I am surprised not to see jonathan haidt mentioned- his views on this subject align with the authors, and he brings an interesting perspective to the table.
One of the unexpectedly adventurous organisations when it comes to playgrounds in the uk is the National Trust.
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.
Near us, Tyntesfield is great. There is an obstacle course type one down by one of the cafes, then there are three on a trail up in the woods. Some are more structured than others.
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.
There is an adventure playground in Berkeley that my kids adored when I used to live in a nearby city. I’m not sure how it’s avoided a similar fate to the Toronto example you refer to, but it’s a wonderful place. Terrifying to watch as a parent no doubt, but empowering for the kids.
Sure, some playgrounds may be mind-numbingly dull, but those are a well-intentioned response to older playgrounds that posed serious physical dangers. You can argue that getting a little bit scraped up once in a while isn't bad for children; it may teach them lessons about how to avoid such future mistakes - but plenty of children have sustained more serious injuries on playgrounds that allowed them to climb much higher than they could on, say, a tree in nature (speaking from my life experience). I think the article conflates the issue of modern over parenting with safer playground design - which if done right, can only be a good thing.
Ditto, I grew up in the woods so climbing on trees was an everyday activity for me, more frequent than playing on playgrounds. I used to climb trees as far as the tree would support, then climb it further until it collapsed. I fell out of more trees doing that than I can count.
Thankfully, helicopter parents cannot hope to regulate trees.
Ok and I know ine guy (kid) who spent weeks in hospital due to fall from tree and two other people who broke limb (adults). That is on top of head incidents close to me.
I don't prevent my kids to climb trees, but accidents do happen.
A big part of the complaint is that injury rates & severity has stayed about the same. It seems the safer we make the playground, the more risks the kids take. It's called risk compensation.
Calling this a war is the reason the saying "pick your battles" exists. Anyone who is a parent knows that kids always find ways to hurt themselves, there is no shortage of opportunities. Might as well make playgrounds safe, kids don't care as long as they have fun.
All these old pictures showing kids having fun in environments we consider harmful, always depict kids older than those we typically let play in playgrounds.
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.
They do have softer ground and rounder corners but the playgrounds today are way cooler than I was a kid. The one near me has climbing walls and a zip line. It's crazy.
I find the playgrounds in my city (Tampa, FL) to be excellent. This article is completely wrong about the parks here.
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.
How old are the kids you are talking about? 20-month-olds are happy with literally any playground, especially if there are a few other kids. They are still learning the very basics of climbing, running, sliding, swinging, ...
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.
I used my local playground until I was 16. Now, nearly 30 years later I still go to the playground to play, but it's a climbing gym. People don't magically stop playing soccer, or baseball, or video games when they pass age 10, I don't know why we assume as much about playgrounds. A well built playground offers challenging terrain for kids of all ages.
I don't think that's really common though. We thought the playground was for little kids even though there was plenty of challenging terrain for us at the time.
In our current society it's certainly not normal for an adult to be climbing around on a playground alone. And it's not insane for a parent to approach such a situation with caution.
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.
Oops, guess some parents are going to have a bad time. Their problem, not mine. Parks are for everyone to enjoy. Bigotry in action, and a slew of apologists. Sad.
>Oops, guess some parents are going to have a bad time.
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.
How old are you? Thirty years ago at my local park teenagers were climbing onto sections not made for climbing, running up and down slides and occasionally knocking over smaller children, etc. It certainly wasn't a de-risked modern place.
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.
YMMV, but I would recommend all young children spend as much time barefoot as possible, and in thin flexible shoes the rest of the time (probably not a bad idea for older people as well, but the difference is most extreme for those just learning to move). In San Francisco, my 3-year-old can be barefoot outside most of the year; in places with hotter/colder weather shoes might be necessary during some months.
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.
There is some interesting history to going barefoot in the US.
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.
Hookworm (like other parasites) can be a pretty serious public health problem. It’s great that hookworm is way down in the USA, and tragic that it still affects 400+ million people around the world, and makes many of them anemic, causes brain problems, etc., especially since (from my understanding) it is pretty easy to treat with medication.
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.
Unfortunately this article is pointless. It's just unsupported assertions. The only part of the article which approaches something worth writing about:
> 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.
The pictures though. In the background of the top one, behind the hand of the kid who's standing on the tire, there appears to be a the ribcage of an enormous animal sticking out of the ground.
