An article in this month’s Atlantic Magazine described a playground in Wales called “The Land”. The description of “The Land” will set your head spinning and would give municipal lawyers nightmares – kids lighting fires in metal drums, piles of old mattresses, kids piling up and knocking down tall stacks of wooden palettes, etc.
Today’s Boston Globe featured an article called “The Future of Play”, inspired by the Atlantic article. It talked about the history and evolution of playgrounds in Boston and America.
Both of these articles struck a chord with me and gave voice to vague, nagging, subliminal feelings I’ve had in recent years about our playgrounds.
At the moment, my wife is involved with a fund raising effort to replace our local playground equipment at the Emerson Playground in Upper Falls. We have catalogs from playground equipment company’s scattered around our house. What’s striking about these catalogs is the basic “sameness” and “borning’ness” of all the playground equipment. For a given park you can buy more equipment or less equipment but its all off the same ilk – plastic, generic overly safe structures with rubber flooring. You can travel anywhere in the country, and for the most part everyone’s playground are nearly interchangeable.
Three import points about our standardized “Mcdonald’s model” playgrounds are that
*Kids mostly lose interest in them at a relatively young age
* There’s practically no provision for free form exploratory play – climb on the structures, slid down the slide, that’s pretty much it.
* The sense of risk has been wrung out of the designs. The facing of, and mastery of risk is an essential part of kids play. That doesn’t mean we want to fill our playgrounds with broken glass and loaded guns but it means that there have to be parts of a playground that put an 8 or 9 year old slightly (and relatively safely) out of their comfort zone.
When my daughter was younger and at prime playground age we use to seek out odd ball, different playgrounds. Even then (5 years ago) they were few and far between and there’s even fewer today. The ones that she was always drawn to were the ones that had different and by today’s standards more dangerous equipment – a 1950’s era playground in Dedham full of steeps slides and a high speed merry-go-round. The kids would organize themselves on the merry-go-round with the bigger kids pushing on the outside, the littler one riding inside and the magic of it was for the most part parents would stay off sides and watch the kids sort themselves out. For the kids, an essential element of the appeal was that it went fast enough with the big kids pushing to really scare them.
Another favorite was a fairly nondescript generic playground but it did have a big sandbox. The neighborhood tradition was that people left their toy trucks, cars, etc there. Kids who had just met would play together in the sand box for hours, building roads, building towns, acting out various scenarios – going shopping, car crashes, drive to vacation, etc
The genesis of all this standardization and simplification of playground equipment were a few high profile law suits in the 1970’s. From then on, legal liability became the main driver of playground equipment design. As a result, all the equipment is designed to be very safe and very boring for all but the youngest kids. Even swings are being eliminated in towns around the country as one more way that kids could potentially be hurt.
The other missing piece in today’s playground is raw material to play with – to build stuff, to create something, to knock it down. As the Globe article mentioned the first playgrounds in Boston were giant piles of sand and were immensely popular. Today, even sandboxes are frowned on for a variety of safety and health reasons.
As Susan Solomon, an architectural historian and playground consultant was quoted in the Globe article – “Things like taking risks, learning to fail, learning to master something, to plan ahead, to develop deep friendships – none of these could take place on most playgrounds today.
So how can we do better in designing the next generation of Newton playgrounds? How can we push back against the overwhelming fear of LIABILITY! to make more interesting, engaging playgrounds that can hold older kids interest, and foster real play rather than just a bit of climbing? I don’t know the answer. I do know though that the system today is designed to just build nearly identical Mcdonald models playgrounds that don’t do much to foster real play except for the very youngest children.
I assume the statute of limitations has run out on things I did in my youth, but a lot of things in the story from Wales have a familiar ring to them. In comparison to today’s young folks, we were hell raisers, albeit pretty good natured ones. We were constantly lighting fires at makeshift campfire sites down at the old Cold Springs playground where the makeshift dog park is not located, and in the Green Woods aqueduct behind Endicott Street and Selden Road. We kept most of these from spreading, but on two occasions the flames got dangerously out of hand. What put a stop to this was a roaring fire in a stiff wind in the back of Selden Road that got completely out of hand and almost burned down the house where John Rice and his family now live. In defense of what we did, it was the Lone Ranger and Tonto that initially got us into lighting campfires because they used to give short lessons over the radio on how to tie knots, light fires, cook meals over a campfire and ride a horse. Thank goodness none of us turned into pyromaniacs.
Check out the St. Louis City Museum.
The description of the Wales playground structure reminds me of “The Sudbury Model”. It’s the learning model (and I do mean learning model, not teaching model) used by Sudbury Valley School. Without a long description, the model allows almost complete freedom to the child (no structured classes, no curriculum guide) such that the end result is this great discovery of self and true learning. Most children in this model gain a huge sense of self confidence. The risk-reward part of letting a kid be a kid tends to lean most kids to the reward side. Aside from playgrounds, I’d like to see more sports programs encourage the kinds of play we enjoyed when we did it ourselves at age 8, generating our own leadership structure without adults and completely enjoying the experience of making mistakes and developing rules, and not stopping because some whistle sounded. On the other hand, this new “Youtube-age” we live in gives me concerns about kids imitating really stupid acts. I’m not sure what the balance is, but the Wales idea of passive monitoring is smart.
