The war against today's dangerously dull playgrounds
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My understanding (based on some news article I read a couple years ago; take this with a pinch of salt) is that in practice, the injury rates from de-risked playgrounds are not materially lower than injury rates from older riskier playgrounds. The main difference is that the new playgrounds are less fun.
Our parents would just let us do our stuff. And although we were bruised all the time only one of us broke a bone once.
In the same time my friend with over-careful doctors as parents broke arms/legs roughly four times. And other kids with paranoid parents had similar problems.
Our parents thought us early on that we need to judge these risks ourselves, while these other kids would be extremely scared of harmless stuff at one point and overconfident in other more dangerous situations.
Also, when it comes to "our parents in the past would let us do anything and I came out ok" sounds a bit like survival bias to me. In Sweden, far fewer kids die today than in the 70s, so perhaps there's some merit to bicycle helmets, safer playgrounds and not letting your kids eats whole grapes unattended before the age of five or so etc.
Maybe the parents were not so much paranoid as reacting to their kids either doing dumber stuff or being more clumsy or having weaker bones.
human beings are often not rational
How does that follow?
For something to be abandoned, there needs to be social agreement that it is a bad idea. This is meaningfully different than something being a bad idea.
I have a friend who design playgrounds, and he operates on the principle that there's two kinds of safety. It's the objective safety I mention above, and there's the subjective safety which you mention. Kids should have objectively safe playgrounds, but they should be allowed to challenge their subjective safety feeling.
The objective safety has mostly to do with the design and maintenance of the equipment. The subjective safety is more due to the design of the playground itself and the elements in it.
One example is a climbing wall. With the right layout, sufficient impact sand or rubber on the ground around it as well as proper maintenance, it can be objectively very safe but still allow kids to feel they push their boundaries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924858
Very cool, thanks, keep posting!
(My own photos)
Goodness, I've instructed mountaineering courses, and I see plenty of adults who do this. The main difference isn't that the adults are smarter, but that they stopped trying to have fun.
Unless the playgrounds magically changed brain development so that kids got well-developed executive function much earlier than human children develop that under normal circumstances, there is no conceivable playground design that could do that.
And older playgrounds weren't, in any case, designed to do that, or with the risks built in intentionally for any particular purpose. They were built with less structured consideration of risk, which made the actual risks (and the obviousness of them, even to adults) essentially random.
I'm not an expert, but I find it quite likely that, yes, playgrounds do magically change brain development.
I think it's well-known in developmental psychology that your experience of, interaction with and reasoning about the world around you shapes how your brain develops.
They don't change it enough to make executive function develop early enough to make that story plausible, which we know because some of the studies on how and when executive function develops which make it implausible occurred with people who grew up with those old playgrounds.
Pretending children are just smaller adults is as much of a problem as excessively infantilizing them, if slightly less popular of a problem the last couple decades.
My philosophy is that it's not my job to protect him from harm. It's my job to protect him from irreparable harm. The point being that he has to learn how to cope with being hurt and getting hurt is the only way to learn where the line is.
Sometimes we make errors and increase the risk of harm when trying to decrease it; errors should be corrected but it is otherwise trade-offs and uncertainty.
Once he tried to start climbing the changing table at home, we decided to try to get him to practice climbing on things. He now climbs the table by himself most of the time. This accomplishes two things - he loses interest in climbing it, and if he tries it when our backs are turned he will have the skills to make it up without hurting himself.
As a parent I would of course keep my kids away from something I thought would cause a head injury or was seriously dangerous, but minor injury risk (even up to broken bones) is just something all humans live with. Otherwise there’s no sports, no running, no exercise at all.... and that’s even worse for your health.
Most kids don't go to playground after school, because nowdays parents are expected to go with them and parents don't like that or wants to cook. Playgrounds are super boring for parents. When kids are big enough to go alone, they don't know what to do there.
Kids over 8 mostly want to either play elaborate stories or talk.
"Naturally" there are no playgrounds, gardens at best and risk there is from tools. When I take kids to forest, there are only rarely dangerous situations. Most trees are impossible to climb at, exceptions are the ones with fruits in the gardens. The ground is soft.
The kind of injuries that happened in old playgrounds like stucking head somewhere or strangling on rope or hand stuck in seesaw don't happen.
He loves the outdoors. He will literally yell and cry at us to take him out for walks and/or to the park. Loves when I take him on the playground.
When we climb up, he loves to crawl through the tunnel and finds it hilarious when I chase him to stop him from getting away from me. He will definitely try to go down the slide by himself, or crawl out of the playground to a 5 foot drop. It's as if he has no concept of the dangers.
