By Douglas Pugh
If, like me, you squandered some learning opportunities in your youth and now seek a road to rectification, consider returning to a playground. I’ve scouted out a few candidates, not by name or location but by type.
There are large playgrounds that feel like the parking lots they were originally designed to be, and there are medium-sized playgrounds.
But my favorites are the small playgrounds, large enough for a compact softball diamond but otherwise an expanse bordered by mature trees, with stretches of green and areas of dirt that turn to mud when it rains.
Changes have come to all three types. They have been profound.
The big metal twirl-a-whirls are gone. No longer can you create centrifugal forces capable of throwing you to the dirt, crumpled, too dizzy to stand.
Those big steel slides — so hot in the sun they burn your bum — are gone. Teeter-totters worth their salt have vanished. No longer can a heavier kid suspend a lighter classmate on the up end of the teeter-totter plank until he or she yells “Give,” or apologizes for some slight.
Or jumps off, twisting their ankle and bruising their ego.
The big metal jungle gyms are gone as well.
What happened?
In 1981, a committee composed, I suppose, of engineers, insurance adjusters, and PTA mothers — not a playground user among them — developed playground safety standards.
Standards that have diminished playgrounds.
Now, homogenized structures of multi-colored plastics — none too high, none too large — serve as playground equipment proxies where the big swings used to be, swings that carried you to the sky and when you jumped, let you fly.
Oh, some good has come of it: from 2001 to 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported an average of 13 playground deaths per year in the United States, 10 fewer than in 1980.
But consider this: In 2021, 2,590 children died as a result of firearms in this country, up from 1,311 in 2011 — an increase of 1,279 — a lot more than 10. Firearms are now the leading cause of childhood death in the United States. (CNN, March 2023; New England Journal of Medicine, May 19, 2022)
There is a fundamental difference between these two risks: risks on a playground are assumed, the risks of firearms are imposed.
So much for the integrity of our risk-avoidance efforts on behalf of our children.
Being an elementary school principal carries aspects of life’s most pleasant endeavors. But that occupation presents challenges. If you walk into an elementary school and pause, you feel the weight of the obligations.
Obligations to teach young people the academic skills they need, but also teach them to walk away into a world of greater self-determination, where risks await they have not previously encountered.
The city of Toronto, Canada, recently banned tobogganing at 45 of its sledding hills. The city determined it was too risky.
Trying to close toboggan runs in Canada worked about as well as an earlier attempt to ban street hockey — it didn’t. With Canadians, these efforts were not just wrong; they were embarrassing!
And if those efforts had been successful, they would have hurt kids.
According to recommendations by the Canadian Pediatric Society, unstructured outdoor play — in particular risky play — is essential to the physical, mental, and social development of children.
“We have to reconsider how we view risk and understand that risk is a part of life and that it’s part of our children’s lives,” said Dr. Suzanne Beno, a pediatric emergency medicine physician. “There’s a very positive benefit to allowing children to recognize risk, experience risk, and learn to manage it.”
Proposed new Canadian recommendations provide that children should be kept “As safe as necessary, but not as safe as possible.”
Children are born with the instinct ot take risks while playing, and learning to negotiate risk is crucial to their survival. But if children never go through that process, fear can turn into a phobia.
Paradoxically, our fear of children being harmed may result in more fearful children. (The Atlantic, April, 2014)
If you decide to head back to a playground, pick one that requires you to take risks, one where it’s prudent to pack a few Band-Aids.
Doug Pugh is a retired judge from northern Michigan. He and his wife winter on Fripp Island and are pleased to be there … when they are. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.