Are Our Kids Bored By Playgrounds?

Last summer, we met our friends Sally and Mike and their kids in a nearby harbor town to let the kids play on a playground, walk around a bit, and get some dinner. Typical late-weekend-afternoon-in-the-summer stuff here on Long Island’s bucolic North Shore. I’d been to this town many times before, but not with my kids, so I didn’t remember the playground, and I figured it would look more or less like every playground I’ve seen in the last eight-and-three-quarter (almost!) years of being a parent.

 

You know the kind. Carefully planned. Almost too carefully planned, really, with one tiny (plastic) slide for the littlest ones; one high, but not crazy high, twisting slide (but covered, like a tube, or at least with high sides), and maybe a medium-height “bumpy” slide. There’s always an unstable-seeming-but-safe, bridge-like thing. (I think the kids are supposed to feel as though they’re crossing an Amazonian ravine on one of those rickety rope bridges, a la Indiana Jones, not that our kids necessarily know who Indiana Jones is). In another part of the park there are usually swings. And it goes without saying that the surface beneath is soft and safe.

 

I like safety. Truly, I do. I know that as a kid, though I played with nothing but cement or asphalt beneath playground equipment, I never experienced a major or memorable accident, so I’m willing to admit it’s because no serious accident happened that I can smugly scoff at the padded-cell safety of kids’ play equipment these days. My parents talk (brag?) about blazing-hot metal slides and the rusted poles in monkey bars, atop cracked pavement. And they survived. Right?

 

Right. And learned how to climb high and exactly where their threshold for fear was on any given day.

 

So back to this day last summer in this nearby town. On the waterfront is one of those typical parks, as I described above, but bigger. Sandboxes, areas designated for littler ones and bigger ones, lots of swings, but otherwise the expected conglomeration of equipment that seems to be saying, “here you go, kids, play this way!” instead of just sitting there, like the old-school stuff, saying “I don’t give a crap what you do. I’m some monkey bars. Climb me, don’t climb me, it’s entirely up to you.” The latter is often so pre-planned that only the smallest kids really have fun (them, and the teens who occupy the areas at night, but that’s another story.) The former are more like blank slates waiting for kids to make their own brand of fun.

 

But then our friends showed us a different portion of the park. I drew in my breath. Though it was set on soft sand, this (shaded!) section had metal slides, two of them. Not attached to any other equipment; just slides, with long, metal ladders. And there were two merry go rounds.You know the kind — where you climb on and maybe the bigger kids run around the outside to get it going, and you hope to hell you can hold on tight enough not to be flung out to the elements? Yes, that kind.

 

The kids loved it.

 

I was reminded of that park just now when I read a New York Times article about parks, by John Tierney. Now, this is not a new subject. I’ve read it before: playgrounds are getting blander and blander; tots are being followed obsessively around by helicoptering parents, so even on the blandest and bluntest-edged equipment, there’s little to no chance of children getting hurt; playgrounds which may as well have been designed by lawyers.

 

But this piece got me thinking about something else: it’s not just about a nostalgic longing for the hot metal monkey bars of our own or our parents’ past; it’s about why kids might actually need that perception of danger. Or even the reality of it. A Norwegian psychology professor, a playground-observing expert quoted in the piece, says that kids need to: explore heights; experience high speed; handle dangerous tools; be near potentially dangerous elements like water or fire; play rough; and wander away from adult supervision.

I’d say, the above is a list of attributes and attitudes you don’t find in my local parks. How about yours?

 

The psychologist, Dr. Ellen Sandseter, goes on to say:

“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.”

 

As my friends and I sat on the periphery of the more-dangerous, throwback, who-let-this-stuff-stay-here portion of this port-side park, our kids were spinning that merry-go-round for all they were worth. My friends’ son then began climbing trees (he’s the sort of kid who sees basically any structure — trees, fences, playground equipment, hills — as a scaling opportunity) while my sons sort of lingered on lower branches and watched their friend scamper higher. So I guess they were proving Dr. Sandseter’s point: They were doing what they each, individually, felt capable of doing, and not 100% afraid of trying.

 

Without any piece of equipment telling them thishigh is too high.

 

 

I know it’s commonplace now for parents to leap up and admonish and/or hover, but I tried my best to sit on my hands and just watch, remembering for myself the freedom of getting to the top of the bars, or swinging so high the chains on the swing went slack. Remember that? And then when the swing swung back down the chains would snap straight and you’d bounce, hard, jolting your kidneys. It might have given my mother a minor heart attack. If she’d been watching. Which she usually was not.

 

Do you think playgrounds are perfect, too safe, or not safe enough?