Bringing 'risk' back to playgrounds

March 10, 2018 5:36 PM

"After decades spent in a collective effort to minimize risk," educators in Britain are now deliberately bringing risk back to the playground, a move that "resonates both with right-wing tabloids, which see it as a corrective to the cosseting of a liberal nanny state; and with progressives, drawn to a freer and more natural childhood.
posted by zanni (58 comments total)

Are they bringing back the YOU! YOU, BEHIND THE GREY SHED! STAND STILL LADDIE! guy too?
posted by delfin at 5:47 PM on March 10, 2018 [14 favorites]

Loose bricks and saws? Seems kind of Lord Of The Flies. But looking at the playground of my old elementary school -
which used to have a geodesic dome, one of those triangle slides, a climbing tower, see saws and a jungle gym - it does appear like playgrounds have been stripped of anything legitimately exciting.
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:48 PM on March 10, 2018 [4 favorites]

Doesn't count if it doesn't include setting things on fire and blowing stuff up.
posted by mondo dentro at 6:01 PM on March 10, 2018 [7 favorites]

Yeah, but those very same right-wing parents that tut-tut about how cosseted kids are these days will be the first to hire a lawyer when their kid gets hurt on a playground that clearly and easily could have been made safer.
posted by darkstar at 6:02 PM on March 10, 2018 [44 favorites]

Your kid can be the kid sitting in the ER with his broken glasses sticking out of his forehead, like I was.
posted by lagomorphius at 6:06 PM on March 10, 2018 [12 favorites]

Grey shed? But... but...
posted by Leon at 6:08 PM on March 10, 2018 [5 favorites]

There was a spectacular sprawling playground at an elementary school down the road from where I grew up in Northern Virginia. Tall, dark, rough-hewn wood with tunnels and catacombs inside that you could climb endlessly about in (and get splinters, or get stuck where adults couldn't pull you out if you weren't careful). A large band of parents volunteered their time to build it at some point. They tore it down around the time I was in high school and replaced it with a few pieces of sad bright plastic without any sharp edges, as is the style these days.

I live in Kansas City now and there is a very tall pyramidal rope playground structure a mile or two from my house. It is probably about 35 feet tall, and while the ropes that it's made from are very thick and tightly interwoven, the possibility exists, however remote, for real injury. On balance I think challenge and risk are good thing for kids in measured doses, and it's heartening to see this style of equipment making a comeback.

Trampolines, though. Keep kids away from those things.
posted by killdevil at 6:09 PM on March 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

I remember once when i was about 6-7, dropping off the edge of some play-structure or another and landing split legged onto the edge of a sandbox that was too close, too high, and too hard. Just crotch-shotted myself at what felt like 50 mph. Pretty much the only time in my life that I was glad I wasn't amab. Because hoo boy it was bad enough but if I had testicles? I would have ended up in the hospital. Yeah the rounded plastic one they replaced the poorly designed one wasn't as fun, but at least the chances for injury were much less. This extra risk playground thing seems... ill-advised.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 6:12 PM on March 10, 2018

...broken glasses sticking out of his forehead...

O M G. DIY explosive?

I must have had a guardian angel.
posted by mondo dentro at 6:14 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

I’m thinking about all the ER visits my twin sisters had via accidents that happened during play (for some reason I didn’t get any broken bones/stitches until a surfing accident when I was 36), and this sounds so terrible. I’m 37 and they are 36.

My sisters have grit, but one is missing the tip of her right index finger, the other fell off one of those spiral slides and stopped breathing for 5 minutes. Both had broken collar bones. One had third degree burns from a BBQ. Both have had prob 100 stitches. Both have knocked out teeth. Both have broken ankles from getting their feet stuck in their bicycle chain. Etc etc.

Not all of these would not have happened if we had a more modern and “safe” play time, but there should would have been less blood.

I guess there is an unspoken “...for those that live” at the end of their mission statement.
posted by sideshow at 6:19 PM on March 10, 2018 [10 favorites]

are they allowing high level members of the british government to hang out unsupervised at children's playgrounds again?
posted by indubitable at 6:20 PM on March 10, 2018 [9 favorites]

This extra risk playground thing seems... ill-advised.

Have you seen the excuses for slides they have these days? They've deliberately designed them so they have static cling. It's a great way for kids to not want to spend time on the playground.

