Comment by alx__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alx__ | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't think it's the playground design, it's the parents.

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!

The thing I don't get is how do these parents have the energy for that? I quickly discovered with my son that if I set the bar much higher than "will he die or lose a limb from this?" then I would be exhausted and done for the day by 10 AM.

I love him very much, but I just wouldn't be physically able to prevent every accident. Is there some sort of exercise regime or diet or other lifestyle change that gives you energy for that?

(Not that I necessarily want to change that, I'm just very curious.)

it's fear

Maybe part of it is fear of an ER bill you can’t afford or don’t have insurance to cover?

Personal anekdata: I've seen much more unsupervised children in low-income neighborhoods than in upper-middle class ones.

just say anecdote

it's not an anecdote. an anecdote is a single story. this is his/her collection of anecdotal evidence/data. I don't see why they've spelt it with a k though

It's just a spelling mistake, I've meant https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anecdata

perhaps in the US, but wouldn't this equally have been the case historically?

the overall effect is almost certainly the result of the proprietors of playgrounds shielding themselves from lawsuits. I'd be willing to bet that around the time it started to change there was a big lawsuit, or a string of them that put the fear of god/bankruptcy into people running these things for the joy of others

We have 4. The bar is a trip to the hospital. Urgent care facilities on the east coast usually won’t do pediatric stitches, and in my experience, a hospital visit for simple stitches or similar takes around 4-6 hours (I.e., 5.5 hours of waiting for 30 minutes of treatment). The absolute last thing I want to do is sit in a hospital with four kids for 6 hours, even if it’s free after insurance.

> I honestly don't think it's the playground design, it's the parents.

Let's go one more step. It's not the parents, it's the society.

Parents don't live in a vacuum, and if you think back to your school days, the kids in your class were probably not writing essays on why they'll want to be watching over their future kids like crazy maniacs for a decade and more until they leave home.

> We've created a fear bubble around kids and they don't know what danger is

I believe they do know, and its far worse than the danger of a broken arm or sprained ankle. It's the danger of being shot dead. I urge everyone to read this article and imagine yourself as a child being told this stuff and "practicing" hiding and being quiet in an active shooter scenario. Far more terrifying than any playground from the past.

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a40732/what-...

It seems to be a trend all around the western world but the danger of being shot isn't present outside of the US. I think it's more of a fear culture then a real threat to the children themselves.

I guess even in the US being shot by a mass shooter is several orders of magnitude less likely than being run over by a car?

It appears to be feared disproportionately.

Recency bias and a tendency to miscalculate the odds of something that is A) awful and B) played on repeat for days. Also, angry reactionaries always demand that the authorities “do something about this!”

Those factors pretty much guarantee that there will be a swift, uncalculated, often showy response to public tragedy.

It's pretty insidious. Kids getting shot at school is rare, so it's reported on. Kids getting killed by drivers is so common that bereaved parents have to beg and plead and scream at their elected officials to get them to even notice, much less do anything.

Like a lot of modern problems, the blame partly lies with the news media and partly with mass innumeracy.

Essentially. I distinctly remember an article about some multi-car pileup a couple days after a mass shooting, and noting that the otherwise unremarkable car accident ended up in 2x the causalities

I was in school after 9/11 when they started having terrorist drills and such. It's not like we sat in fear all day. We were kids. We weighed it the same as the fire drill or the tornado drill. Even seeing 9/11 on TV and being of age to vividly remember it and understand what it meant didn't seem to do much of anything 20 years down the line now in terms of traumas in my generation. At least kids aren't being forced to die in a far away war when they turn 18 anymore like they were in my fathers generation and in his fathers generation.

oh yeah, drills were the FUNNEST. Earthquake drills were my favourite. No terrorist drills though, that's pretty American.

Which is ridiculous as kids being shot is extremely extremely low risk.

Slightly tricky to get the numbers here as most sources include colleges full of adults under "school shootings" and most school shooters shoot teachers rather than students, but it looks to be around 70 since the year 2000.

Which is such a small number that it should be completely irrelevant from a public policy and safety perspective. Heck the nuances of road signage law and hazardous chemical labelling are probably hundreds of times more important. The stress of worrying about it probably costs more life years than the shootings (which average at around one life hour per person).

> I honestly don't think it's the playground design, it's the parents.

I don't think that it's the parents. I believe it's entirely the playground design, the laws, and the mentality of finding someone responsible.

The parents would be fine if some kids broke bones, get disabled or die, it's a fair trade-off for better playgrounds. But the hands of the playground designers are tied.

It is both.

But also it is the administrative effort/cost of a playground. Plastic is easier to maintain than wood. Less dangerous things produce less complaints by helicopter parents. Sand is expensive to maintain (I shuffled 30 tons of sand with some other parents for a kindergarten).

We are in the "weak men create hard times" phase. Societies have their four seasons too.

There is another aspect though that my childhood playground looked not completely unlike the pictures but most kids didn't bother using anything. Most kids didn't want to climb on the monkey bars because it was boring after the first few times.

The playgrounds I see now while being safer look way more fun and the kids actually use them. There is one near me that while the ground is this almost foam padding the actual playground looks like something from American Ninja Warrior. No kid would pick a bunch of scrap metal over it if given the choice.

This whole thread reminds me of Danny Carvey's Grumpy Old Man character from old SNL. Back in my day the playground was 30 foot off the ground and if you fell off they had to amputate your leg.

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