Some Thoughts on Playground Safety
In today’s Slate, Tom Vanderbilt does good work in attacking the blight of playground equipment on America’s lawns. You know the landscape: Brightly colored swingsets and slides, no kids on them, sitting on a pitch of grass. They’re eyesores, they never get used, and they become a big environmental liability when it comes time to dispose of them.
So good on Vanderbilt there.
Bad on Vanderbilt here:
In her book American Playgrounds, Susan Solomon notes how the fear of injuries and their litigious consequences forced the closing, or banal “post-and-platform” retrofitting, of many playgrounds. Gone are the kinds of things that defined my own childhood: terrifying metal “monkey bars” pitched over a pit of hard gravel or the towering, twisting, all-metal “tornado slide,” as we called it, which was at once the most exhilarating and the most dangerous thing in my young life.
Here we have an exhilarating mixture of ignorance and nostalgia forming a perfect mound of bullshit.
Let’s take this thing point by point. I’ll admit I haven’t read Solomon’s book. But I can tell you this: I have a couple of very young kids and wherever I am, I’m always in the market for a playground. I haven’t had trouble finding them, either. So if there’s a big trend toward closing playgrounds, perhaps there were too many to begin with.
As for “retrofitting” the playgrounds, let’s hope so. When I was a kid, I often played on equipment anchored into asphalt. I fell on that shit many times. And no, that wasn’t exhilarating or cool or somehow character-forming. It wasn’t an experience that I’ll relate to coming generations in the same breath as walking through the snow barefoot just to get to school.
Those surfaces hurt. They’re a big reason why every year about 200,000 kids from preschools and elementary schools check into emergency rooms in this country after playground falls and the like.
The injuries and emergency visits, thank goodness, are on the decline. Why? Because playgrounds are getting safer. Rubberized surfaces are getting installed across the land, the better to cushion the impact of a fall. Insane equipment that mangles our little kids is getting thrown out. And if lawsuits are forcing these trends, then good on the lawsuits, too!
Vanderbilt should stick to aesthetics and the connection between home and its exterior. Leave out the mindless and tiresome references to the good old days.
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11:20 am
Rubberized, non-asphalt surfaces are fine, but why get rid of swings, the see-saw, and slides tall enough to actually slide down? Modern playgrounds look like boring deck surfaces designed by adults, with a lower number of kinetic elements than before. I think he’s partially right. You can have both safety, and more fun, traditional elements there.
1:44 pm
I’m all for the safe rubber surface, but I have an issue with the legal system (by way of reactive city or school administrators and freaked out, litigious parents) defining what my kid can or can not play on. Honestly, how much “insane equipment that mangles our littles kids” is out there begging to be built?
2:21 pm
I’m a parent of a 3-year old son who babysits for other kids and actively looking out for park variety. The slides Mr. T mentions are not non-existent. But most parks are trying to guess who their clientele are and tend to err on the side of younger (to minimize risk). The parks you describe with the low slides are intended for YOUNGER patrons (like 2-3 year olds).
I find complicated decking to hold the interest of folks up through about age 10. But bigger and badder slides, fire poles, complicated monkey bars–these are a must for the older kids.
2:54 pm
There’s some variety out there. I ran across this — I don’t know how deadly it is, but it looks cool.
http://www.kaboom.org/tabid/285/CurrentPlaySpaceID/9756/Default.aspx
5:13 pm
As a Certified Playground Safey Inspector I believe I can speak to this with an informed opinion. In addition to inspections and audits some individuals at our company provide expert witness testimony. As such we are intimately familiar with a wide variety of playground injuries. Complicated monkey bars make up the highest percantage of injuries leading to litigation. Falls to equipment in general make up about 16-17% of seriuos injuries. Those complicated monkey bars you yearn for david are directly responsible for , brain damage, spinal fractures, dismemberment and growth plate fractures. Regarding bigger badder slides - studies indicate that young children get no benefits, sensory or otherwise from slides over about 8′. Yet the severity of injuries occuring from a fall to any surface increase exponentially once you go over about 8′. Current laws and guidelines are based on the collection and analysis of data from emergency room visits resulting from playground injuries. We know how kids get hurt. We should do something about it.
2:46 pm
Dear All,
I am Susan Solomon (author of American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space) and feel you should hear from me directly.I am not advocating that kids get hurt . I am endorsing playgrounds that allow for some unpredictability and challenge in hopes that our kids will learn from experience, thereby becoming better judges of what is dangerous and what is not.
We, as a culture, need to rethink safety that prevents all risk. We have to develop settings where kids can try something new, NOT succeed, then keep plugging away until they overcome obstacles. Kids with that playground experience will gain a sense of achievement; they will learn that taking a chance has its own rewards. Kids who know how to take limited risks will be our creative business people, scientists,scholars, artists of the future.