In Britain’s Playgrounds, ‘Bringing in Risk’ to Build Resilience | Hacker News Reader

In Britain’s Playgrounds, ‘Bringing in Risk’ to Build Resilience

nytimes.com

58 pointsonuralp47 comments

> in Shoeburyness in Southeast Britain

Completely off topic, but this made me chuckle, and I thought it might be interesting to point out.

This sounds completely weird to a British ear. For some reason, don't ask me why, we don't ever refer to North/South/East/West in the context of 'Britain' but only in the context of the countries within it. Southeast England is the 'correct' phrasing.

Just an interesting and funny example of completey unintuitive local language quirks being exposed by an outside perspective. Of course it's totally logical to say 'Southeast Britain', and seeing that it looks weird made me, for the first time, notice it and question why we don't.

Another favorite American-perspective truth about Britain I enjoy is when towns in Essex are described as London suburbs. It's inconceivable to me (I lived in Chelmsford for a few years as a teenager) but quite true.

If you mean that it's too far out to be considered a suburb, places even farther out from Los Angeles than Essex is from London are described as suburbs of Los Angeles, so I don't know if it's an American perspective. Apologies if you meant something else.

Typically a suburb is related by function rather than distance. For example I grew up in what's called a "dormitory village" built in Metroland - which is a type of suburb. Like most cities London used to expand by gradually encroaching on surrounding non-urban land - most parts of what we'd now think of as inner London were originally villages on its outskirts, and the city just kept growing. The last batch of growth was "Metroland", the North West expansion of London's underground railway to neighbouring towns last century. And then people said "Enough" and the planning rules were altered to create a "green belt" into which London could not grow. But Metroland is still there, just stuck at the first phase where it's connected to the city but not yet urbanised. You can wake up in your nice cottage amid open countryside in the village of Chesham, walk a few minutes to a London Underground station incongruously sited amidst this setting and travel to your job in the City of London (which you need because a cottage in rural-seeming Chesham is fantastically expensive...). The dormitory villages don't make any sense without the huge city to absorb all these workers, so they're defined by it and by the transport links that make it practical to live in this village yet work in the centre of the city, they are suburbs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grZ6371HcJE

It's not true, though. Those towns have their own history and their own characters. Suburbs are places where housing is built specifically for people who work in the main urban area.

To a non-British ear, Shoeburyness is what sounds weird ;)

I don't even mentally error check placenames in the UK - someone could tell me Wibly-upon-Fluberstuck was a place and I'd probably believe it.

https://www.anglotopia.net/ultimate-list-of-funny-british-pl...

Looking just on the London Tube and Rail map[0] alone, there's plenty of both odd and amusing station names (East India! Cockfosters! Cyprus! Barking! Elephant and Castle!), and many that are pronounced completely differently to how they appear (the number of visitors who I hear ask for directions to 'Lie-chester Square' for example!).

[0]: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-rail-and-tube-services-map....

Very funny. (My cousin was born in Wibly-upon-Fluberstuck)

It sounds like it should mean something but it doesn't.

A measure of how soft the ground is, by observing how far one's shoes get buried in it.

https://tmoliff.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/shoeburyness-absn.htm...

It absolutely does mean something. Just probably not what you had in mind. :)

In English toponymy "bury" refers to a fortified settlement, and "ness" is a promontory or headland.

Sure enough, Shoeburyness is a town on raised ground by the mouth of the Thames estuary, and has had some sort of fortification or another on that site since Roman times.

Here's some pronunciations: https://forvo.com/word/shoeburyness/

(I think the harbour1971 is closer).

My first search returned this other site, where all of the pronunciations of Shoeburyness are wrong.

https://www.howtopronounce.com/shoeburyness/

I saw a made-for-TV movie about the Steven Stayner kidnapping [1]. Stayner was kidnapped when he was 7 while walking home from school in Merced, California.

No one knew if he had been kidnapped, murdered, had an accident, or ran away.

There's a creek named Bear Creek that runs through Merced. At one point in the movie someone in law enforcement suggests that they dredge "the Bear Creek" to search for Stayner's body.

