The dangerous playgrounds of 1900s through vintage photographs

IIRC the gist of the article was that playgrounds should always include risk elements because otherwise the children will use the playground against its design to find those risks (e.g. climb up on top of a structure which was designed that you play inside of it). The crucial element though was that risks should be calculatable and there should not be surprising dangerous outcomes.

I have to say looking at the playgrounds available to my kids here in Sweden, I'm pretty jealous of them, we didn't have such cool playgrounds available to us (or they were very rare). It is sometimes terrifying to watch as a parent, but look like great fun.

There's a school near me with a nice large area great for skating around. Most of the equipment is the newer style plastic hunks with soft edges and a rubber mat surface on the ground.

Have seen kids there find all sorts of ways to nearly injury themselves. They're having fun like I used to as a kid. And we had the murder bars and fling-yourself-gorounds. Newer designs might only help prevent scraped knees and pinched fingers.

Now the kids with their helicopter parents look annoyed and miserable. The kid tries to run and gets yelled at to slow down. They get to excited and told to calm down. Parents will wait at the bottom of slides and catch kids before they have even reached the end.

You'll have nosy neighbors calling cops on kids because they're walking down street without parents.

We've created a fear bubble around kids and they don't know what danger is. Let them make mistakes! Let them explore their spacial surroundings and fall down!

Edit: added a sentence for clarity.

I have no fear of heights, but a healthy respect has been instilled in me from various attempts by my younger self to reenact various action scenes from the glorious testosterone fueled action movies we had access to without parental supervision as small kids, it was absolutely wonderful.

Being a parent today and seeing the dull shit my own son will have access to, I don't feel the least safer.. Sure, he might not fall down and hurt himself THERE.. but he also won't learn it there.. where there at least is soft sand below, and where he could have learned many of the dangers of the physical world in a scaled-down and at least somewhat controlled manner.

Remember those spinning things, "roundabouts" or whatever they are called.. Every child who survived one of the more energetic bouts on those things, they know something about centrifugal force and how after a certain threshold, keeping yourself in the center is the only way to avoid bruises.. It gives some general ideas about the mechanics of the world and your body, and your strength.. It improves your ability to move about in the physical world in a safe way.

I had since moved to the US, but I visit every few years. Over time it’s been “made more safe”. The first thing they did was add finely desiccated rubber tube to the ground. I guess a kid who falls, eventually bounces.. must be a nice way to land after breaking all kinds of stuff on the way down. A few years later, they chopped the bars to half height. Whoever is making decisions is doing it reluctantly, I think. Years later the rubber shredding is there, but the bars are reduced again - it’s been modified to a simple set of three swings.

So boring. I think it’s the parents overthinking risk.

I'm kind of torn on this.

On the one hand, I was lucky enough to grow up in an environment without much supervision; just about the only fear drilled into me by dad was "don't screw around with electricity". Other than that, we got up to a lot of trouble and the sensation of visceral fear from a massive miscalculation of physics was something I got accustomed to, amongst other forms of childhood terror of my own making. From my perspective, it's hard to argue in favor of a sheltered, over-safe childhood compared to a childhood where boys will be boys.

But on the other hand, minor scrapes aside, a close childhood friend died in an ATV accident that was completely avoidable if we had any sort of safety standards, and I did crack my skull open once and had to be rushed to the ER.

I wonder what the right balance between the two would look like.

> While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.

This feels like they have the correlation/causation backwards. I suspect people who don't have so much of a built-in fear of heights are more likely to be hurt in falls from height.

But the US may take things a bit too far today. In Norway where I live kids still walk and bike to school. Most schools have forests and rugged terrain to play with. The playgrounds are slightly safer than when I was a kid, but you still got to be careful when climbing trees, rock walls etc.

But most of the times me and my buddies just climbed, jumped and fell from 'ordinary' structures around our city. We specifically looked out for like interesting bridges, little monuments, fire escapes, rooftops to climb up to etc. Strained ankles, wrists, broken toes, bleeding/scratched up elbows, knees, hands, noses, mild concussions, things you would expect from skating and such. No broken arms or legs, though.

Tbh the most terrifying, horrible things happened in day to day ordinary traffic. I remember vividly from the aforementioned playground, once, one small boy (4-5 years old) playfully but erratically running away from the perimeters out on to a bike lane and getting smashed by a race cyclist (probably riding 20-30mph) before my very eyes. There was screaming (of shocked parents), loud yelling from the cyclist himself and an unconscious child lying there still.

Also second hand stories of trucks hitting cyclists, buses hitting schoolchildren ... the worst things I've heard of from falling, tripping, slipping were broken limbs with the following plaster castings displayed as a badge of honor.