(I miss really tall swings. Even as an adult, swings are just fun.)
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:20 PM on March 10, 2018 [14 favorites]

The thing I liked about the article is the reference to America's litigious culture and how having to pay for medical care makes parents more eager to find someone to blame.
posted by irisclara at 6:24 PM on March 10, 2018 [24 favorites]

This keeps coming back. Anecdotally, I have not observed in my own children any reluctance to use contemporary playgrounds. Playgrounds are fun. And in my experience the claim that riskier playgrounds are in some way good for kids, while perfectly plausible in principle, is not well-supported empirically.
posted by escabeche at 6:34 PM on March 10, 2018 [23 favorites]

Sounds like a dream for the kids. More, and more complex, work for the caretakers or educators, though - an issue sadly only mentioned in passing by the article. As the responsible adult on a high-risk playground, I’d want a substantial raise. Kids vary a lot in their risk-taking behaviors and their klutziness and it’s no easy feat for the caretaker to predict which of the little monkeys is just going to go on a suicide mission when nobody’s watching.

(I love how the article takes a turn at the end and explains how all this brick-catapulting is going to make the kids into superior gristle for the capitalism machine later on; giving them an edge over the weakling/non-risk-taker competitors. Because it can never be about the kids just having fun...)
posted by The Toad at 6:34 PM on March 10, 2018 [16 favorites]

Doesn't look like there is enough room to play bull-rush in that playground.

Also, is that a stylised Droog on tha side of the shed. What are they teaching kids exactly ?

We had a pretty long/high flying fox at school in Form 1 & 2 (11/12yrs old) and swing ropes on may-poles over steep slopes at primary school. Many broken bones, smashed teeth & dislocated limbs eventuated. That was the 70's & 80's though. Not sure if all that stuff is still available to young uns.

On the other hand NZ has ACC/free-healthcare so you just got patched up and sent back to school as the cool-kid with a cast for everyone to sign (not me though - I was to wimpy for serious shenanigans that led to broken bits).
posted by phigmov at 6:35 PM on March 10, 2018

We have "mobile adventure playgrounds" here where the parks department hauls around tools, pipes, wood, all sorts of random things for children to play and do. It's all supervised of course, but a great idea
posted by Calzephyr at 6:37 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, these are not quite "tower of terror" playgrounds (like the tornado slide from my childhood that you could have died if you fell off) of days gone by; they're more calibrated than that. They're a lot about providing more creative and free ways to play and to interact with the environment (and for the children to explore the capabilities of their own bodies). There actually is a movement towards these in the US, although not usually at schools; they're often called "adventure playgrounds" here if you want to go to one.

Another thing you see a lot more of these days in the US is age-graded play structures (of the bright plastic sort) -- many playgrounds have a little one with a sign that says "2-5" and a much bigger, taller, more daring one that says "5-12" or similar. That gives school-age kids more appropriate challenges and risks and fun, instead of making them play on a structure that's safe for toddlers too.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:38 PM on March 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I ended up in the ER maybe ten times as a kid but never from injuries on a playground. I was just really clumsy. I was the kind of kid who could manage to rip his scalp open* and need twenty stitches just by tripping and hitting a metal cabinet. The county Youth and Family Services would probably show up at my parent's door if I was being raised today.

*Now that I've gone bald, that damn scar down the back of my head has reappeared after being hidden for about 45 years
posted by octothorpe at 6:38 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

A lot of the riskiest parts of the playgrounds of my childhood involved either poor maintenance or materials introduced by adults who loitered there after hours. Better maintenance, cleaner premises and adult supervision would have prevented most of the issues that I either had or was relatively closely involved with. Rusty nails, giant splinters because of damaged wood, broken glass, a bunch of fourth graders competing at how far we could get jumping off of the swings with no adults anywhere in sight. None of this stuff actually seems that dangerous by comparison.
posted by Sequence at 6:46 PM on March 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've taken my nephew to an adventure playground a couple of times, and it definitely is a lot of fun. (It's fun for him, but I am completely shameless and pretty small, so it's also fun for me.) I don't think it's actually very dangerous, though. You could conceivably fall and hurt yourself, but I don't think you're likely to hurt yourself very badly. It's not the monkey-bars-over-concrete of my childhood, which is a good thing. I'm not that nostalgic for the unsafe playgrounds of yesteryear, because I think a lot of the risk was unnecessary and stemmed from poor design.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:52 PM on March 10, 2018 [5 favorites]

Also, is that a stylised Droog on tha side of the shed. What are they teaching kids exactly ?

The image is a little blurry but the text seems to suggest that vecks ought to wear a shlem on their gulliver to keep the red red krovvy from flowing after a tolchock o my brothers.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:10 PM on March 10, 2018 [23 favorites]

I am absolutely nostalgic for the dangerous playgrounds of yesteryear, because they were fun. Gym class was a nightmare - I was terrible at everything and as a result never got the chance to practice (no one got much time, but the kids who were good got most of it) , so the only times that I really got to do anything with climbing or balancing or testing what I could do physically was on the playground. I remember very vividly how I would push myself to climb a little higher or try something that was a little scary - and that's utterly out of character for me.