Thank you for starting this thread.
One my memories from my childhood is fights and injuries. I had fond (yes) memories of showing up at elementary school and counting the injuries we gathered over the weekend. They were badges of honor!
BTW – I grew up without “anger issues” and with empathy and healthy respect for others (I think).
I wish my son could experience some of this…
@Ted, have been at the St. Louis City Museum. Couldn’t get my kid out of there when he was 9 or 10.
The Atlantic article brought me way back, and I remembered the independence we had as little kids. Until I was 7 we lived in a townhouse village of a few hundred units, roadways and walkways throughout, a huge playground on one side and a strip of woods with a stream running through it beyond the playground. We’d go out during the summer and be gone for hours, alone until we ganged up with friends. We’d muck through the stream, trying to stay dry on rocks but invariably failing – my biggest worry was that my mom would be mad that I messed up my sneakers. We’d collect scrap lumber and try to build rafts. “Try” because we were quite little and hadn’t figured out effective ways of connecting anything. I remember lashing planks together with twine we found blown into the thicket by the stream. Of course we didn’t know our knots so nothing stayed together. We’d get even wetter and muddier.
The playground surface was asphalt. There were two slick sheetmetal slides and the older kids would always go down headfirst. Once in a while some kid would slide off and whack their head on the hard surface. Someone would run to find an adult who would carry the kid away, and for weeks afterwards we would breathlessly relate to all who would listen that the kid had “cracked his head open”. But no parent told us to stop.
There was a merry-go-round with a sitting platform about a foot-and-a-half off of the ground. The little kids would climb onto the middle and grab a rail as close to the hub as possible while the older kids would lie on their backs underneath, kicking for all they were worth with the intention of getting the thing spinning so fast that anyone on it would fly off from centrifugal force. The older kids would dare and harass the younger kids until they got on board, and once in a while some very small kid would fly off and get bloodied and bruised on the pavement…..but nobody ever told us we shouldn’t do what we were doing. We just developed our own sense and tolerance for what was scary, risky, fun, stupid, or all four.
Were those the good old days? I don’t know, and I cannot imagine letting my own kids loose like we were loose. But my heart still quickens when I remember. Everyday was adventure, creativity, freedom, and joy, as we figured out our world on our own.
The two big shortcomings are of the current playground designs are the lack of challenge (i.e. thrills) for the older kids and lack of opportunity for creative play for all kids. The first one is the hardest since it involves possible tradeoffs vs safety (and liability). The second one – creative play might be an easier nut to crack.
One thought I’ve had about suggesting to our local playground committee is building something akin to a large sandbox with no sand and the standard rubber matting floor. Rather than fill it with sand, fill it with donated blocks of all kinds, large format Lego’s, Bristle Blocks, etc. We could get donations from individual families in the neighborhood of their kids’ old blocks as well as possible donations from businesses that sell them.
No doubt over time it would periodically have to be replenished but that seems pretty manageable.
I’m sure this will somehow be more complicated than it first seems – it always is. The appeal though is that it would give at least the younger kids a big box of stuff to build, create, and play with in a more free-form way.
Was thinking something similar not long ago when I went back to my hometown in NJ. There was a lot of wooded property owned by the water company and we kids used to go exploring a building forts all through the place. Bob’s experience with “campfires” sounds familiar to me.
There was also the occasional problem with people dumping illegally in the woods. We turned this to an opportunity by digging pits into the ground and covering them over with plywood and disguising them with mattresses, dirt, and other camouflage. It seemed idyllic at the time, but the concepts of a) my parents not knowing where we were and b) the number of staph infections I got from cuts and playing in tainted water horrify me as a parent.
Are we more resilient as adults than our kids will be? I think I can make a case for us being more entrepreneurial, perhaps.
check out these: http://www.rockwellgroup.com/projects/entry/imagination-playground
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/nyregion/in-a-brooklyn-park-design-movable-parts-at-play.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/arts/design/16shat.html?pagewanted=all
Great links – thanks Andreae
Just found this article. Thank you for writing it and making it more known about this progressing downfall in imaginative play for children. I did my Masters thesis on this topic about 7 years ago and still keep my eye out for any playground out of the ordinary. I found a great, stimulating playground in East Meadow, Long Island. Best one I have seen around in New York in ages. The town defines it as a ‘special needs’ playground! I personally think it is just what ALL children need and I wish there were more around. I currently live in Australia, and have luckily found that the problem is not nearly as pervasive here as it is in America. Hope it stays that way, so at least this nation has a higher chance of producing some creative, innovative thinkers.