So, the most dangerous things for children out there are adults (with overpowered machines).

If you're not familiar with playground maypoles, they're like the English morris dancing-type maypoles with the ribbons sprouting out of the top of the pole. But instead of ribbons, there are chains with handles on the end, and instead of wrapping around the pole, the chains rotate within the base, allowing the children to spin around the pole itself. Every kid is attached to the same spinning element, so all of their energy is summed as they run around the pole, so eventually one or more kids are airborne, holding a chain with one or both hands, spinning around a pole at merry-go-round speeds, over concrete.

The intense nerfing (and limiting of access) of the world for US kids is very recent. This playground of 1912 looks almost identical to my playground of 1982.

https://www.kompaniazabaw.pl/f/g/kepapotocka_4.jpg

Note the triangular shape. Kids either get their limbs stuck in the ropes while falling or roll down, eventually hitting the sand.

If I came in injured, my mum would fuss over me to confirm I was ok-ish. If I was, the parental concern would flip and she'd whack me hard and tell me not to do it again. :/

By the time we reached middle school, ours was an old elementary school converted into one for slightly older kids too big for a wooden/metal playground. We had this big climbing arch thing but since it was a newly organized school and a crazy neighborhood we just got on top of the thing and coordinated swinging ourselves on each side of it back and forth until the whole thing came crashing down in a pile of splinters.

If it's boring kids will find something else to do.

My partner is from rural Ireland, and grew up a 30 minute drive from the nearest doctor or A&E. They were fairly poor and only had one car, which her dad had at work during the day. Her mother was a stay at home mum. No mobiles existed, and there was no public transport except a bus every 2 hours with the bus stop a good 30 minute walk away from their house.

There was TV but only a couple of channels. No internet. No library. There was nothing for her to do growing up except roam the countryside and injure herself. Her mum was a busy lady at home (duties of an Irish wife), so she was literally thrown outside in the mornings and told not to come home until dinner.

The stories she can tell about suffering broken or cracked bones and not going to hospital are horrifying to me. I mean I think unless she had been bleeding out they just sat tight. She has scars she doesn't know how she got.

Kid got killed on it, so the local place took metal and sealed off the entrance. Some kids tried to climb the fire poles up and got hurt, so they had to demolish it.

I keep trying to find photographs of it to show my wife / kiddo, but it seems noone took pics. Or, at least, it was never posted online. I'd like to find out how much of my memory is real, and how much of it was because I was a tiny kid.

There were also the swings and slides and stuff, great big tall BurkeBuilt slides that rose like 20 feet in the air and burned your butt on a hot day.

Of course the personal injury and chemical exposure lawyers prevailed. Google Maps satellite imagery of my elementary school reveals that TireTown, the tire tower, other structures, and original steel swings and slides have all been removed. A nice, safe, colorful plastic foam-padded playground occupies a small corner of the area once occupied by my playground. Such is life.

I had failed to realise that because she was wearing a nappy / diaper she would experience a near frictionless decent. I remember watching her shoot off the end of the slide and skip (on her bum) across the rubber and bark chipping off ramp like a flat stone over a pond.

Poor little thing, she was totally shocked a bit sore but not too damaged with scuffed elbows and one thigh and of course a pair of tights written off.

However, the moral is a good one, for quite a while after that she flatly would not go on slides of any sort. Eventually she decided that some slides were fun and ok, and went back on them, and she went back to all slides after about a year. By then she was much more competent and in control. I believe that in a small way it helped her understand and calibrate physical risks, it didn't make her any less bold in the long run, but it did make her more sensible.

After all most of the work injuries during fall happen from height ~1.5m when your body don't have enough time to rotate and you will just hit your head, so bigger height can be actually beneficial for safety.

Here in Czechia closest playground to my house has rubberized ground and bars (dinosaur backbone) for climbing on them at roughly 3m height, don't think it would really make much difference if they were 1-1.5m higher, if someone falls down from that height on head it can be pretty dangerous already from current height. In the end my kids are climbing on trees in park nearby in bigger height than in playground.

I grew up as kid in 80/90s mostly just with metal constructions playgrounds and my most serious childhood injury was when I took down matress down from bed and had great idea to jump from matress to wooden surface to break my skull, so much for dangerous playgrounds.

Btw. there is still fairly dangerous (longest) slide in Parukarka park in Prague I ocassionally try, it's pretty long and fast and you just need to stay there short time to see kid flying off, if it's cleaned from rubber left from shoes, happened to me, happened to FIL visiting, seems kids with lower weight don't go that fast usually as adults. So you can still find fun rides even nowadays.

https://www.idnes.cz/praha/zpravy/v-parku-na-parukarce-se-de...