Meanwhile, I generally let him do what he wants elsewhere, like climbing stairs, crawling into cupboards, etc. He picked up a pretty gnarly bruise on his chin when we went swimming and he fell in the change room.
To his credit, nothing seems to deter him. He'll cry for maybe 30 seconds, often less, take a quick hug from me, and then jump right back to whatever he was doing.
I can't wait until he's actually walking because then I can expose him to some riskier stuff, which he'll enjoy. Winter's almost here, so I expect him to be walking when we start enjoying the playground more often again.
If you have snow, get him a snow sled for toddlers. Stiga makes a really nice one called the Baby Cruiser. It has a large back rest, cushion and a seat belt. And the design makes sure the speed remains low enough, unless you take it out on icy conditions (which you shouldn't).
As a bonus, in spring you can put it on top of a skateboard, run the seat belt around both the sled and skateboard, and presto you can "sled" in summer. My kids used to love that.
https://www.clasohlson.com/uk/Stiga-Cruiser-Baby-Sledge/p/Pr...
Sledges are awesome though, and also highly recommended. I take him to daycare on one when the ice/snow is suitable for it. If only the city wouldn't grit the pavements it'd be easier!
I do plan on taking him out all the time in the winter, but we're limited by:
1) Reduced daylight hours
2) My wife is primary caregiver (on leave) and does a fantastic job of taking him outside, and she will continue during the winter, but it will be more difficult for her than for me.
Nevertheless, he's going to love this winter!
If you're up north, maybe you also do cross-country skiing (or snow shoes). If so, you could consider getting a pulka like the Fjellpulken Children. It's awesome, but a bit expensive, and maybe hard to find over there. They work well up to the age of 4-5, then they want to ski by themselves.
https://en.aventurenordique.com/children-pulk-fjellpulken.ht...
Of course I don't like him being injured, but at the same time it is going to happen and I'd rather he learn as soon as he can.
I'm very very attentive when we're in a swimming pool, but otherwise I hang-back when we're in the park unless he says "Daddy help".
When I was a kid, a visit to an NT property was being dragged around some posh house where you couldn't touch anything.
Somewhere around 15-20 years ago I think they realised their clientele was getting older and older and ever since they've been on a bit of a mission to make more of their properties kid/family friendly. They now have some of the best play areas we know of, most of them in woodland, with the equipment etc made of wood, often taken from the woodland, or built into the landscape. We took a small group to one today, and they would have spent hours playing there if we'd had the time, much longer than they will play at some of the more structured "modern" play areas near here.
We've taken to using NT sites as breaks on long journeys. At a minimum they will have a cafe, and most will have something to give us and the kids a nice break from the car. Its definitely a nicer way to stretch your legs than a motorway sercvice station. The app is pretty useful for this.
They can be pricey as individual visits, but if you go to more than a couple a year, a family membership pays for self pretty quickly.
No way would I tolerate it being otherwise.
The value to the child is immense!
Just one example: during a crisis time, or disaster, who do you want as peers?
I will take the free ranged humans any day. They will have some sense of what "do what it takes" actually means, and few enough boundaries so as to stand a chance of applying it successfully.
Almost all the horror stories I hear about hyperactive reports to and, even moreso, actual enforcement action by, child welfare agencies are from the suburbs, but big cities.
Nextdoor tends to attract people who worry about anything and everything, and who report anyone they don't recognize (or just don't like) as being suspicious.
Social media, including NextDoor, is full of that.
Yes, bad thing happen in real life. But in the hyper media only bad things happen. Don’t let that filter out reality for you.
It was a half-mile away. All side-streets.
Of course, that was back in the 1970's, when crime in the USA was but a fraction of what it is today! ;-)
Crime rate in 1974 is higher than it is now.
Crime rate in 1977 is 2x what it is now!
America is remarkably safe, but safe doesn't drive views or click throughs, so it isn't exactly reported on.
So many people consider the 50s,60s,70s idyllic, crime-free decades when children could safely walk across town and everyone knew their neighbors and nobody locked their doors.
In reality, crime today is much lower.
The street I grew up on is now packed with cars. Used to be we could run around with abandon, now days for some reason the off street parking and parking garages are both full, and with the same # of houses, people are now parking on the street, and cars are more frequent.
Rather strange to be honest. :/
In areas with built up density it makes sense of course, more people and all that.
Most of my playing outside happened before middle-school, because by grade 7 I had too much homework to play outside a lot.
