I have two kids. They're grown, so they don't (that I know of) play on playgrounds anymore. So I haven't been up on the latest trends in Playground Science. It took this from South Florida's Sun-Sentinel to bring me up-to-date.
Swings are bad. Teeter-totters (see-saws to some of you) are bad. Merry-go-rounds are extremely bad. All moving parts are bad, according to Broward County Safety Director Jerry Graziose. "Moving parts on equipment is the number one cause of injury on the playgrounds."
And the way I see it, lack of moving parts on equipment is the number one cause of sheer boredom on the playground, which will quickly become the number one cause of kids beating the heck out of each other for the entertainment value, which will become the number one cause of injury on the playgrounds.
When my son was thirteen months old, his daycare provider picked up and moved over the weekend without warning. My husband went there to drop off our son that Monday, only to see through the window that the house was empty of everything but a small pile of trash in the middle of the living room. We had to find a new daycare lady in a hurry. After lots of visits, we narrowed down our choices to two.
One woman was our age, with her own small son. She had a fireplace with a hearth that she covered with carpet scraps, so the kids wouldn't get hurt if they fell down on it. Her back yard was grassy, but part of it was fenced off, so the kids wouldn't get hurt.
The other woman had a fireplace with a low brick hearth. Not covered. She had a two-foot high cinderblock retaining wall in the back yard with concrete steps in the middle leading to the higher level of grass. My husband and I talked about it and agreed that our son could get hurt pretty badly at the second house. But it looked so much more fun, so that's where we took him.
If, like Broward County, we let the lawyers decide what can be in playgrounds, we're going to get dull, play-free playgrounds. If we keep on letting the lawyers decide, we're going to end up raising a generation of hermetically sealed "Bubble Boy" children. And that would be a shame, because there's no fun in that.
By the way, my son (and later my daughter) never got injured at the daycare lady's house.
2 comments:
Exactly!!!!!
I'm in my sixties, a Grandpa!
If we'd been raised with the restrictions the current Gen faces, we would have absolutely nothing to look back on.
Ask someone who grew up small town in the fifties how they got around and what they did for fun, you'll get some hair-raising tales of 'survival against the odds, in today's view.
Ask them how many kids who were on their bikes incessantly got head injuries. None of us wore helmets or elbow-pads. There were a few broken bones maybe... but I dont recall any of my peers getting head injuries... and yes, we had asphalt and concrete.
Because, before we ever got on a bike, we had learned how to take a fall.
But the playgrounds? Look to your local litigation lawyer for the answer.
That isn't true. That day care provider's house was where I had my injury that led to my horrible deformed arm, remember? Of course, that happened when I was standing on a wimpy plastic toy and fell onto the middle of a carpeted floor, as far away from any walls, hearths, or sharp objects as I could find.
-Your son
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