We had an absolutely fantastic playground - a three level climbing tower, wide monkey bars that were higher up than the average adult's head, lots of poles to climb and slide down, lots of bars for doing flips on. My childhood best friend and I spent a lot of time developing a way to clamber around the whole extensive layout without touching the ground. The ground was covered in squishy wood-chip stuff and the vast majority of the stuff wasn't actually that high off the ground.

Also I just don't think there was as much idiotic risk taking as people expect from children - I played on that playground every year between kindergarten and the end of fifth grade (it was that good - there were lots of different things) and I remember few injuries of any significance. There was a rumor that some boy in some other class had fallen off the climbing tower and broken his arm, but it was one of those cases where no one knew exactly which kid was supposed to have fallen, so it might very well have been no one.

The biggest risk was the climbing tower, and it would have been pretty easy to fix that by using nylon rope netting on the sides to make it harder to fall off. (I never knew anyone who fell off, and my parents were pretty paranoid about safety so I think I would have been forbidden to climb it if anyone actually had.)

I think that at least some climbing is worth the risk of falling. I know I fell off a few of the lower things in the park from time to time but since almost everything except the climbing tower itself was no more than three or four feet off the ground, it was hard to really hurt yourself.

Playgrounds should be complex enough that there's an element of challenge available in physical play. Nothing need be death-defying, but things that need a little practice to master are good for kids.
posted by Frowner at 7:11 PM on March 10, 2018 [6 favorites]

I've seen those terrifying British safety PSAs from the 70s. No wonder they went so far in the opposite direction. Watch out for the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, kids!
posted by lovecrafty at 7:13 PM on March 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

This view is tinged with nostalgia for an earlier Britain, in which children were tougher and more self-reliant. It resonates both with right-wing tabloids, which see it as a corrective to the cosseting of a liberal nanny state; and with progressives, drawn to a freer and more natural childhood. It is also supported by a growing list of government officials, among them Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of Ofsted, the powerful agency that inspects British schools.

This is reminiscent of the "Seatbelts weren't mandatory when I was a kid but I'm not dead, am I?" arguments. And the answer is "Well, if you watched your friend being hosed off the roadway after the accident because they weren't wearing a seatbelt, your opinion might differ."

This keeps coming back. Anecdotally, I have not observed in my own children any reluctance to use contemporary playgrounds. Playgrounds are fun. And in my experience the claim that riskier playgrounds are in some way good for kids, while perfectly plausible in principle, is not well-supported empirically.

This is an important point. And the other function of the rubberized surface is accessibility.

Tim Gill, whose 2007 book “No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society” became a handbook for the movement, ascribes this to bureaucratic inertia, and to a sharp drop-off in government investment in play that occurred in 2010, when the Conservative government introduced austerity measures.

Oh, wait. This is a result of the fact that the "nanny state" was reined in? Oh my.

But ultimately, you really wouldn't want your kid thinking about universal design or accessibility, now would you?

Sigh.

Yeah, these are not quite "tower of terror" playgrounds (like the tornado slide from my childhood that you could have died if you fell off) of days gone by; they're more calibrated than that. They're a lot about providing more creative and free ways to play and to interact with the environment (and for the children to explore the capabilities of their own bodies).

But they're still not universally designed with full accessibility in mind - that's a huge problem. They're (perhaps unintentionally) designed to exclude certain children's bodies. So they're not very well-"calibrated" at all, unless that exclusion is the intent.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:16 PM on March 10, 2018 [8 favorites]

Also, you know what's really dangerous? Bikes! I've managed to hurt myself as an adult by just, like, falling off my bike! And you can hurt yourself pretty effectively even if you're wearing a very solid helmet. There are a lot of ways to minimize risk - use good bike lights, pay attention to conditions, wear a helmet, avoid obviously dangerous roads, etc. I'm a pretty careful cyclist (knock on wood) and although I usually fall a couple of times a winter and hit a curb every few years, I'm usually going slowly and carefully enough that I just get bruises and sore muscles.

But who would take biking away from kids? We just tend to accept that while minimizing risk is good, it's worthwhile to let kids do something fun even if it's a little dangerous. We could easily say, "falling off the bike is too dangerous, kids shouldn't bike or roller skate, after all they could break a bone", but we usually don't.
posted by Frowner at 7:17 PM on March 10, 2018 [8 favorites]

I am reminded of the time in the mid-80s when my family went to Sesame Place, the Sesame Street-themed amusement park north of Philadelphia. In large part, it was much more of a run-and-jump-and-climb park than your typical fun park, more romping than holding onto your lapbar.