I have 5 young grandchildren and a 20 month old son, so lots of observation time. The grounds are wildly loved by the kids there. They have rubber surfaces that dramatically reduce broken bones, but do not prevent pain. I love that they still get scrapes, bruises.
The sets are large, complex, and fun. My kids will spend as many hours as we let them.
Most playgrounds are okay for 0–8 year-olds. It’s older kids, especially teenagers, who get most bored on de-risked modern playgrounds, and either give up on them or start looking around for (often quite stupid) ways to make them riskier, e.g. a group of 6 kids climbing onto a swing intended for 1 kid (thereby breaking it), riding their skateboards down the slide (and almost running over the toddlers at the bottom), climbing up onto the roofs of buildings that weren’t intended for climbing, throwing rocks at each-other, ...
The playground near my house was re-done a few years ago, and the number of kids older than 10 has dropped dramatically. All of the toddlers are plenty happy with the new one, but it’s a net loss for the city because there are many good playgrounds for kids under 8, and very few for older kids.
Aside: those rubber surfaces are very uncomfortable on bare feet any time the temperature is above 80°F. And often playground wood chips are full of extremely sharp corners (My adult friend stepped on a wood chip which punctured both his shoe and his foot). Sand, dirt, grass, and even concrete are all much more pleasant.
Middle schools never had them as far as I know. So around 10 seems to have always been the max age for playground equipment.
Is that the right reaction to have? I think it probably is.
And regardless of whether you agree with the OPs's reaction, that's the reaction that the vast majority of parents are going to have.
No it's the 46 year old alone on the monkey bars who's going to have a bad time. At the very minimum police will run them off. There are plenty of cities that have ordinances banning unaccompanied adults from playgrounds, and a 46 year old who insists on doing this is just going to ensure their local municipality passes such an ordinance.
I personally don't care if an adult wants to play on a playground, but making a kids only zone is hardly bigotry in action.
Anecdotally, a few years ago after redesign my neighborhood park went from a pretty decent number of 10–16 year-olds playing on the playground to now basically none, except sometimes high school skaters who bring their skateboards, or sometimes a mob of high school kids who will all cluster around the swings and look at their phones.
I’m not saying that there haven’t always been teenagers doing stupid shit. But having riskier / older-kid-focused playground equipment does attract at least some teenagers who use them more or less as intended.
I’d be curious to see better research about this though.
Anecdotally, being barefoot dramatically improves kids’ rate/quality of learning basic locomotion (balance, stability, agility, speed). The kids I know who are habitually barefoot learn how to walk and run with a graceful and efficient gait in a matter of months and by 1.5 years old are quite mobile, while kids wearing stiff shoes often are still toddling around at age 3.
(I’m sure gross quantity of practice also makes a big difference; some young kids are pushed all around in a stroller/car seat/etc. and spend very little time walking for themselves. The frequently-barefoot kids I know all spend a lot of time outdoors running and climbing around. I am sure even in identical circumstances there will be high variance in young kids’ motor skills. But I bet if we took a random sample of yuppies’ children in a modern suburb and compared them to a random sample of kids from a hunter–gatherer tribe somewhere, the differences would be quite stark.)
It makes plenty of theoretical sense as well: (a) the bottoms of the feet are incredibly dense with nerves, and (b) the feet and lower legs have a huge number of tiny interconnected moving parts. If learning anything is largely a matter of trying a variety of minor adjustments and then gathering as much data about the result as possible, and then throwing it at our personal deep learning neural net machines (a.k.a. brains, specifically the motor cortex), then wearing stiff shoes is a huge handicap, both limiting degrees of possible motion and also obstructing most of the measurement apparatus.
Historically, poor southern whites went barefoot because that was cheaper than buying shoes. This barefoot lifestyle ensured they would stay poor by infecting them with hookworm, giving them lifelong anemia. This gave rise to the stereotype of the poor southern white as pale, lazy, and sluggish.
Getting these people to wear shoes was actually a major public health accomplishment.
I’m curious to what extent the decline of hookworm in the US South can be attributed to better sanitation and healthcare and increasing urbanization vs. footwear per se.
On the other hand, poor people in the US South now have a shocking rate of obesity (in some places >50%), because they now spend little time walking around outside, spend much of the day sitting, and eat an unhealthy diet (probably not an exhaustive list of contributing factors). From what I can tell the public health impact of pervasive obesity can be just as serious as parasites like hookworm.
* * *
If someone plans to live in a tropical rural village somewhere that people habitually defecate outdoors, wearing shoes might be a reasonable precaution. For most people reading this website though, being barefoot isn’t going to harm their children.
https://www.blogto.com/city/2017/09/adventure-playground-tor...
