Playground "Safety"

Today, Em and I went to the park. When I stepped outside, the sun was bright and hot, so off we went, without any jackets!! As soon as that sun disappeared behind the clouds, well, let's just say the temperature dropped to somewhere in the single digits! Well, OK, maybe not, but it might as well have!

While I sat on the bench, watching Em enjoy the park to herself, riding her bike all over it, I had to think of something other than how terribly cold I was!! I started thinking about all the wonderful playground equipment we no longer see at parks. Now, we see these big structures that are so "safe" for our children - you know, with huge gaps they need to cross over 5 feet in the air, or zip lines suspended at just the right height for their feet to clonk some other child's head as they recklessly glide on by with no ability to stop! So glad they've improved on my old favorites!

Let's take for instance teeter totters. Where are they? We had the perfect set of 4 wooden ones at the park I used to go to. You could adjust them so that size made no difference. You could fit about 8 people on each side! We even used to use them in our obstacle courses, making participants run over them, stopping in the middle to make them to balance them and run down the other side. Now, they weren't the safest activity! If your friend wanted to play a bad joke on you, they would slide down to the end while you were suspended in the air and then just hop off. Yup - you remember. Major heiney fatigue, and if you had your fingers under the seat? Well, that would just be some serious finger busting! All in all, though, they were a favorite and I have yet to see them at one of today's parks!

My other favorite were those super high slides! We had one at almost every park. You climb, and climb and climb up these teeny tiny rungs with handles on each side, in a long line of kids who are dumping dirt on your face from their muddy sneakers, then you get to the top. You would hesitate at the sheer height and wonder if you'd made a big mistake (for the 20th time!). Then, just as you realize you cannot climb down due to the fifteen kids on the ladder, the person behind you gives you a good shove and off you go, screaming for dear life only to land in the big mud puddle at the bottom! It's OK, because that helps the next time you go down - you are not as dry, the wet jeans will keep your speed from getting out of control!

Then there were those swings! Many parks these days do not have them, or they have a babied down version of our swings. They are half the height these days, have mulch or reclaimed, chopped up rubber tires under them and have some king of plastic, rubbery seat on them. Ours were the real swings, wooden or metal, (splinters or heated, in other words!) and they had all natural material under them - dirt, rocks, stones, mud, you name it! The perfect landing pad! Our target was always the branches of the huge oak trees that shaded the playgrounds of the past, their roots the fabric that held all our lead pipe structures! We knew nothing of the ill effects of lead, nor the frailty of the old trees we thoughtlessly climbed. And our swings, they were the finger pinching kind, the ones that actually planted ideas of space travel in our naive and imaginative minds. We didn't need pretend space ships to dream that we were on one when our swing sets were already launching us 50 feet in the air!

Finally, my favorite ride of all, the metal merry-go-round! That ride provided so many options, especially the older wobbly ones!! It was great the more you had to help push it around. If you had older kids who were faster runners, you could jump on and find your place, hang on for dear life and ride! I'm sure many a parent lost their heart while watching their child innocently grab hold of a bar and let their legs hang off as that thing spun around. I can remember running around, jumping on, leaning over that bar and launching my whole body over the side and the air holding it up as we all spun around. What fun? I mean, how dangerous can those things really be??? (I'm laughing! of course!!)

The truth is, we've taken all the risk out of playgrounds these days. Even where there is a little risk, it's not the kind that would ask a child to be inventive. It's a big, high step here, or a tiny jump there. They have numbers, tic-tac-toe, steering wheels and all other realistic things to play on. And they are fun, but they hardly stimulate the imagination the way a tiny brook, tree toads and a little bridge did for us when we opened our mud pie stand, complete with frog frosting! (No, we didn't kill any frogs!) Or the carnival we created, or the obstacle courses, which I rarely see kids trying to make on our playgrounds today, which do everything for you! I'm not really complaining, but I'm grieving a bit of the past.

Last summer, I took my kids to one of my favorite parks back home, Lincoln Park (not the band!), and was happy to see that after all they redid, they left the horse swings. They were always my favorite. The park is now gorgeous, smaller swings, lots of mulch, trees trimmed so you cannot climb them or swing to them, and lots of fun rope and wall climbing aparatus. But the horse swings take me back to a carefree time, when we used to go to the park without our parents, safely, and visit the moon, or mars or even make our homes under those spider looking monkey bars. Now the kids hardly outnumber the adults, they place has much more painted color but the world I used to play in has been blotted out. One can only wonder the effect of "safer" playgrounds will have on the imagination and creativity of today's children!