There was an obstacle course that teenage me ran through with my sister, slipping and falling at one point and whacking my chin on one of a series of what were basically big brightly-painted sewer pipes that kids were to crawl through. I ended up at a nearby clinic for a tetanus shot and two or three stitches. The doctor there was sympathetic, but described himself as a bit overworked -- "We have what's basically a shuttle bus hauling kids back and forth from the park all day long to get patched up."
posted by delfin at 7:20 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

I remember reading a few years back that they were trying something similar in...Sweden, I think(?)...but for totally different reasons, with clear positive effects. It apparently made bullying just go away. Completely. I think it was one of those things where a totally 'safe' playground removed 'man against nature/the environment' from the equation and all kids were left with was 'man against man'. Remove the safety features and kids have to look out for one another, or at the very least, bullying/pushing/shoving becomes so blatantly dangerous that bullies tend to dial it way back to, y'know, avoid killing someone.
posted by sexyrobot at 7:28 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Have you seen the excuses for slides they have these days? They've deliberately designed them so they have static cling.

Preach, the only slide my kids have been on that is worth a damn is the one that was put into a park in the sleepy city park in my grandparents town circa 1989. Everything else is an abomination of non-functional crossed with barely workable if my toddler gets on her belly and arches her back. It probably has something to do with the fact that current slides are 99% plastic while those, and others I recall from childhood, are stainless/chrome/whatever and therefor probably more expensive, I guess.

We just encourage our kids to take as many risks as they want to and, maybe, a tiny bit more. We also refrain from hovering nor do we flock to them when they fall down, skin a knee, pinch a finger, or do anything short of serious injury. We let them come to us to explain their feelings and the events that transpired, we hug and explain or redirect as necessary and all is well.

The compliments our kids get for being brave and resilient (aka 'bouncing' back up after a fall or spill) are some of the best feeling ones we get, right up there with whenever we get a compliment on polite behavior, though those are harder to come by... *shrug*

I think kids need dirt and danger and thrill, within reason of course, so I say bring on the sticks and blocks and sandboxes and merry-go-rounds that actually spin fast and slides-that-actually-keep-your-interest-past-age-3.
posted by RolandOfEld at 7:29 PM on March 10, 2018 [5 favorites]

I do wonder how much of the risk has been shifted onto the family's financial stability since we've moved away from stay-at-home parent families, and often away from having extended family nearby. Not to mention higher insurance co-pays and deductibles.

Kids can recover fine from a broken arm, but can the family recover from all those unexpected missed days of work and medical bills?
posted by smelendez at 7:41 PM on March 10, 2018 [6 favorites]

I do hope they're shooting for a happy medium. My mother still gets all pale and quiet remembering the time she watched a classmate die a quick but bloody death from a playground fall. And my sister's back was messed up for months after being thrown off a seesaw seat onto it's metal frame.

We've all picked gravel out of our knees and elbows, but that's what the good Lord gave us tweezers for.

The worst things that happened to me on a playground were from either lack of adult supervision or presence of adult supervisors who think it's appropriate to pick up a child by one arm and throw them into a snowbank.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:47 PM on March 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I guess I think the "grit" argument is kind of bullshit - kids in general have lots of opportunities to deal with adverse circumstances. The reasons to create a complex and challenging play environment seem more like giving kids the chance to experience more with their bodies, the chance to learn different motions and use different muscles all in self-directed ways, the chance to do vigorous play and work out some of the stress and stasis of being at a school desk, etc. Stacking things, cutting things, climbing things - those are all good physical experiences to have for themselves, not because they teach a moral lesson.

It seems likely, considering the seventies, that people may have erred a little too far in the opposite direction, but I bet a compromise position is possible. For instance the squishy rubber ground-cover seems like a really good idea, even if it's expensive. Novel materials seem like an interesting idea - can some things on the playground have a little bit of yield?

I wonder if you could design a safe very tall slide? Maybe something that was built into an artificial hill, so you would climb up shallow steps in the hillside, then slide down a half-tube sunk a bit into the hill? That would eliminate all the "falling off" risk, and I bet you could make all kinds of interesting other stuff by using the slope while still being quite safe.
posted by Frowner at 7:48 PM on March 10, 2018 [11 favorites]

Have you seen the excuses for slides they have these days? They've deliberately designed them so they have static cling.