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/jun/09...

The first time I saw some rather rambunctious kids do the jump, I was impressed with the designers for hiding such a fun feature.

I climbed very high trees and nearly shit myself trying to get back down. Sometimes I fell out of trees. I built dangerous forts. I started fires and cooked fish on them. I cut sticks with knives and shot at bottles with a small gun or a sling shot.

My kids have no idea what this stuff is like and how sheltered they are. I try to get them out in the world, I take one of them spearfishing and harvesting out in the ocean, we fish a bit, but ultimately they really are quite soft.

I have a feeling we don’t need to send our kids up trees and make them cook fish on a fire to “harden up”, but adversity in various forms and the opportunity to overcome it either with a group or independently seems invaluable to developing kids. I do get the sense (even from my wife) that this attitude isn’t so broadly accepted or comfortable for people.

I even volunteered with a scouting group in hopes my kids might find some good opportunities, but it was extremely mellow. Nice people, some great camp fire talk, but the kids were free to complain their way out of difficult tasks or discomfort and mostly played magic cards or sat lazily through activities we’d put together.

Parents were quick to complain to us if their kids expressed that they had to do anything they disliked. For example, a moderate hike or carrying water buckets for their camp mates.

I’m not sure. Is it such a big deal? Am I myopic and assuming my youth experience had more value than theirs?

Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t be better off if my childhood was a little more demanding, really. I don’t mean this in a masculine context specifically, but I often feel soft. Lack of discipline, unwilling to face discomfort, etc. Perhaps my perspective on the entire matter is limited and/or poor to begin with.

I’ve read quite a bit of childhood psychology around these matters from the likes of Steve Biddulph and D.W. Winnicott but I think I could stand to read quite a bit more.

These kinds of topics always remind me of the sort of cyclical silliness evident in this quote:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

— Socrates

The locomotive is still there, but there's a fence around it now.

I about made it — but dropped onto my back and had the wind knocked out of me. First time I had ever experienced that scary sensation.

Times.

https://goo.gl/maps/ZDVDT4qfz3EQtfLR9

They’re often higher than some of the monkey bar things I remember from my childhood in the 70s. Our kids got a genuine feeling of having accomplished something, working up the courage to get to the top and wave for a selfie.

It’s such an incongruous thing to find in a modern sterile British park, with nothing else more than a foot or so off tHe ground, and that having a guardrail just in case.

Sadly, it seems that they’re getting torn out here. Neither of the examples I remember from just 2 years ago still exist.

I went to an elementary school in Wisconsin where they had a bunch of tires bolted to a huge wooden pole.

After a few years the metal bands and rusted webbing of the tires was sticking out of all the climbing elements. How about we just give all the kids TETANUS FOR FREE? It's on the house.

At the same school I was a big swing proponent - I would ride that goddamn swing every day, no matter how much rust it developed and ---- surprise, the chain rope broke and almost killed my ass.

Edit: My school did pay these glorious medical bills. Shitty playgrounds are good until you almost die.

I agree but as far as I can tell everyone agrees with this. Every playground near me has monkey bars and tall slides. They're safer than these photos but you could certainly still get hurt on them.

Are there places banning monkey bars and slides?

The risk calculation is different for families with 1-2 kids.

The pond was about three feet deep but there were drainage ditches extending out. We'd catch "pollywogs" tadpoles, squish giant black ants, and light fires. We'd also made elastic guns using a board and two nails. This would be mid 1970s.

My school may have had a playground but I don't recall.

I remember also a few accidents, generally it was mainly kids crashing on different school benchs, ending up bleeding....

-I feel like I'm small again.

-I feel A sense of fear at the sight of the height.

-I feel like the other children climbing are going to look down at me not climbing, and laugh.

-I feel myself snapping back to my present adulthood reality.

-I feel shame that I grew up in a safety culture sheltered from challenges that could have developed the bravery needed to climb these things as a kid.

The idea that people can be divided in "tough" and "soft" and that facing risks makes you "tough" would make any decent psychologist cringe.

No, humans are a tad more complex that that.

It's kinda hard being sentenced to just sitting on benches or walking around just because I got too old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Park

The problem of the playground is too much the same. No challenge. But still danger is still danger.

The Bomb Shelter really was a bomb shelter. We had one of the first houses on the street, and just down the hill was a house under construction. All they had built so far was the basement and the bomb shelter. The kids in the neighborhood made that our clubhouse and brought snacks so we could hang out and keep safe from any nuclear attack.

The Rough Country was just up the hill from our house. They were clearing out some trees to begin construction, so when we needed a break from the Bomb Shelter, we made tunnels under the fallen trees to have another place to hang out.

