How should our kids play at recess? Alameda schools offer lessons | Hacker News Reader

How should our kids play at recess? Alameda schools offer lessons

sfchronicle.com

34 pointsJamilD22 comments

When I was a kid, both the local park and elementary school playgrounds had climbable constructs made out of widely-spaced wooden logs, with many sections partially hollowed out. That meant you'd have bees, hornets and wasps nesting in there frequently. Add to that the risk of splinters.

To make matters even more interesting, these things were tall. Probably 20ft at the very top. If you fell, you'd either fall from that height into the stones and probably be fine, or you'd get unlucky and break your fall on protruding wood from the equipment on the way down. There were no rules governing how you could or couldn't play on the stuff, just common sense.

Of course, it was fairly easy to see how something like a bee sting, splinter or just plain bad luck could have resulted in a kid losing their balance, falling from a decent height, and ending up paralyzed (or worse) in the process. I knew of no serious incidents, but in the mid 90s all of that equipment was replaced with un-fun plastic stuff that was maybe a third of the height and impossible to fall from. I can only imagine how the earlier equipment would be received today.

Yup. I was an 80s kid. I also had tons on fun on playground deathtraps that somehow never contributed to any serious injuries for me.

Coming soon to a playground near you, replacing all climbable trees with small bushes.

That is literally survivorship bias

I can't be the only one that remembers frequent broken arms and concussions from playground equipment in the 80s/90s?

Frequent? No. Occasional? Yes. And fingers pinched in swing chains, someone biting through their tongue, sand in eyes, skin ripped from palms, and other minor incidents.

To add an anecdote the other way: I fell from a late 90s playground jungle gym and manager to land my tongue on a sharp point left over from welding the thing together. Damn near tore it in half and had to get stitches. They pretty quickly replaced the entire thing with one of those plastic constructions.

To be fair some kid managed to get a skull fracture on the plastic thing so maybe making things more obviously dangerous is safer.

Tangentially related: ask your neighbourhood woodworker how he lost that finger. Good chance it's from the bandsaw, which is a relatively slow moving machine so it seems safer than e.g. a circular saw while in fact the inverse is true.

Everything here got replaced with super safe stuff in the late 90s/early 2000s, but recently the new new stuff going in seems to be getting more dangerous again!

A park just went in nearby and it's got a bridge of swinging pendulum things that you could easily fall off, all suspended about 2m off the ground. There's bark underneath but still, you could easily break your arm falling off it and it's prety much designed to tip you off. 15 years ago I feel like they'd be 30cm off the ground max.

Well, if you break your arm, what's the big deal ?

No, seriously ? Yes, you did break your arm, but I'm sure you can learn plenty of things in the process.

Generally I agree, but one problem is that most families can't easily absorb the cost of a trip to the emergency, X-RAYs, and a cast. It may be a good lesson, but it's also an expensive one.

That sounds like a healthcare problem, not a playground problem.

I agree, but the healthcare system is the reality we live in.

I've got no problem with the new equipment, I think it's cool that they're being less super-safe (within reasonable limits). Didn't mean to imply I thought it was bad.

The other user's comment about healthcare costs doesn't apply here because I'm not in the US and we have free public healthcare.

Latest thinking is that a broken arm for kids is within acceptable limits for learning about risk. It's the fatal injuries from boring old teeter totters that's been nixed.

Children tend to like some element of risk. If you try to remove all risk from play equipment children will use it in weird ways that are sometimes far riskier than if you just give them something a bit scary.

My local park had a recent rebuild, and there's some stuff up really high (over 4 meters), but it's all enclosed. And there's a 3 meter high crow's nest, but it's surrounded by netting.

They've got really good at building mostly safe but still exciting equipment.

I saw this pic of an old playground and it's pretty damn alarming: http://dallaslibrary2.org/dallashistory/photogallery/images/...

Though, I spent my youth playing unsupervised in the Appalachian woods, climbing trees, getting stung by numerous types of bugs, falling out of trees, stepping over snakes, touching poison ivy, swimming in rivers, getting splinters, accidently cutting myself with knives, machetes, axes, & hatchets and I had practically no "bad" injuries (no broken bones or hospital trips)... a few close calls though.

I'm lucky to not be from the US, and so growing up was pretty free for all, within the limits of common sense and your mom yelling at you for not being careful when you got hurt. The funnest part of it all was using the playground like it wasn't meant to, like climbing up the slides, laying on top of the monkey bars or standing up, balancing on, and jumping off the seesaw. I also had a bike; you needed something with a good suspension cause we'd try to make them jump on makeshift ramps. Or we'd take them down the steepest slopes/stairs we could find to challenge ourselves. We'd even ride them down the river-side through rocks and plants; park it by shore and jump in the river.

Of course I fell on my face and got hurt; everyone did. I still have some of the scars on my knees; boy it was definitely worth though.

It strikes me that in the US on top of underestimating the common sense of kids adults also tend to underestimate their resilience (then again, sometimes I see the kinds of TV shows kids here might be exposed to, and I too wonder if their common sense is being undermined /:). When you're young you can take hits, a scratched knee, torn shirt, wet/muddy shoes, they're all temporary and not a huge deal. What really matters is the game. Sadly, in adult-space in the US it seems to be the risk of lawsuits that matters most.

When I was a kid we used to play with rusty galvanized iron and stray dogs. I would give my childhood a 10/10.

Probably the lowest in the fun/danger ratio were the teeter-totters. Playing on them the way they were meant to be played on was no fun, so almost immediately people started doing dangerous things, like jumping off to watch the other person fall to the ground. Also, giant chunks of swinging metal....imagine absent-mindedly walking too close to one of those.

Parents don't want their kids to die so they place some reasonable restrictions on activities in order to reduce risk. After all, they only have 1 or 2 kids so they can't afford to lose one. Historically families had many more children and it was perfectly normal to lose 1 or 2 (usually to infectious disease).

With school bureaucrats the story is different. They place unhealthily stringent limits on risk. They can't afford to lose a single child even though they have 200,000 of them. Because they might get sued or have their careers damaged.

I'm trying to imagine all the fortunes that schools are giving up by keeping kids safe.

I don't understand what you mean. Explain?

Don't have citations handy, but the first generation of playground equipment actually was incredibly lethal (1930-1940s).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com