The static charge they generate can actually fuck up a cochlear implant, so that’s a huge design flaw.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:52 PM on March 10, 2018 [13 favorites]

I think parents who are worried their children are undermaimed and insufficiently fractured are more than welcome to buy their special libertarian snowflake sprogs a set of lawn darts and be done with it.
posted by darkstar at 8:17 PM on March 10, 2018 [6 favorites]

I wonder if you could design a safe very tall slide? Maybe something that was built into an artificial hill, so you would climb up shallow steps in the hillside, then slide down a half-tube sunk a bit into the hill?

There are slides exactly like this near my inlaw’s house in Munich, Germany - some pics here. There is a risk of tumbling down the stairs, but it happens rarely. It’s amazing exercise to wear them out.

That same park also has a wonderful water playground/splash pad right next to a beer garden. There’s a lot to love about raising kids in the US as opposed to Germany, but I have to say the german Beergarden/Playground combo (which is pretty common actually) beats the US version of sitting on the hot smelly rubber with your iPhone while your toddler desperately tries to pick up speed on the X-tra Safe (TM) plastic slide...
posted by The Toad at 8:17 PM on March 10, 2018 [6 favorites]

Oh god it wasn’t the height or the speed we had to worry about back in the 70s. It was grilling hell out of your leg meat on the scorching metal slide in the summer!
posted by darkstar at 8:20 PM on March 10, 2018 [24 favorites]

Not that I’m a safety prude... My favorite childhood activity in Georgia in the winter: waxing up a section of cardboard and using it as an unsteerable sled to careen down the rough, barely snowy slopes of the neighbor’s hilly yard. The end of the run carried you hurtling across the bare street and right under a row of parked cars, if you weren’t careful. It was blissfully dangerous.
posted by darkstar at 8:25 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Another thing you see a lot more of these days in the US is age-graded play structures (of the bright plastic sort) -- many playgrounds have a little one with a sign that says "2-5" and a much bigger, taller, more daring one that says "5-12" or similar.

I saw one of these with a sign that said "Recommended age range: 2-5 years (18 months-5 years in Canada)."
posted by aws17576 at 8:29 PM on March 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I saw one of these with a sign that said "Recommended age range: 2-5 years (18 months-5 years in Canada)."

Damn, that metric system is more complicated than I thought!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:52 PM on March 10, 2018 [20 favorites]

I wonder if you could design a safe very tall slide? Maybe something that was built into an artificial hill, so you would climb up shallow steps in the hillside, then slide down a half-tube sunk a bit into the hill?

Golden Gate Park in San Francisco has its concrete slides, and Alpine slides have been around for awhile and are kind of all over the place.
posted by rhizome at 9:12 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

I wonder if you could design a safe very tall slide? Maybe something that was built into an artificial hill, so you would climb up shallow steps in the hillside, then slide down a half-tube sunk a bit into the hill?

Also in San Francisco: the Seward Street slides.
posted by bendy at 9:41 PM on March 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

I wonder if you could design a safe very tall slide? Maybe something that was built into an artificial hill, so you would climb up shallow steps in the hillside, then slide down a half-tube sunk a bit into the hill?

At Discovery Park in Seattle when I was a kid, there was a giant slide on the playground that went down the side of a hill. If I'm remembering correctly you'd fall maybe a foot, if that, if you fell off the side. (But it was straight and very slick, and you could build up a hell of a head of speed before you got to the bottom and shot off into the dirt. This was also the playground that had a tire swing that was a legit monster truck tire dangling from a giant angled log and you could fit at least half a dozen kids on it. And the place where I got my foot caught in another wooden play structure and my shoe came off and I had to walk back to daycare barefoot. Okay this is turning out not to be the best example so I'm just going to stop now.)
posted by skycrashesdown at 9:43 PM on March 10, 2018

current slides are 99% plastic while those, and others I recall from childhood, are stainless/chrome/whatever and therefor probably more expensive, I guess

The steel ones also get as hot as Satan's anus in the summer.

I wonder if you could design a safe very tall slide? Maybe something that was built into an artificial hill, so you would climb up shallow steps in the hillside, then slide down a half-tube sunk a bit into the hill?

Our apartment building owned a plot of land next door that over the years we built up with gardening beds and a play structure. You climbed up the play structure through a series of wide (like, two kids could easily sit on them and play a board game) square platforms that spiraled to the top. Only the top two levels had railings, but the other two were low enough that should you be so unlucky as to manage to somehow pitch yourself off the side, you were unlucky to take serious injury. I was always too chicken to try the monkey bars that you accessed from the third level, though!
posted by praemunire at 9:50 PM on March 10, 2018

Most of the "slides built into hills" I've met have been ludicrously fast and/or remarkably dangerous due to being made out of steel or concrete. None of the ones I've seen or met have necessarily been safer alternatives to "real" playground slides with fall hazards.

