Do Bad Playgrounds Make Bad People?

Modern playground design emphasizes hierarchy and lone wolf exercise. Shouldn’t they instead teach collaboration and creative play?

In the past few years, I’ve visited hundreds of playgrounds, most in the United States., a bunch in Canada and a few in Ireland. I’ve been ranging far and wide with an active toddler who needs to unleash his inner monkey every day. 

As a result, I’ve become an armchair expert on what works and what doesn’t in modern playgrounds. While I can’t say I’ve seen it ALL, I’ve seen more than any adult should have to see of the social Tinkertoys that adults have designed for kids.

This playground in Cork, Ireland, might struggle to meet ASTM guidelines in the U.S., but maybe getting muddy and sword fighting with sticks (no face hitting) would bring back some fun?

I generally dislike modern playgrounds. First, they’re not adult friendly. Second, they’re not conducive to group play. Most feature the same three or four amenities: slides, swings, and teeter totters, maybe a climbing wall or two. Made to resist the elements, they’re sterile hardscapes made of steel and rubber. They’re dull ways to kill time without screens, until your kid outgrows them. 

But it wasn’t always this way. Once, playgrounds were seen as important social training tools, a way to connect new souls with the natural world. Long before playground manufacturing became an industry, many, many hours of thought went into their design, their purpose, and how they might better our kids.

Sandpiles Gone Rogue

According to historians, the playground concept got started in Germany 100-plus years ago as sand piles for kids and has gone through many evolutions. You can find a fantastically detailed history of playgrounds called The Evolution of American Playgrounds by Dr. Joe Frost, that you can access online. 

What you’ll learn is that an incredible amount of thought and debate shaped the first few decades of playground design. Big thinkers of the day got involved, and, just as I’m suggesting, emphasized children connecting with the natural world, but naturally got bogged down in the details.

According to Scholarpedia.org:

During the early 1900s, the relative merits of John Dewey’s and Frederick Froebel’s philosophies about free play versus directed play were vigorously debated at meetings of the International Kindergarten Union. Yet, when the spirit and philosophy of the two prominent men were carefully examined, the differences were reduced. The various materials for proponents of both sides eventually included indoor and outdoor play and learning environments - bean bags, wooden soldiers, tools, blocks, footballs, hammers and nails, lumber, workbench, spoons, brooms, balls, sand boxes, wagons, tricycles, etc.

Sounds complicated, right? It was. If you think about the trajectory of schools and education, you can see why this complexity was done away with. As schools consolidated and became less local, conformity prevailed—extending into the schoolyard and beyond.

Junk as a Pathway to Adventure

Another critique I’ve lowered on modern playgrounds is their orientation toward conformity and predictability. But this too is an evolved choice, following many other “movements” in playground design. 

For example, Frost points out that, around World War II, so called “junk playgrounds” or, more generously, “adventure playgrounds,” were proposed by Carl Theodor Sorensen (1936) a Danish landscape architect.

These playgrounds predicated on the concept that, “over centuries, children played in construction sites, garbage dumps, junk yards and wild places, found and borrowed their own tools, built their own dens, forts and houses, and played their own creative games—all without the unwavering supervision of adults.”

If I had to nail down the reason these playgrounds fell out of fashion it is because they required adult involvement. As someone who has been to many a parent night at the local school, where only about 1 in 10 parents show up, this doesn’t surprise me. 

These ambitious early playgrounds needed adults on board to referee the kids' games and adventures. By 2002, most of the early adventure playgrounds in the United States had closed. At least one remains open today in Huntington Beach, Calif. It’s a fun and dirty day, with a mudslide, rope ladder and other wild and free type activities—but it does require parental supervision.

One of the last playgrounds of its kind, The Huntington Adventure Park features real-life mudslides and other messy fun.

An Adult’s Eye View

I have spent many hours watching people watch their kids at modern playgrounds. Few appear to enjoy the experience. They’re expressions read ‘please save me,” as they sit on hard benches with smartphones in hand. 