That probably sounded fine to most people watching, but it seemed very wrong to me. I lived in Merced or the surrounding countryside from 7 until I went to college, with several years living a block from Bear Creek, and I never heard anyone call it "the Bear Creek". It was always just "Bear Creek" or "The creek".

I once made a list (since lost) of assorted creeks, rivers, lakes, and other prominent geological features around the US and what the locals called them. Some almost always used "the" and some almost always did not. I could not discern any pattern to which did and which did not.

I wonder if a given locality is consistent on this? E.g., if they omit "the" from their local river, will they also omit it from their local lake?

I wonder if intelligence agencies, when sending people trying to pass as natives to someplace to spy, train them on this level of local lingo minutia?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Stayner

Reminds me that many people in southern California put "the" before highway names:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California_freeways#F...

I'm from a town called Campbell River. There's a river called Campbell River running through it. The river is The Campbell River and the town, of course, is just Campbell River. Talking about the actual river was awkward. You had to say "We're going up the River next weekend," and people would ask "Which river?" because there are several in the area. Then you could say "The Campbell River." It was necessary to have this exchange every time.

Wouldn't "we're going to the Campbell River," and "we're going to Campbell River" be distinguishable?

Yes, but...

Local dialect almost prohibits certain speech.

I bought a pressure cleaner today. Where I'm from, South Australia, everyone colloquially refers to them as "a Gurni", all the locals here in Tasmania call them "a Karcher". These are the two leading brands.

The hardware stores here sell both, but if you say to someone here in Tasmania "hit it with the Gerni" they'll screw their face up and then you have to have the conversation about how everyone back in South Australia calls them "a Gerni".

So, I think, it turns out easier to just use the local lingo even if it has some peculiarities that seem clumsy.

My other favourite is "sack truck" vs "hand trolley".

Words are fun!

> That probably sounded fine to most people watching

My first impression was that the troopers were going to search a bear's crack for the remains of Steven Stayner. I only realized it was creek after re-reading twice.

You don't have to put so much effort into not offending anyone. It's fine to say "that's not British English, by the way". Half of your post is dedicated to not offending delicate Americans by reassuring them that they're not wrong. I'm sure they know.

It's odd that older generations feel the need to build in risk into playgrounds when any kid will be just fine pushing risk. It's moreso overbearing parents halting their fun.

I remember sitting in park watching kids daring each other to climb on top of the plastic safety spiral slide and try jumping down the ground from 15 feet up. Eventually a gaggle of adults kept lining up to talk them down to be more safe.

Not to mention kids these days are under a massive amount of social stigmatization through social media that permeates their daily lives. At least back in the day when you got beat up at school you could go home and feel safe for a bit. Nowadays your bullies come home alongside your Facebook account.

I tend to believe that the resilience built into the current teenage generation is unprecedented. When I see others complaining about a lack of grit in kids I see a generation that has developed a strong set of coping mechanisms for a reality older generations are simply blind to.

Its really interesting POV. I do wonder if this is conflating different development areas.

The social side is much more direct route to emotions, belonging and self worth. While playground adventure is more about challenging your brain to allow you to do what feels dangerous but you can overcome.

I did tread twice in what you said "I see a generation that has developed a strong set of coping mechanisms for a reality older generations are simply blind to". Very pertinent.

Children push risk, and so you need safer forms of risk built in to allow children to feel the risk, rather than trying to eliminate all risk at which point children do fucking stupid things like

> climb on top of the plastic safety spiral slide and try jumping down the ground from 15 feet up

>Children push risk

Yes, a healthy boy can't even sit on a chair without tipping, rocking, swivelling, etc. Put peril in parks or promote parkour.

>One such audit found that a popular climbing structure, open since the early 1980s, presented “a medium to high risk potential for severe to fatal injuries”

Ah, they must mean the tree. Popular since 198000000 BCE.

Tokyo (not sure about the rest of Japan) has similar with a number of 'play parks' within larger parks. Rope swings, makeshift slides, saws, hammers and nails abound. The kids come back smelling of smoke from the communal bonfire though...