I remember reading something somewhere about the real issue with risk and playgrounds... that modern playgrounds often hide risk, whereas older playgrounds it would be more obvious. The idea is that there were clearly places (high up, requiring climbing skill) in the old playgrounds that kids would slowly work their way up to conquering. Because the risk was obvious, kids would approach it with caution and build up skills to get there. In contrast, a lot of injuries occur when 'safe' playgrounds have kids try to do things not designed for, but because of the way they are made don't appear to be dangerous bus actually are. Giving kids the ability to assess risk accurately, and develop the skill to take that risk, is the important part.
One of the problems with de-risked playgrounds is that kids crave a certain amount of risk, and if there is nothing to do that seems a bit risky, kids (especially older kids) will start looking for ways to make the playground more exciting, doing things that the playground designers didn’t anticipate and didn’t consider the safety of.
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.
I agree with the argument, but I'm skeptical of the claim that "injury rates from de-risked playgrounds are not materially lower". If these playgrounds are more expensive to build and deliver no benefit at all, surely they would have been abandoned long ago.
Of course this is anecdotal evidence, but me and my 3 brothers grew up with a lot of silly or dangerous stuff: climbing on trees, skateboarding, snowboarding, trampolines, jumping down stairs, jumping over ramps with the bike, jumping from cliffs and bridges etc.
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.
Perhaps your friends parents were over-careful because their kids kept breaking bones? Kids are different. Mine is very risk-averse and has essentially never hurt himself bad. I was the same way as a kid. His friends are daredevils who hurt themselves constantly.
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.
> If these playgrounds are more expensive to build and deliver no benefit at all, surely they would have been abandoned long ago
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.
There is a park near me with a metal bridge only a couple feet off the ground. There are gaps where children can fit through to climb up/down. Just outside and perpendicular to this particular bridge is a set of metal stairs. I witnessed a toddler fall off the bridge and narrowly miss hitting his head on the metal corner of the stairs. It probably could have killed him. The mother was sufficiently spooked that they immediately left. Everyone is just worried about limiting liability. In this case, smarter positioning of stairs would eliminate some risk. Considering how these sets are so modular, I'm surprised there isn't more oversight about deployment.
Back when I was a boy, the local park had an old steam locomotive set up for the kids to play on and around. It was quite popular. Being all iron, angles, and sharp corners, there was nothing safe about it, but I don't recall anyone getting hurt on it.
They still have one in Tokyo, in a playground called Higashi-choufu. My son played there from age 1 to 2.5 when we had to move. It was quite well done with sharp pieces removed from the conductor stand. Children could play there or climb back in the coal wagon and slide down its angled floor. He never hurt himself, but I banged my head a couple of times due to low overhangs...
The rules we have here in Norway, which is a variation of a EU thing IIRC, allow kids to get hurt, but not permanently. There are a lot of dangers which are non-obvious, especially to a kid. Crevices where the rope for tightening the hood can get stuck, potentially strangling them. Stairs where a kid can get their head through but not their body. Swings where they can lose their fingers thanks to the chain mounts or similar. Lots of similar things.
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.
Your comment made me think of a great comment on the topic I had read here a few months ago. After some digging around, I found it, and it turns out to be a post of yours, too! :)
The slide in your linked article resulting in a lawsuit was 12 feet tall. I recently played at a kids (something like 4-10) park that has a climbing feature that one can get to the top of that is a bit taller than that. It was fun but I was thinking the whole time, this could never go over in the USA.
An inflatable park company came to our town for a bit with a bunch of rides, one of which was a super high slide. I didn't understand why they were making us get into burlap sacks before going down, but I understood later - the speed near the bottom was high enough that I'm pretty sure I would've walked away with major burns if I'd touched the slide. My wife ended up with a mystery burn she noticed at the end of the day that I suspect came from this.
Are you able to provide a link to pictures of a playground designed by your friend? I would be very interested in see it. The playgrounds sound very well thought out.
That's not entirely true. a) because kids are bad at assessing risk, even when it is obvious. Have you never seen a kid stuck somewhere they could climb up to but not down? My five year old sister managed to climb ten feet up a wall above a concrete floor, and then stayed there weakly sniffling 'help' until one of us noticed she was out of sight. b) because the old playgrounds often suffered from hidden dangers like rusting metal that could break off as splinters under the skin, which happened when I was about ten. I got a tetanus injection and then spent a week or more regularly soaking my foot in hot water to make sure any remaining rusty pieces weren't lingering in there.
> Have you never seen a kid stuck somewhere they could climb up to but not down?
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.