Occasionally, a kid drags the parent on to the torture devices. I call the play structures that, because they’re wrong-sized for adults. I spend my short visits “on the bars” ducking low ladder rails and trying not to throw out my back on some butt-crushing, twisting plastic slide.

For an adult, following a kid down this narrow tube slide is just as painful as it looks. Also, if you’re claustrophobic, you’re in for a rough ride.

A parent’s style has a lot to do with how she interacts with kids at the playground. I’ve seen the whole spectrum from the “extreme helicopter” to the throwback “go play while I do laundry” approach. I’ve coached soccer for 5 year olds enough to believe that somewhere in the middle of those styles is the sweet spot.

Modern playgrounds may be fine for the ego-centric 5-year-old. He goes up and down the slide, oblivious to the world. They’re less fine, however, for groups of kids of mixed ages. 

I’ve seen more than one spontaneous Nerf gun battle at the playground devolve into tears and anger as Lord of the Flies social hierarchy takes hold. Older kids team up, steal all the ammunition, and bully the younger kids. It’s a thing.

Not all of the athletic gear is singles only, but most of it is. Stuff that involves groups seems to be disappearing. Push type merry-go-rounds, for example, appear only at about 1 in 10 facilities. My generation remembers the treacherous metal spinners that left us with skinned knees and occasional bloody lips. But we still remember them with wistful affection.

This is a typical “off-the-shelf” playground design, surrounded by chain link, with gymnasium style challenges gear more suited to marine trainees than 7 year olds.

Getting Around Weather and Lawyers

Ask a public works manager why she chose a standardized metal playground for city parks, and you’ll probably get a simple answer: Lower maintenance and fewer lawsuits. 

It’s not clear, however, how much of this anxiety is warranted. Accidents do happen, but many of the existing safety protocols seem misplaced. For public spaces, for example, ASTM offers a full set of playground standards: ASTM F1487-21. It spells out handrail heights, surfacing and so on, but the science of falls is complex, and a contributing factor deserves a callout: They note that “lack of supervision is associated with 40 percent of playground injuries.”

That’s something to keep in mind when we talk about keeping playgrounds safe. How much creativity and adventure do we want to give up so we don’t have to supervise our kids?

For perspective, about 200,000 U.S. kids get treated for playground injuries every year. Of those, about 67 percent result from falls. In general, a plaintiff has to prove that the facility operator was negligent—doing inadequate maintenance or creating an unsafe condition. When lawsuits do happen the plaintiff has to make a strong case against that negligence took place.

Without getting into the weeds, every choice in a playground’s design impacts safety, but especially the ground cover. 

According to the Canadian Public Health Association, which has a whole website devoted to playground safety: 

One study showed that the odds of being injured in falls on non-impact absorbing surfaces were 2.28 times that of falls onto impact absorbing surfaces. This study also showed that children experienced half the risk of injury on rubber surfaces compared to bark surfaces and a fifth of that on concrete surfaces… Other empirical evidence has shown that falls on a wood fibre playground surface were far more likely to result in an arm fracture than falls on a sand surface.

If falls are the biggest risk, why do so many playgrounds seem oriented toward vertical climbing towers with steel steps and rails? At least one study found that falls from heights above 2 meters result in about twice as many injuries. 

Smarter designs I’ve seen, such as the fancy molded tree fort at Depot Park, in Gainesville, Fla., keep the height down and raise the fun with clever hiding places and animal cameos.

Splash Pads: Costly But Innovative

 Splash pads, especially in this disturbing era of global overheating, offer a welcome break from playground convention. They may not be especially educational, but they tend to encourage healthy social interactions, not counting the kids who show up unchaperoned with assault style squirt guns. But that’s on the parents, not the park designers. 

They’re also safe. Unless you count self-induced waterboarding, injuries are unlikely in most of these pads. I’ve seen some fantastic ones, notable in Frederickton, New Brunswick, Canada and (until it closed due the latest hurricane damage) at the Aquarium in Tampa, Fla. 

The problem with splash pads is their high maintenance cost. For example, I spoke to the local engineer in Crystal River, Fla., about their recent splash pad failure after a flood. He explained that when even one sprinkler jet in the ground fails, it can cost tens of thousands to repair. Municipalities often abandon splash pads rather than pay their unexpectedly high upkeep. 

