Back when a parent’s first thought wouldn’t be suing everyone in sight, and would have been laughed at if they did think of it.
My grade school, for some reason, left a broken tetherball pole out on the playground for like a year after it broke. The base was the tire-with-cement, so it would tip over… and one time didn’t quite make it all the way over, so it came back up and nailed me in the head with the end of the broken pipe. Got my first and only real authentic concussion! I’m certainly one to say things like “back in my day…and we turned out fine” and all that, but knowing what we know now about concussions I always wonder if maybe it did have some sort of real effect on my life.
This is the playground my 2 year old goes to. He has a blast, along with the other 6-15 kids who are there at any given time, rotating in and out as their parents/grandparents come and go.
We see kids from age 1.5 up to 10 (give or take) playing together and without much worry. To me, the playground of the 1900s – and even the usual geodesic dome playgrounds – just strike me as lazy. “Here’s some tubes for a kid to climb on, whatever.”
It looks pretty safe. The high areas are fully enclosed, The forward area looks like a chipped rubber surface. Falling off a rope web, if it’s constructed correctly, is more like rolling down a hill than falling off a cliff.
That guy is not hooked in in anyway. Just sitting on a glorified swing. And (at least with Grand Coulee Dam) there were quite a few skilled craftsmen who ended up as “extra rebar”.
I haven’t been part of the discussion because we had your regular old run-of-the-mill slide, monkey bars, etc.
However, we did live in a split-level ranch home with little supervision at certain times of the day.
My window rested directly next to the eaves over the front porch, and my brother’s was next to it.
Things we would do:
Climb out of my window onto the roof.
Jump out of my brother’s window into beanbag chairs in the front yard (about one story up).
Climb onto the top of the couch, jump and bounce off the cushions to the floor. I dislocated my left elbow in the first grade.
Jump down the basement flight of stairs. As we grew, we added pillows at the bottom when all seven became too easy, and we progressed into executing tricks. I cracked my head open on the landing above at the age of twelve by taking a running start. I received twelve stitches in my forehead, leaving a permanent “Nike swoosh” scar under my hairline.
Sledding down the stairs using a pleather baby crib mattress that was out of use.
Jumping out of the swingset in our backyard to see who could fly furthest and still land on his feet.
There might have been more, but that’s all I can remember at this time.
Growing up, there was a playground with a rocketship similar to the above ones and an actual F-86 that you could climb all over. The thing with the slides at school was to take the waxed paper from your sandwich and go down sitting on it a couple of times. This waxed the slide for greater speed. (my mom told me about that) I was disappointed when they changed to the sling seats on the swings from the old hardwood seats because they were more difficult to jump off of at apogee.
The “trouble” is that playgrounds became relatively a lot more dangerous over time.
As childhood deaths and permanent injury have plummeted due to better hospitals and safer homes and cars, playgrounds dropped only marginally as better health care managed to save only a few of the children who would have died or been maimed in playground accidents.
As our ability to protect them has grown, children’s lives have simply become too valuable to sacrifice a few of them for the betterment of the vast majority.
As always, we look at the trade-off - a physically challenging playground helps forge children’s confidence, physical dexterity, physical health, etc. Are those benefits worth sacrificing the lives of those few children who would die or be permanently injured?
(Perhaps a talk I had with a children’s surgeon in my the early seventies made the trade-off a little starker. He was pretty definitive, but I imagine I’d be if I was actually looking at the dead and injured children. That and catching my 2 year old just before he plunged backwards off a 2.5-meter fall in a school playground. He’d have likely survived it, if he didn’t hit head first, which was a definite possibility. I hated the nerfing that followed a few years later, but I wonder how many other kindergarten students had taken the same fall.)
I fell off of the monkey bars and cut myself when I was 7 or 8 - on a piece of glass on the ground below because some idiot left his/her broken pop bottle there. So I don’t blame the monkey bars.
And when I saw “giant robot” I thought, “A Transformer who acts as playground equipment!” Imagine my disappointment upon seeing the ad. I have a sad now.