Adults aren’t necessarily good at it either, no. I was responding to this idea that old dangerous playgrounds were really “safer”
> Because the risk was obvious, kids would approach it with caution
> Giving kids the ability to assess risk accurately, and develop the skill to take that risk, is the important part.
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.
As one of the kids who grew up in relatively unrestricted playing environment (read: no purpose-built playgrounds, the whole city/town/village was our playground) I am wondering how today's kids manage to develop any skill in the physical world, since parents are constantly around and the kids are super-dependent on the supervision and restrictions.
> 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.
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.
> I'm not an expert, but I find it quite likely that, yes, playgrounds do magically change brain development.
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.
I’d love a link but this argument makes total common sense.
Learning where your boundaries are, and pushing them a bit, is such an important developmental step.
I let my toddler do absolutely whatever he wanted on local playgrounds and let him have some nasty falls. Unsurprisingly he learned very quickly what his comfort zone is and when he has to be extra careful.
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.
That sounds great but I think the difficulty is that it can be hard to allow a child to get a little hurt without increased risk that they get a lot hurt. There just isn't a clear line, it's all risk.
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.
We've done the same with our toddler - he's certainly had some good falls, but he quickly figured out how to tackle new obstacles. It's really great watching how excited he gets when he figures out how to climb something new.
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.
I knew a kid who was allowed to play fairly unsupervised as well, but I think her parents found that it didn't seem worth it when she eventually broke her leg in a fall at five. I'm sure you'll feel good about your choice unless one of the nasty falls ends in a head injury or permanent damage of some kind.
I broke my leg as a kid. It wasn’t a big deal. I remember the cast being kind of cool, the other kids in my school signed it.
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.
I have to admit that the potential cost of such injuries didn't occur to me until I read your comment. Blissful ignorance of an European enjoying universal healthcare I suppose.
Frankly, the whole issue is overblown. The kid really does not need to break leg to learn something profound. We have old school playgrounds here, but kids don't like them more. Metal slide is too hot in summer and it all gets old quicker then colorful new ones.
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.
I have a 14 month old, and I find it fascinating to watch him play. He's super active, starting to stand, walks very fast when I hold his hand, but not yet confident on his own.
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.
I'm jealous of how well my child, almost three, can walk/run and cope with the snow and ice. He's almost as stable running on snow/ice as he is on solid ground. Unlike myself.
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!
Kids have two big advantages on slippery conditions, both coming from the square-cube-law: they have a lot more traction relative to the torque they can put into a stride, and their moment of inertia tensor is less ill-conditioned.
Thanks for the link! I'm going to see if I can find that here in Canada.
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.
Yeah, I know what you mean about the reduced daylight, we live at the same latitude as Nunavut. Fortunately good headlamps are plentiful on eBay, also works wonders for the kids when they're 2 years and older.
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.
Not all kids are like that. Some somehow keep doing stuff that hurts them. Some don't do anything remotely dangerous and then once in few months do something completely stupid. Some kids are prone to injure themselves in situations where other kids don't from inattentivness.
In my experience the best playgrounds are not playgrounds at all.
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.
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.
In part I agree and disagree with your sentiment. On the other side of the argument, I believe sometimes children too need some inspiration. Perhaps with a set setting they can put more imagination and thought into the scenario that they might want to play
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.
When each of my kids turned 5 I started letting them go around the block with another kid, 2 kids minimum. My neighbors started texting and calling me as if my kid was in danger. They couldn't understand that I let my kid out of my sight. The best playtime is unsupervised. Being allowed to be out of sight and making your own decisions builds confidence. We learn from mistakes, we learn less when we are prevented from making mistakes.
I respect that attitude, but I do wonder if the authorities might decide to take my kid away from me I try that with my kid (after I become a parent). Attitudes are a bit restrictive in many big cities.
To be fair, I live a suburban area that is relatively safe. We have clean sidewalks and almost no one using them. I started letting them go to the corner, they had to respect not going further and coming back when I asked. Then to the mailboxes around the corner, they would get the mail. Then around the block. It was a progression based on trust and mutual respect.
I have no fear that they'll take them away. They won't. It might suck up some time and money in court if they double down on being stupid but they won't get to take them in the end. It's my life being gone through with a fine tooth comb by the state as part of that process that I don't want to risk.
I grew up that way and simply took my own where they could free range.
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.
A colleague at work was working from home, watching his kid play across the street at the park. A busybody reported it and the family was slapped with negligence and lost custody of their kid for a short while and had to prove to a judge that they are capable parents.