Canada, I suspect, manages to keep the water on because they strongly emphasize childhood development and consistently put money behind public facilities without turning these into wedge political issues.

The Frederickton, CA, splashpad features more than a dozen surprising water jets, dumping devices and mini “adventure” surprises. It’s packed all summer with kids of many ages.

Putting Kid Power to Work

Endless energy--that’s how most of us describe our kids. So why not harness it for social good. This has been done successfully in Africa, for example, with a so-called “play pump.” As kids turn the merry-go-round, they pump fresh water to their school. One can imagine many such kinetic devices. One that recharges batteries might educate kids about energy storage, for instance.

Caution to the Wind?

It’s not like nobody else notices how lame playgrounds have become. Many towns have and communities have made laudable efforts to build better play areas, with mixed success. One thing they all learn—the playground will be used in ways they might neither envision nor approve of.

Depot Park, for example, features a mixed high-tech design with safety features such as rubber paths and ground cover. Built on a superfund site, it’s a great demographic equalizer, and often packed with kids. Some areas cater to toddlers, others to pre-teens. 

But left on their own to roam, what do the kids really want? More risks and bigger thrills. I happened to be visiting Depot Park one day when the park was officially closed. A group of a half dozen older preteen kids took advantage of the situation. They jumped the fence, and sought out the highest, most dangerous perches to climb on, balancing 20 feet in the air on the fabric canopies and daring each other to cross the treacherous cables.

On another occasion, I watched some 5–8-year-olds capitalize on the waterfall-style splash pad. They used it as fuel for their slide runs, by running into the splash pad and soak their clothing, then rushing up the steep steps to the top of the nearest slide, soaking it down and streaking full tilt out the bottom to tumble in the sand.

Was it safe? Not entirely. But it became a fun game of chase, with war stories about how fast they went, how hard they hit the sand, and how mad their mom was getting.

The Right Stuff

If I had to rank the many playgrounds I’ve experienced, I’d put the ones with natural and kinetic features at the top. They’re conducive to imaginative and social play. And they’re tactile and “evocative” in a way that steel and metal contraptions can’t match.

By kinetic, I would include equipment that requires some physical exertion:  merry-go-rounds, zip cables, dangling ropes, and ramps you can rappel up and down. I’d also include almost any splash pad. Moving water keeps kids moving and interacting. 

And don’t forget the parents. Our kids may think of us as robots who live to serve their whims, but we’re the ones driving them to the playground. It needs to offer us something we can’t get at home (see “Three Ways to Improve Playgrounds for Grownups” at the end of this blog.

Any gear that encourages positive interactions raises the playground design bar. I understand how city managers hate ongoing maintenance costs. Wood rots. Ropes don’t last as long as chains. But even chains rust, and most metal becomes rusty and even jagged over time. There’s no invulnerable material.

Better to use renewable and natural materials, in my view, than to gain a few years of lifespan but sacrifice the spirit of the play space. The best playgrounds I’ve ever visited have been all-wood structures, rope and lumber assemblies.

By balancing a real challenge with slight danger, steep ramps (as opposed to trendy climbing walls) like this have been popular at every playground where I’ve seen them and usually involve group play.

By bringing playgrounds back down to earth, we can reflect local landscapes and materials. This instills in kids a sense of connection to their geographic region. I recently visited a playground in Ireland that does this masterfully, combining historic architecture styles with fun animal shapes and adventure park-style amenities.

The artifacts from this playground in Cork suggest a more organic approach to public playspace design.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible in rethinking playgrounds. I encourage all parents to get involved. Let your public workers know what you want. 

The Ultimate Climbing Apparatus. Looking for clever, safe inspiration for playground equipment?

Draw them a sketch. Send them a photo of a piece of gear or a magical nook you like. They rarely get nice letters like this. My bet is they’d be happy to integrate some new ideas into the next million-dollar public playspace.

You won’t be seeing any more of these treated lumber forts on your local green. The last few are being removed now, due to splintering and perhaps excessive concern about leaching from treated wood.