When I was a kid we had something called an "adventure playground" that was... somewhere between preteen shanty town tree fort, a rope course and a mud lake.

There were very few rules. One obvious rule was no fighting. Another one was no tools or nails in the mud pit, mud slide and other water/mud features. And that was about it.

In the building/tree fort area you were allowed to build whatever the hell you wanted with simple hand tools, scrap wood and nails. You could buy nails, or trade three old bent nails for a straight one. This, of course, assured a rather high turnover rate of structures being dismantled for fresh nails, as well as some seriously overengineered tree/ground forts designed to resist dismantling. There was also a lot of paint available, and some of it was just plain old Krylon enamel.

On the mud, ropes and water side of things there were rafts you could pole around on in the mud lake, a mud slide, a rope bridge over the mud lake and some rope swings and other rope structures. The mud slide was pretty frequently being tuned and rebuilt into a steep wooded hill, and it was lined with heavy duty landscaping sheeting and had some serious banks and launch hills in it's short, steep 50-60 foot run.

Also, in hindsight I don't remember this playground really being that great besides the mudslide and ropes stuff, because, really, as a kid I and my friends were still allowed a pretty ride range and freedom to roam. It was cool and all, but it wasn't like it was the first time we pounded a nail with a hammer in a tree fort or played in the mud.

I remember going out alone as young as 8-10 or with my brother and friends essentially all day with nothing more than a dime to call home, just in case. And you'd better have a damn good reason for using that dime, and it better not be because you're too lazy to walk/bike home in time for dinner.

And we'd go all over the place. It wasn't unusual to go ride bikes for 10-20 miles all over town or even end up at the beach to go bodysurfing or swimming unsupervised in huge surf, and then go biking some more.

We also did a lot of dangerous stuff like riding our bikes off of steep cliffs and hills and launching off some pretty heavy ramps, and none of us had helmets. Not advocating against them here or saying this was ok, at all, just observing. I didn't have a bike helmet until I was almost 18 and starting to do some serious mountain biking.

Or there were the inevitable rock and dirt clod wars in some crappy brownfield littered with rusty junk. Those things got pretty rough.

While I'm glad we're learning how to be safer in general, and that we're taking things like not so minor head injuries a lot more seriously - I also don't like the idea of an entirely risk free, danger free world. Especially when it comes to development and how we learn things from danger and even pain.

And that said, some of the newer playground equipment is actually really cool. There's some really fun rope towers and pyramids and stuff out there. And parks with fun little ziplines that actually work. Or cool things like musical or creative toys built into the equipment.
posted by loquacious at 10:22 PM on March 10, 2018

I think if risk and injury is so character building every adult who wants to avoid the cosseting of a liberal nanny state should have both their arms broken.
You could even get a whole two birds one stone thing going on if you give some poor kids baseball bats for the job.
posted by fullerine at 12:13 AM on March 11, 2018 [8 favorites]

I like the balance that the big playground at Chester Zoo strikes. There's a big water bed that you can fill up and there were kids there of all ages co-operatively playing to fill it up and experiment with it. The signs explicitly talk about being a place for adventurous play. Mandolin Conspiracy's post has got me wondering how accessible it is though.
posted by threetwentytwo at 3:25 AM on March 11, 2018

I dunno what people are on about with reference to modern playgrounds. I took the scatterkitten to any number of parks and playgrounds in his pre-kindergarten days, when we had to find some way to burn off that energy in the daytime, and while the dumpy ones were, yeah, basically one rounded plastic structure with a crap slide on a mat, the bigger ones had ropes, climbing walls, slides tall enough that my boy (bless his risk-averse heart) refused to even go down them, weird mutant monkey bar variants, seesaws and spring rockers and sandboxes... I mean, there was a ton of stuff to do at most of them, and plenty of it was "risky" in the sense that if someone clumsy (not naming names here, but he does take after his father in this) were to fall off something, there would quite likely be scrapes or bruises, easily.

I'm quite happy to have things that are as engineered as possible to be safe while still allowing for fun play, and I cannot even look at that photograph at the head of the article without physically cringing and trying to lunge forward to save the child from getting brained when the bottom brick gets flung backwards into his forehead.

Other than being made of wood and not plastic, the other shots they had of various playgrounds weren't really all that far off of what actually is out there, and this is in the litigious US of A as cited in the article.

