Are Playgrounds Becoming Too Safe?
Filed under: In The News
Credit: Corbis
If so, then count yourself lucky. Those things are death traps. That's why officials in New York City -- that notoriously safe community -- have been slowly removing them from public playgrounds.
With one notable exception.
When Henry Stern was parks commissioner in the 1990s, he let it be known that he likes the 10-foot high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.
"I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them," Stern tells The New York Times. "I didn't want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay."
The Times reports Stern was ahead of his time. Now others are wondering if nervous Nellies have removed the fun from playgrounds by trying to remove the danger.
"Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground," Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway, tells The Times. "I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed."
After observing children on playgrounds in Europe and and Australia, Sandseter identified six categories of risky play:
1. Exploring heights.
2. Experiencing high speed.
3. Handling dangerous tools.
4. Being near dangerous elements (like water or fire).
5. Rough-and! -tumble play (like wrestling).
6. Wandering alone away from adult supervision.
The most common is climbing heights.
"Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run," Sandseter tells The Times. "Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years."
But what if they fall?
Falls rarely cause permanent damage, either physically or emotionally, The Times reports. Children do not develop a fear of heights. According to The Times, a child who's hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.
"Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety," Sandseter and fellow psychologist Leif Kennair of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.
They say this "anti-phobic effect" helps explain the evolution of children's fondness for thrill-seeking.
"Paradoxically, we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology," they write.
Other researchers concur.
"There is no clear evidence that playground safety measures have lowered the average risk on playgrounds," David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University in London, tells The Times.
In fact, he says, the opposite may be true.
"If children and parents believe they are in an environment which is safer than it actually is, they will take more risks. An argument against softer surfacing is that children think it is safe, but because they don't understand its properties, they overrate its performa! nce," he tells the newspaper.
The Times reports fear of litigation motivated New York City officials to remove anything even potentially hazardous from playgrounds.
"What happens in America is defined by tort lawyers, and unfortunately that limits some of the adventure playgrounds," Adrian Benepe, the current parks commissioner, tells the newspaper.
But even if you grouse about lawyers spoiling playgrounds, he says, it's hard to knock the soft bits of rubber that often replaced asphalt.
"I think safety surfaces are a godsend," he tells The Times. "I suspect that parents who have to deal with concussions and broken arms wouldn't agree that playgrounds have become too safe."
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