As a kid my playground was the mountains, the beach, playing with sand,dirt, climbing trees, making cardboard's or bricks' or wood houses. Hearing and telling stories around the campfire...
I was terrified when I went back to visit a school I was when I was 4-6 years old. Instead of just one big piece of land for kids to play they had divided it with fences in something like 20 small spaces so they could control kids easier.
It was a prison. I believe this has to affect the kids development somehow.
I also feel bad for a playground like the one in the image: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1094dd57d6a80c1ae1fb131937de5...
Because kids have imagination, they don't need a ship. If they have boxes they have a ship, or a space center or everything they could imagine.
This is like a father buying a toy for his children and then only he playing it, not letting his children play.
A adult designer takes the best part: imagining, and then doesn't let the kids imagine anything else as you can not move or modify anything in the ship like you can do with boxes or wooden logs.
That is making a tremendous disservice to children.
Disagree 100%.
My kids absolutely LOVE that playground (assuming it’s the one in Hyde Park, London). It’s nowhere near where we live so we’ve gone there maybe 5-10 times tops.
But they love it, and beg to go if we’re nearby.
The main problem I have with it is that unlike the picture it can get insanely crowded, sometimes with a queue waiting to go in, managed by park officials.
Not sure why you think a fun ship discourages creativity. My kids regularly do creative play and role-playing anywhere, at home or out and about.
But it’s also just really cool and tons of fun to climb around on a giant (to them) wooden ship.
How did she control the study well enough to assert that there's a causal relation? Or was it just a correlation?
From the age of ~3 kids start to learn their motor skills to climb, grab, jump, do all sort of stuff.
Kids of the age of these pictures, you let them play wherever that's not a death trap, they'll basically be fine.
I remember when my school replaced the entirely wooden and very interesting play structure from the 70s with one of those new colorful, tubular metal ones. It sure looked safer. The 15 foot spire we took turns leaking off was gone. The tire swing that took out many a passing kid was gone. The piece of 5ft diameter concrete drain sewer pipe I busted my head on was gone. But that didn't stop one kid from nearly scalping himself on the new equipment, requiring 28 Staples. Nor did it prevent broken legs from falls, or many other injuries. But it sure looked safer and I guess we didn't get as many splinters. But kids always find a way to get hurt.
Missed the chair and ended up cracking her head on the bookshelf behind. Had to go to hospital to get glued back together.
Thankfully, helicopter parents cannot hope to regulate trees.
I don't prevent my kids to climb trees, but accidents do happen.
> As for the increased dangers, she says Play England has a rigorous assessment system that measures the risk against benefit.
I'd be really curious to know how they quantify risk for different designs and how they calculate "benefit" in way that can be measured against it. Unfortunately, the author decided to fill an article with unsupported assertions instead.
To me the current equipment seems fine but the city is claiming "end of life" and I have no objective reason to doubt.
What I did notice is that the current equipment is made of materials such as wood and rope with some plastic. The new equipment will be primarily plastic and metal. I wonder if splinters have become the Great Evil for Junior since I had cause to attend a swing set.
Near us there's nice, challenging playgrounds, but their designs have become homogeneous. The older playgrounds had more unique features to each, with custom molded fiberglass.
I don't mind some playgrounds drifting to other materials, but the wood ones also have something to offer. I worry they're slowly being replaced by the same sorts of hdpe and brightly painted metal structures that are everywhere else. They're nice but all start to seem the same after awhile.
It's sort of like if houses all got torn down after 30 years and were all replaced with variants of the same template, rather than preserving older structures or encouraging innovative architecture.
Kids have as much to learn from variety as they do risk.
I’m sure the insurance companies have actual data and actuarial tables for what results in lawsuit damages. If a city wants to have those items in a playground, fine, but it isn’t going to be insurable.
As a kid I always was much more interested in running around in the woods or climbing trees than playgrounds. Which, insurance still can’t force the removal of as far as I know.
It is wonderful.
sigh I have to wonder just how long it'll last. I did see a section on the concrete rock structure that looks like ther was supposed to bw some sort of rope bridge. I guess that got removed.
All the images and videos just looked so American to me. A guy pulling kids in wagons with his motor vehicle, where I’m just asking myself: Why? And of course, almost all the adults and a fair amount of the kids are overweight …
I’m not trying to bash America, but this did confirm quite some stereotypes of mine.
Playgrounds in 2019 are full of playful risk. And if you want something more dangerous, there's everywhere else to choose from.