Basically, I see no reason to believe that you need real risk to teach kids about dangers, nor is there any evidence to support that playing on safe equipment isn't fun. Making playgrounds dangerous is illogical on the face of it. This feels like the drinking-your-own-urine-for-holistic-health version of child-rearing.
posted by Scattercat at 4:48 AM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]

With the slides, I wasn't so much thinking "let's build a mega-slide that you need to bring cardboard to slide down" (not that those aren't fun!) but "could you have an artificial hill tall enough to build something as high as a spiral slide without the falling risk"? The slides linked by The Toad are more what I had in mind - kid-appropriate in length and gradient, but high and steep enough to be more exciting than your average gently-sloped eight foot surface.

The biggest difference between the parks of my childhood and the plastic parks of today isn't risk, per se, it's challenge. (I grew up in a lower middle class suburb but we did have thoughtfully designed infrastructure, so maybe I was just lucky.)

For example, a friend and I figured out a way to climb around the whole park without touching the ground, and it involved walking long stretches on balance beams made out of logs (repurposed telephone poles?), walking on gym-style narrower balance beams, using low, wide parallel bars to swing ourselves along, climbing a wide ladder made out of pieces of pipe set in a wooden climbing structure and stepping from upended post to upended post. (There were a series of about eight or nine, each a medium long step apart; the lowest one was about a foot off the ground and the highest about 2.5 feet.) Almost none of this was especially dangerous. (there was also a scramble over the top of some high bars which it would probably be safer to replace with a nylon net.)

The thing is, it was tricky - it wasn't impossible for a fat and clumsy kid like me to do slowly and carefully, but it required some focus and to do it speedily required building some skills.

It was a very cleverly designed park - almost everything was available in different heights, so there were balance beams a foot off the ground, slightly higher ones and then ones that were about three feet high; similar with the monkey bars and poles to slide down. Most of the balancing stuff was linked, so you could go from the low ones to the high ones if you were ready to do that.

I've actually spent a reasonable amount of time in nearby parks (and if there are no children present I usually climb up on the equipment or swing on the swings). As an adult I'm not actually as physically adventurous or coordinated as when I was a kid, and what I consistently notice is that there's almost nothing physically difficult available around here. (There's one tall climbing net structure which is a little challenging, but it's also kind of same-y - you climb the net, and then you climb the net some more.) Almost everything is low plastic slopes, plastic bridges, different low plastic structures, etc.

"Physically challenging" doesn't have to mean dangerous or even "only fun for the athletic kids". When I look back on the perfect playground of my childhood, I'm struck by how many tiny challenges were built in, and how they could be ramped up. It wasn't even that using the balance beams or the low parallel bars was thrilling, like sliding down a steep slide or jumping off a swing - it's that you could start out by doing easy things and try to progress.
posted by Frowner at 6:47 AM on March 11, 2018 [8 favorites]

Yeah, see, when I was in elementary school we had an artificially-built, asphalt-covered hill with three metal slides going down it in our schoolyard, which didn’t just mean tumbles off it and leg burns in the summer, but in winter it became covered in snow and ice and we had a game where like, 80 kids would try to climb up its icy surface while the kids at the top pushed them down to stay king of the hill, and if you were strategic you would use the slides to shimmy up, but like, 10 kids would be doing that and would climb on you and mash your face into the sides of them. Then if you lost your grip or footing you would slam down into the climbing kids behind you, sometimes boot first. But if you got to the top a great strategy was to tackle the kings of the hill at the knees, which would smash their heads against the tops of the slides now and then.

We also played British Bulldog. Lots of lost teeth, dislocated shoulders, broken wrists. It did provide excellent background for Lord of the Flies.

I realize this story is mostly about supervision but I think I’m also challenging the idea that if you present kids with an environment that they will use it in an exclusively healthy way. My older son played safely on things. My younger son ended up on the roof of every play structure. (He also had an undiagnosed vision problem so probably had no depth perception and therefore no fear.)

I am fine with safer playgrounds. We didn’t have rock climbing walls when I was in school and they are amazing, even the shorter ones on playgrounds if a family can’t make it to free night at the community centre. We have trees and wooded areas for greater challenge if required, plus camping.

I don’t believe I learned grit via tire swing and metal slides, anyway.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:11 AM on March 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

I guess I think the "grit" argument is kind of bullshit

Especially when it's clear they're not even building it, they're just letting the kids get it from the two clearly labeled bins that are right there.
posted by radwolf76 at 9:37 AM on March 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

I adore the boy's face where he's on the plank and gauging how much weight to use in order to move forward without falling. And the other boy watching.

