our playground in the early nineties had a metal slide that got hot as h*ll on a sunny day, a wood and metal jungle gym that you could get serious splinters on, a metal geodesic dome, and a tire wall that bees liked to colonize. guess what? no one ever got hurt - and it was a lot of fun. Now - its all plastic and rubber chips. nothing to fall off of, nothing to get hurt on. wheres the fun in that?

Just try to find a see saw at a city park in 2011. We've gone too far.

Cambridge, MA installed a really cool playground with a hill and sand and giant wood blocks. The kids got all creative and figured out how to throw sand on the hill (it's rubber) and slide down it on the blocks. Summer sledding! Hooray! ...And then the mommeighs complained that their kids got hurt...away went the blocks. Really. So sad. My kid got her foot squashed by a block, too, and some rug burn. Know what? She learned and tried the trick again a different way. It's called exploratory innovation.

No playground can replace age-appropriate adult supervision. Teach kids safety rules, ban clearly dangerous things like lawn darts, and then let kids play hard until they're tired or hungry enough to stop. Kids are driven to challenge the limits of their own abilities. That's how they learn best, both from fun times and scraped knees. Child's play may look foolish and unnecessarily risky to grown-ups, but is an essential part of how kids grow.

My husband wrote about this very topic a few years ago.
http://m.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/real-estate/at-play-with-a-playground/article768153/?service=mobile
I agree, kids need to be challenged, not coddled. A scraped knee or a splinter never killed anyone!

Sadly, I'm afraid that litigious parents, not cautious ones, are the impetus for super-safe (and less challenging) playground equipment. Many schools and communities opt for such designs, in part, to avoid potential lawsuits. Some communities avoid playground equipment altogether for the same reason.

While I think it's great for playgrounds to be designed with safety in mind, I don't want today's kids to miss out on the thrills of tall swing sets and seesaws. Many of the first big challenges I overcame were on my school playground's rusty, mile-high monkey bars and jungle gym. Kids need opportunities to challenge themselves, set goals, take risks, and overcome fears. Accomplishing these tasks on the playground can help kids build the confidence they need to face similar feats in other areas of life.

Children today are coddled in a way that's beyond ridiculous.

How else will they learn that there are circumstances in life if you childproof everything and take all the consequences of risky behavior away?

Well put. Little kids learn best with their entire bodies and all their senses, not by sitting and reading like grown-ups do. Also, if you take away playgrounds older kids will continue to play, but in higher-risk places forbidden to them. It's good for kids to have a place to play together. It helps them develop social skills and a sense of community. It's a pity common-sense with regard to playgrounds has to be replaced by "don't drink the paint" CYA policies.

At 7-8, I secretly tried to leap from a basement workshop table to the top of a big freezer, landing mid-section against the edge of the freezer top before sliding down the freezer's side to the floor. I knew the house rules and that I was doing the wrong thing. From my mistake I learned an early valuable lesson about consequences. Memory of that pain is a big reason I've never broken a bone in my life. It's not possible or desirable to protect a kid 100%.

Whole-heartedly agree! As an early childhood educator, I see this every day. I had an opportunity to see an amazing lecture on resiliencey in children and the speaker (cannot remember who it was now) used an observation of a parent telling her child that was up high on a climbing structure that she needed to come down because it was not safe. The message that parent was unknowingly sending that child was that the child should not trust her own instincts or body to keep her safe. It really hit home with me and changed the way I work with kids. Challenging children and allowing them to make mistakes, fall, get hurt, use their body and take risks, allows for greater and more enriched learning experiences. Great article!

You should see the playground equipment here in Europe!! Europeans believe in supervision, and there isn't the same litigious environment, so playground equipment here can get pretty challenging -- like a 20 foot high rope net climby structure. Here is a picture of a similar, smaller, structure:

http://www.24heures.ch/vaud-regions/actu/securite-place-jeu-garantie-2011-06-04

Ironically, the article is about safety for kids, but the piece of playground equipment has nothing to do with the story. The little boy in question lost part of his finger in a toboggan run, when it got caught in the structure. I doubt we'd see even this climbing structure in North America.

So, I'm happy that my kids had a chance to grow up in Europe. My husband, a former skydiver and ski instructor, has made sure to teach them how to be safe risk-takers. As a result, they are both excellent skiers (even our 4 year-old), and are developing well physically. Our daughter has a reputation as a "casse cou" (neck-breaker) because she is an able horsewoman and climbs trees like a cat, scaring the school principal and Canadian parents. The only time she ever hurt herself ironically enough, was back in Canada, on one of those dinky little "safe" plastic slides not more than 3 feet high which they had at her school. She was pushed off by a boy, and broke her collar bone. Nothing since though.

Still, I can't support everything here; there should be a balance. Here is a play structure on the grounds of a school which poses a strangulation/head entrapment danger:

http://www.lematin.ch/actu/suisse/16-millions-de-francs-pour-sécuriser-les-aires-de-jeux-50351

I'm not a parent or teacher. I just remember being a kid having fun while getting blisters and then calluses on playgrounds. It's safer for kids to learn a healthy respect for the laws of physics early on playgrounds than later when the stakes are higher, like behind the wheel of a car. Helping kids to become quick, strong, and able to take care of themselves is the parents' job. Some parents mistakenly believe it's to protect their kids for life, with bad results.

They gotta keep some metal bars somewhere that some kid can put his/her tongue on when it's below freezing. :D

Seriously, there are no see-saws anymore?

Challenging playgrounds are better for parents, too. Kids will be less noisy, whiny, and bored, sleep better, and misbehave less after expending their amazing energy on a challenging playground. They need that release, almost like wild animals, then they'll be good and tired. They'll be able to pass for civilized indoors if allowed to play hard outdoors. Win-win.

it's not the playgrounds that are making our children 'dumb', it's the sitting in front of the tv/computer for hours on end playing 'interactive' games.
our children should be smart, creative, free little creatures- if we let them.

I think online games are making our kids dump, playground can make them active but unfortunately everyone like to play indoor games.
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