to see a child hurt, even if it's just a scraped knee. But on the other hand, children need to take on physical challenges to learn and grow, and scraped knees and other bumps and bruises teach them valuable lessons about their own limits.
When given age-appropriate challenges, children tend to take them very seriously; in fact, the more obvious the risk is, the more cautiously a child will proceed. Adventure Playgrounds are a perfect case in point. While our paranoid and litigious society boasts only a handful, Europe has hundreds, offering kids the opportunity to play with fire, use handsaws and sail across 50-foot zip lines.
Denise Brown, Manager of the Berkeley Adventure Playground in California (pictured right), told NPR in an interview:
What we like to say is that there are no hidden risks in the playground. Even a young child walking through the playground gates can look around and tell that it's a different type of playground, and there are sticks and boards and nails and rocks and things that they need to watch out for.
In her experience, there are fewer injuries on Adventure Playgrounds than at standard U.S. playgrounds. At Kolle 37, an Adventure Playground in Berlin where kids can build their own three-story forts with wood and nails, two children have broken bones and a couple have stepped on nails over the course of five years.
We don't give our kids enough credit. No child wants to fall off a jungle gym or slide. Accidents are an unfortunate fact of life, but to lower every last slide and jungle gym to a height that would only interest a toddler is doing our children a grave disservice. Our instincts to protect and our instincts to immediately point fingers when accidents do happen by filing a lawsuit, are actually hurting our children by denying them the opportunity to take on vital challenges.
During National Playground Safety Week, I'll celebrate common-sense safety. I'll also celebrate skinned knees and bruised elbows. I'll celebrate so-called "dangerous" playgrounds --playgrounds with see-saws, zip lines and towering slides. But I won't laud so-called injury-proof and lawsuit-proof play equipment -- because a boring playground is nothing to celebrate.
Photo by penny (cc).
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Play Equipment for Kids
Look around a modern playground. When I was a kid, you had a climbing structure here, a slide there, a firepole yonder, and a section for the swings or see-saws. Now it's all combined - a big climbing structure with bridges and monkeybars and swings and everything all in one! (I never saw merry-go-rounds as a child, but I see them often now in newer playground. It's probably a fashion thing)
And some of them are "safe" and some of them are tall, but that's beside the point.
See-saws and swings take up a lot of space and only a few people can play on them at any one time. Plus, the play isn't overly conducive to interaction or to imagination. Modern playgrounds, I'm noticing, are often designed so everybody can play at once and it's easier to come up with pretend play.
That doesn't mean that those old-school style designs are wrong, but in smaller playgrounds are they really the wisest use of space? Especially when the current design philosophy seems to be against stand-alone equipment?
Safety might be PART of it, but I'm also seeing fewer of those toddler see-saws as well, the ones that are super safe. I really think there are other things going on here. Overly safe playgrounds ARE a problem, but I don't think they have anything to do with the current decline of see-saws.
1) Merry-go-rounds: you mean you can't just make it go slower? That was my fav, and I was never seriously hurt by one (but I was hurt on a slide!).
2) Anything worth climbing on.
But, if you're into the more "risky" kinds of kid-friendly experience, I HIGHLY recommend City Museum in St. Louis, MO. Look it up, and then drool over it's multi-level fun factory; it's an old shoe factory converted to the ultimate playhouse, complete with a 3 story slide and lots of stuff to get scraped and poked with!
Seriously, City Museum, look it up. Then pretend you went there "for the kids." LOL!
Recently my family was in Venice, staying in what I think is called the "Lido" area. My kids wanted to see the beach, so I walked them over after dark. There, my sons encountered a playground like they'd never seen before, they encountered something they'd never seen in the USA - a see saw.
They had so much fun on it, riding it for rather a long time. Nobody got hurt either.
The irony is that our city's lack of attention to basic infrastructure puts our children at far greater risk than playground equipment ever could. One of my son's parks borders a busy city alleyway, and the gate to the alley was broken a few years back -- it wouldn't close all the way, but also wouldn't open because it was wedged in a dirt bank. Numerous calls to parks department and aldermen did nothing to fix it, and one day my then-two-year-old slipped through the gap and took off down the alley -- while I was stuck trying to climb the fence to go after him. Thank god it ended well when a stranger heard me screaming and scooped him up, but even when I called the city AGAIN and told them what had happened, they still did nothing. It didn't get fixed until I called the alderman and informed him that it was only a matter of time before another child got hurt, and that when s/he did, I would happily testify that the city knew of the hazard and knew that a child had previously been endangered, and still did nothing to prevent further risk.
But, at least there were no merry-go-rounds or see-saws, so I guess they figured the kids were safe.
When my kids were little, there was a playground, built years before by a local service club, that we drove 30 miles to get to. There was a climbing wall made of tires, a very tall slide made of a fire escape slide that had been removed from an old school. It was fantastic! There was an old fashioned merry go round and see saws--the old board kind that were pretty darn high and exciting when you were on the up end. The swing sets were tall and the kids felt they touched the sky with their feet. There was a tree house built among several old oaks that all the kids loved. The playground was always full of kids of all ages and families picnicking.
Too good to last. One spring we drove there to find all the fun stuff had been replaced with orange, plastic, low to the ground equipment. Only a couple of moms and toddlers were there. There was nothing there for anyone over 5.
I miss those playgrounds, plentiful when I was a child, as well as the swimming pools with deep ends and diving boards. And paths through the woods without asphalt on them as wide as a highway.
My grandkids are missing out.
I am on the committee trying to rebuild a current playground, and heaven forbid if I suggest that the new design is boring. I like some of the current equipment and wish they would keep it there... ugh, I miss the good old days!