Seeing the stats on lawn darts was pretty eye opening for me. I had thought (mostly because I was quite young at the time) that it was one or two incidents that caused the ban. The reality was a shocking number of people were getting injured with them.
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I’m picturing some unfortunate Ukrainian kids playing among rubble and bits of this and that… make of it what you can in a devastated war zone and try to have fun… then some ninny comes along and says “That isn’t safe”.
What gets me is the vast difference in materials and design my City has for playgrounds. Some encased in foam and bubble wrap, while others are rusty snaggers over jagged concrete fill. Yet somehow they all conform to good standards, so we’re told.
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A lot of it came from the stranger-danger panic of the 70s and 80s, exacerbated by the advent of cable news a bit later. Once that primed everyone to be afraid for their kids, people starting legislating accordingly. And then folks though “we’ll, if there’s a law, there must be a real danger.” And the cycle kept going.
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My elementary school had two playgrounds and three fields. One playground was an old-school random collection of monkey bars and steel slides and swings with a 20 foot swing on them, the other was a modern soft-fall flooring and carefully smoothed and rounded wood beam piece of art, clearly professionally designed and expensive. One of the “fields” was grass, the others were asphalt and cinders respectively. Then the school got a safety inspection. The cinder field was declared a hazardous waste site, filled with mercury, uranium, and other heavy metals, and the newer, “safer” playground had had so many issues that they ripped it all out and replaced it with an even newer, more expensive, even safer playground that few used because it was so boring. Meanwhile, the old playground had to replace a slide because of rust. They eventually closed the school down in part to remediate the cinder field, renovate, and update the place (built in 1865!) and remove all the wonderful granite walls and floors, since they were essentially high-grade uranium ore – all that lovely black figuring in the stone was pitchblende. The “new” playground is now a parking lot, but from streetview it looks like the old swings and some of the other less hazardous bits of playground equipment from the original survived all the purges, less the monkey bars and the taller of the slides. That playground has outlived no fewer than six of the neighboring high school teardown-and-rebuildings, and the original schoolhouse it was attached to has grown appendages and annexes enough that it looks more like an amoeba than a place of learning, but its still there, if only in the same sense as the ship of Theseus.
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Yup. Apparently my parents’ generation forgot all the stuff they got up to as kids!
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When my daughter was little we lived near a playground next to a pub. I’d take her there to go on te swings and slides while I had a pint.
I’m 58, of course we got into some stuff. I spent my share of time in the ER for stitches, a conclusion and a broken bone or two.
Some of that was patents that couldn’t be bothered with what we were up to.
The other big thing that was mentioned up stream, my dad had a Blue Cross policy paid in full by his employer that included dental and optical for the entire 5 person family. Our hospital bills were pretty much covered.
This just came up today, we pay 1,800 bucks a month for coverage for me and the wife. My wife needs an echocardiogram and a carotid ultra sound. The lab won’t do the tests without 750 bucks up front.
I can’t imagine what an active kid running around doing risk assessments unsupervised will cost a young family.
Orthopedic surgeons ain’t cheap and with out of pocket deductibles costing thousands before insurance will even pay 70 - 80% you can bet if I were the parent of a young child I’d be keeping them nearby.
Point is a lot has changed since us older people were kids and even since our daughter was a kid. A broken arm could bring a world of financial hurt on a family.
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I worry that we’re running into an optimizing to the easy metric problem. We are really good at measuring ER trips and child abductions. We are really bad at measuring the long term costs of a more sedentary lifestyle and even when we can measure it the lag times are enormous. In aggregate, and on longer timescales, we may be trading a few short term gains for some major losses. This is less an issue with the actual playground equipment, but runs through my head constantly as far as kids walking or biking themselves to that playground, rather than being driven. Are we trading 1 or two eye catching incidents now for a community wide 1-2% increase in early mortality in a decade or two.
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I’m in Canada, and the healthcare aspect of it wouldn’t be an issue, aside from some drugs, which aren’t covered. And yeah, it makes me wonder if non-American kids are generally allowed to be more risk takey for that reason.
Obligs:
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be sure to read the instructions first
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Yah they were almost hilariously dangerous. We had a set and loved them but had to idea how close we came to serious injury. We used to throw them straight up and then run out of the way before they landed. Seriously. Not when our parents were around of course- they wouldn’t have allowed that little “game”.
Public health jurisdictions are usually pretty good about this stuff. We assume things are banned from a couple of incidents because that’s how terrible local news always frames it, but health departments are pretty data-driven.
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a certain blogger in new york did a video of her stand-up chat… that chastised injections for kids (#fda… penetration versus scratches) and kids hitting their heads on park equipment…
does it turn out well…
Later era Carlin is often cringe inducing for me and this is an excellent example. I got through 4 minutes of the 8 minute video and realized I just couldn’t watch any more of it. For me, at this point in his comedy career he was less the brilliant philosopher comedian he had been and more of just a cranky geezer yelling at clouds. It’s honestly kind of painful to see.
I do think there is a lot of value in letting kids take reasonable risks, but his routine here doesn’t actually seem to support that so much as it supports “things were better in the old days” and yelling about things in the current (at the time) world that weren’t even happening as he was describing them.
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Your kid would be missing out. I took mine to the one in Berkeley a couple times and it was badass.
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My son fractured his fibula last week doing a wheelie on my dad’s bike after Thanksgiving. (He’s always been a daredevil and is quite good at doing wheelies on his own bike, which has more precision braking). Fortunately with our insurance it was just $150 for the ER visit, so we can afford it. This was, surprisingly, his first trip to the ER and hopefully he learns something from this and doesn’t make a habit of it.
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