> Attitudes are a bit restrictive in many big cities.
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.
Child abductions are an awful thing. I also feel like living in fear is no way to live. You can't learn street smarts without a little practice. There has to be a balance between 'it won't happen to me, go nuts kids' and 'kids need constant supervision'. I try to teach them to be aware and watch out. There are limits. I leave Nextdoor to my nutty neighbors.
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.
Yea, learning more about all the crazy paranoid assholes in my neighborhood from their NextDoor postings would certainly give me pause in letting my kid play near them without my being ready to intervene.
There are a lot of people who literally make up stories about being robbed, having kids abducted, having cancer, etc., because they crave the attention. (One example that came straight to mind: https://idlewords.com/2012/09/no_evidence_of_disease.htm)
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.
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.
While I certainly acknowledge your data, one thing that's struck me is that the level of car traffic is higher, and faster. I don't know the stats, but when my kids were little, traffic worried me more than crime.
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.
The neighborhood where I grew up, it was common to raise a family on one parent working a blue collar (union) job. Now that number is somewhere between 2 and 4 jobs per household. Also, there's a vicious circle, where people drive more because it's more dangerous, because there's more traffic. This is evident if you go past an elementary school in the morning.
Kids have horrible judgement and do things like bike down steep roads (true story of how some dumb neighbor kids got me to crush my wrist and develop weight problems) and play with snakes. Just for that reason I'd never really feel comfortable letting them go around outside on their own below around middle school.
Wow. I was playing outside by myself by kindergarten (though, just in the yard & neighbors). By middle school, I basically just came home to drop my books off, and then for dinner.
Most of my playing outside happened before middle-school, because by grade 7 I had too much homework to play outside a lot.
We played unsupervised from age 6 outside on the streets and in the neighbourhood all day every day. We had to move our improvised roller hockey goalposts (sweaters) maybe once every 30 minutes to let a car pass. Now that same street has 3 cars per minute minimum. There are no kids playing outside.
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.
I took a look at your link and I don’t understand why you feel it’s “really risky”. To me (a German), it seems like any other playground with quite common elements. Sure, the climbing web (if that’s what it’s called) is high, but this is a structure where kids will not even get that high if they are not skilled.
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.
Kids like a challenge, they are constantly testing their boundaries. It's part of learning risk and what they are capable of. That's very true modern playground hiding risk, in my childhood playground you saw the climbing wall as the biggest challenge you tried it once you were ready and had done a few trials runs on smaller ones.
Oddly was never much the case for me. I ended up never experiencing some of the "harder" or more "dangerous" parts of the playground because I just wasn't interested if it seemed too risky. I'd see other kids climbing to a dangerous spot and think they were dumb.
Growing up, my elementary school had an amazing wooden structure that had been built in years past. After I left, it was torn down and replaced by a prefab thing with much less character and probably less fun. The reason given was liability insurance was more possible with the later generic playground.
This has been on my mind a lot lately. It's not just risk changes, it's also variety changes which are also important.
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.
This is the only comment I’ve seen insurance mentioned, which is the main determining factor of what is or isn’t in a playground now.
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.
Problem isn’t so much about risk adverse cities, it’s more about litigious parents. If the city does anything That is considered risky, they open themselves up to big lawsuits if the children do get hurt.
I really liked this[1] talk at Google comparing how kids are raised in Germany vs the US. She touches on the topic of playgrounds starting at 11:30, but the whole talk is really worth watching in my opinion.
When I was a kid (circa the mid-1980s), there was a real Korean war F-86 Sabre in the middle of a sandpit and a steel labyrinth maze that was shaped like a skyscraper with about 8 levels (tall: 13 ft/4 m, wide: 10 ft/3 m, deep: 3 ft/ 1 m) to crawl through at the De Anza playground in San Jose. Looking at Google Maps, it now contains depressing McDonald's-looking, clown-colored boring stuff no kid is really interested in.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadWhen 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.
https://www.blogto.com/city/2017/09/adventure-playground-tor...
Thankfully, helicopter parents cannot hope to regulate trees.
I don't prevent my kids to climb trees, but accidents do happen.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
https://youtu.be/JA7jc4rpTns
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!
https://goo.gl/maps/bF6bSSQ93SbUuHs96
https://xkcd.com/255/
(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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7-k6nK1VUw
Playgrounds in 2019 are full of playful risk. And if you want something more dangerous, there's everywhere else to choose from.