I have no other opinion about this piece, but as a teacher and parent, that particular look makes me so very happy. That's actual learning.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 11:22 AM on March 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

God help me, I'm totally for this. And anyway, there's nothing kids can't make dangerous. Boring slow slide? Let's find out if you can run up while five of your friends are sliding down. Or hey, let's see what's happening at the construction site next door! Etc.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 11:43 AM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]

where like, 80 kids would try to climb up its icy surface while the kids at the top pushed them down to stay king of the hill

Thank you for triggering the memory of doing this on our slide, with fewer kids. I had completely forgotten. We were pretty stupid. But the memory does bring me joy.
posted by praemunire at 11:49 AM on March 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

Good heavens, just reading up on lawn darts and they were even worse than their reputation:

...on December 19, 1988, the CPSC reinstated the outright ban on lawn darts in the US. In the previous eight years, 6,100 people had been sent to the emergency room due to lawn darts in the USA. Out of that total, 81% were 15 or younger, and half of them were 10 or younger. On the week the commission voted to ban the product, an 11-year-old girl in Tennessee was hit by a lawn dart and sent into a coma.

You’ve come a long way, baby.
posted by darkstar at 7:57 PM on March 11, 2018

Holy cow, trampolines are by far more evil:

Trampolines cause about 100,000 injuries every year. Between 2002 and 2011, more than 1 million people landed in emergency rooms with injuries related to trampoline use. Almost 300,000 of the injuries included broken bones.

Children under 16 suffer nearly 93 percent of fractures related to trampolines...

Approximately 15 percent of injuries on trampolines happen to children younger than 6...

One in 200 injuries leads to permanent neurological damage.

posted by darkstar at 8:05 PM on March 11, 2018

Having Feelings about the lack of appropriate risk is an extremely modern first-world concern. We should all be so lucky to have this anywhere on a list of concerns. When I hear this is a conservative concept I recall that not long ago those young London children would have been working in industry where they could have learned about real risk. This introduced risk has that weird retroengineering feel of wetlands restoration; similar but weirdly unnatural.

I dunno what people are on about with reference to modern playgrounds.
I think Gen X USian folks -- confirmed by a number of age-supplying commenters here -- have Unresolved Issues about first-generation "safety" playgrounds. These tended to be awful and replaced quirky and charming wooden structures that had often been built with community support in a post-hippie up-with-children moment that existed in the early 70s in the US. We forget and forgive exposed nails and splinters and the effects of weather and time and that nothing lasts forever, especially childhood things we wish magically wish would.

We would have hated anything that came after those wooden friends. Their replacements were scorn-worthy under the best of circumstances.

Modern playground equipment though (for sure the last decade) is cool AF, things which would have been found only in amusement parks when I was a kid. Sure, no double-height low-rail steel slide to breakneck down but damn, full-on pirate ships and space ships, all sorts of cool pathways and slides and climbing surfaces. Whispermaphones! Plenty of places to prove you're brave still, just a little better thought out and more difficult to abuse (ask tweens how though!) Not to mention strongly vandal resistent and built way the hell more solidly.

My daughters' favorite piece of equipment is a tube slide solely for the climbing challenge. Their next is the carousel which despite having been declawed a bit by safer surfaces and protective skirts are still crazy death machines when you're little.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 10:31 PM on March 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

Swingsets. Up until I was maybe ten years old they were just a solid chunk of wood (I think cased in rubber) and held to the overhead bar with chains. Then they began bringing in the wide strap sort of thing instead of the solid board, and when you sat on them they grabbed hold of you and held you tight.

Important because the new strap-grab type didn't let you go nearly as easy as the older style straight across solid rubber-covered board. And why was that important? Because you want to get going as high as possible and then let go, flying off into next week, whereas with the new type they didn't let you go.

I didn't have the guts of some of the other kids -- I did get going some, and I did then cut loose. But I always held back, I didn't take it as far as I could, unlike some of the other kids, in particular one of my cousins, who was clearly insane -- he'd go back/forth back/forth until peak velocity / peak height was reached and then off he'd go. The guy was a psycho -- Rodney -- he was either gutsy as hell or dumb as a sack-full of hammers, maybe both. With Rodney, I'm leaning toward fearless rather than stupid.

I still think swingsets are fun. I'd no more leap off of one than stick my hand into the garbage disposal, but they're still fun.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:43 PM on March 11, 2018

I still think swingsets are fun. I'd no more leap off of one than stick my hand into the garbage disposal, but they're still fun.

IKR? Swingsets for grownups need to be A Thing.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:07 AM on March 12, 2018