See http://playpark.jp (Japanese only)

Reminds me of the Berkeley Adventure Playground.

also their normal playgrounds are nice. Tarzan swings, metal bar jungle jims, wood and metal slide houses and fenced in sandboxes are standard, plus they pretty much all have public toilets and water fountains. In general I find infrastructure for families great here, even in such a crowded place.

> (In the United States, a country with far higher litigation costs, government agencies overseeing play safety are not known to have made any such changes.)

That's the first time in a while that the New York Times has really made me laugh. The article pictures British schools as a model of educational enlightenment, and takes a swipe against an obsessively litigious culture that's seeping into the lives of infants. It shows how implementing commonsensical educational policies is a bipartisan issue, and that the wider litigious culture is the roadblock to helping kids develop well-tuned resilient and risk-taking behaviours.

Agreed on not holding British schools up too high, but as an American, I have to agree with the author's swipe that any US facility that intentionally provided bricks on a playground would be in for a world of hurt financially. It would not end well.

I showed this article to my Commonwealth wife and she chuckled. Most Brits recall school as a place where physical and verbal bullying is commonplace, much more prevalent than is perceived in other countries. Maybe the playgrounds are sanitized, but the risk of physical injury at the hands of ones' school mates is ever-present.

The code is saying the British playgrounds are not sanitized, and they are not school playground either.

UK schools have done a lot to combat bullying in recent years. My kids’ experience of school is quite different to mine.

The next step would be to remove all those Safety signs (e.g. mind the step, look left, drowning risk in front of the sea... ) in the streets and see how many people die due to their absence.

Those signs are not primarily there to prevent death, they exist to prevent lawsuits, or at least mitigate their impact.

I know, but i still find them stupid and i will always joke about them preventing death. It is just such a contrast with continental Europe which do not have them.

Yep. I lived in UK for 8 years now and I still find them jarring. Warning signs on literally everything. Damn automatic doors have to have no fewer than 3(!!!) warning signs(automatic door, sliding direction and watch out glass) - it's insane. It's like living in a society of toddlers where everything has to be safety labeled.

I like how in Star Trek TNG the lift in Engineering is an exposed platform with handrails. Deep Space 9 has some of these as well.

Only the Turbolift is fully enclosed because it travels fast.

In the future there are no safety signs.

The USS Enterprise was a military ship, though, not exactly open to the general public.

It's interesting that the UK's "Health and Safety Executive" spend so much of their time saying "please stop eliminating risk" and "please stop saying you can't do something because of health and safety, it's not true".

http://www.hse.gov.uk/entertainment/childrens-play-july-2012...

> 1. Health and safety laws and regulations are sometimes presented as a reason why certain play and leisure activities undertaken by children and young people should be discouraged. The reasons for this misunderstanding are many and varied. They include fears of litigation or criminal prosecution because even the most trivial risk has not been removed. There can be frustration with the amounts of paperwork involved, and misunderstanding about what needs to be done to control significant risks.

> 2. The purpose of this statement is to give clear messages which tackle these misunderstandings. In this statement, HSE makes clear that, as a regulator, it recognises the benefits of allowing children and young people of all ages and abilities to have challenging play opportunities.

> 3. HSE fully supports the provision of play for all children in a variety of environments. HSE understands and accepts that this means children will often be exposed to play environments which, whilst well-managed, carry a degree of risk and sometimes potential danger.

>4. HSE wants to make sure that mistaken health and safety concerns do not create sterile play environments that lack challenge and so prevent children from expanding their learning and stretching their abilities.

They say something similar in many of their documents.

I work a bit in safety, and I get frustrated with too many signs. Putting up a sign doesn't change dangerous behaviour; and it causes fatigue so people start ignoring signs.

Shoeburyness, home of the MoD testing range. I moved to the Kent coast as a child. I was surprised while playing on the school playground that none of my friends even noticed the deep booming sound every few minutes. The range must be 50 miles away across the estuary but it's still loud enough to rattle windows.

It's also quite close to the Richard Montgomery Exclusion Zone.

At eight, I was playing with WWII ammunition. I mean, it was everywhere. But damn, that was stupid.

It sounds like a specific playground for parents that want to feel special. It's a ridiculous idea, and dangerous for the kids.

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