I had been playing with electricity all this time. When the TV "went on the fritz", as they always did back then, my dad let me pull out all the tubes, put them in a cigar box (I loved that aroma!) and take them to the corner grocery where they had a tube tester. I would test each tube one by one, adjusting the settings for the tube type, until I found the bad one. Dad would buy a new tube, and when we got back home I plugged each tube back in along with the new one. And the TV worked!

In kindergarten I pranked the class. I had a one farad electrolytic capacitor with the terminals on top. That is a big scary capacitor! I charged it up at home all the way to 1.5 volts. Then I brought it to class and demonstrated how dangerous it was. While I was setting up the demo, I accidentally touched both terminals, one with each hand. I started shaking and writhing around like I was being electrocuted!

Somehow I managed to free myself from the electric charge. And then, conveniently, I'd brought along a screwdriver and used it to short out the two terminals, with a most satisfying bang and a spark.

Then I told one of the girls in class, "It's OK. I discharged it. It's safe now. You can touch the terminals and it won't hurt you."

In first grade, that same girl handed me an astronomy book that she thought I might like. I said, "Oh, I read that last year."

It was not one of my finest moments. I wonder what opportunities I may have missed?

Halfway through the year, the school got tired of my troublemaking and moved me to second grade. It was scary being with the big kids.

In third grade, I was still making trouble, so they had me spend the afternoons in a special ed class called Mrs. Spencer's Workshop, where we could invent projects of our own. My first one was drawing maps of all the freeway interchanges on the new I-5 route between Eugene and Portland. We had family in Portland and used to drive up 99 East to get there, and this new "freeway" idea fascinated me. I'd made rough sketches in the car, so I turned them into more polished and colorful maps.

One odd thing was that I could not draw curved lines! I had to construct them with a series of short straight lines drawn with a ruler.

For my next project I wanted to make a printed circuit board. I'd designed a simple circuit I called the Current Changer Switch that I wanted to demo in the Science Fair. You could flip a switch and make a light go bright or dim.

Of course I knew how to hand wire the circuit and had tested it that way, but I'd heard about something new called a "printed circuit board".

I didn't know about phenolic boards with copper on them, but I did understand the basic concept of etching a board with resist to protect the traces. So I got my own idea: I would take a sheet of copper, stick electrical tape on both sides to map out the traces, and dunk it in a tank of nitric acid.

I asked Mrs. Spencer if she could get me the materials: a sheet of copper, some electrical tape, and the tank of nitric acid. And she did!

So I taped out the board and and dunked in the tank of acid while Mrs. Spencer and I watched the copper dissolve.

And my printed circuit worked!

- The neighborhood playground was made out of cast concrete in a few pieces that sat on top of concrete. It looked very similar to this [1][2] but had several other concrete pipes that were quite a bit taller. Minor injuries were pretty daily.

- My elementary school playground which was made out of old telephone poles formed into various climbing equipment. Even casual scrambles ended with numerous splinters and tar stains. A couple of the pieces were easily over 10 ft tall. They sat on wood chips or gravel. There was a broken arm or other hospital ready event a couple times a year.

- Another school I went to while transferring during a move had equipment in the middle of the woods with no particular safety padding. Kids regularly jumped from equipment to trees, or fell of the large slides. It was cool looking, I remember at least 2 broken arms while I was there for half a school year.

- A local public park had a 2 story corkscrew slide that kids fell off of, and a 3 story rocket ship structure with a zipline over grass that had numerous other places to fall and get hurt. I believe they eventually tore it all down after some ICU-level injuries befell a few kids. A lot of the equipment here looks very familiar to this particular park [3]

- Another local public park built a massive climbing structure with most of it 2-3 stories off the ground with numerous slides, poles, swings, and other bits. It was all wood and a guaranteed splinter. There was also a cool tunnel full of graffiti that was also most kids' first introduction to used condoms and drug paraphernalia.

This was on top of the usual assortment of local parks with hand pushed merry-go-round death traps and other odds and ends.

It's a miracle so many of us survived childhood as all the playthings were literally trying to kill us. On the flip side, we're all monkeys and today's playgrounds often don't have much for kids to really do. The old structures on the other hand challenged us kids to overcome our fears and getting to the top of some of them felt like a major life accomplishment and often forced us to build temporary alliances to help each other up, in, down, or across complex and scary feeling play spaces. They taught both real and imagined limits and how to discover the former while defeating the later.

I don't know what the educational and emotional benefit of modern playsets are supposed to support.

1 - https://youtu.be/hmLV3ThGzKk

2 - https://modernistplay.tumblr.com/post/162016983146/pg7-saddl...

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_playground_equipment