The Science of Play

How to Build Playgrounds That Enhance Children's Development

Susan G. Solomon

• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781611686104
• eBook ISBN: 9781611686111
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Poor design and wasted funding characterize today's American playgrounds. A range of factors—including a litigious culture, overzealous safety guidelines, and an ethos of risk aversion—have created uniform and unimaginative playgrounds. These spaces fail to nurture the development of children or promote playgrounds as an active component in enlivening community space. Solomon's book demonstrates how to alter the status quo by allying data with design. Recent information from the behavioral sciences indicates that kids need to take risks; experience failure but also have a chance to succeed and master difficult tasks; learn to plan and solve problems; exercise self-control; and develop friendships. Solomon illustrates how architects and landscape architects (most of whom work in Europe and Japan) have already addressed these needs with strong, successful playground designs. These innovative spaces, many of which are more multifunctional and cost effective than traditional playgrounds, are both sustainable and welcoming. Having become vibrant hubs within their neighborhoods, these play sites are models for anyone designing or commissioning an urban area for children and their families. The Science of Play, a clarion call to use playground design to deepen the American commitment to public space, will interest architects, landscape architects, urban policy makers, city managers, local politicians, and parents.

1

The Problem

WE LIVE IN UNCERTAIN TIMES, characterized by pressures to prepare our children for undefined future challenges. We are not the first generation to attempt to ready children for terrifyingly unknown events. In 1962, toy and playground manufacturer Creative Playthings published a catalog whose message could be speaking to our own plight. The catalog states that parents and teachers “are being called upon to prepare children for a world so radically new that we dare not forecast its direction, its technology, and its social organization.”¹ The launch of Sputnik and the ongoing Cold War informed their unease; we have to confront even more startling technological breakthroughs, a more complex political landscape, and a physical environment that is more dense and urban.

The American playground today fails as a resource that could help kids mature or prepare for unidentified future ordeals. Unlike the exciting playgrounds of the 1950s and 1960s, best illustrated by Creative Playthings’ Play Sculptures division, which commissioned artists to rethink the playground concept, today’s typical American playground does a particularly bad job at preparing children for uncertainty. We find maintenance-free caged areas that emphasize safety more than critical thinking, smart reasoning, hopeful investigations, or thrilling adventures.

KFC + P

When we look at today’s stock playground, we see an aesthetically unappealing place with few opportunities for personal exploration or social development. The equipment is predictable and demeaning. Almost any child can maneuver easily on it. There is no struggle or sense of accomplishment. Everyone succeeds, but the achievement does not have any triumph; it does not require any struggle or cooperation. No kid can really alter the environment. There is little chance that anyone will ever have a scraped knee or bruised elbow, minor injuries that used to indicate that a child had tried something new. A palette of lurid, jarring, and unnatural colors seem to scream to children that this is a jolly setting; the color choices seem to say that the play structure has already created the fun. Kids are not trusted to produce their own bliss.

FIGURE 1.1 | Pearl Street Playground, New York City, reconstructed and enlarged in 2012. A private grant of $2.1 million paid for this renovation. The fencing has become less intrusive than earlier play spaces, but the equipment remains banal and the surfacing is monotonous. The new plantings are outside the fence, close to the sidewalk, so they are out of reach for playground use. It is unclear why an adult is on this low equipment. Photograph by Robert S. Solomon, 2013.

The British have a nickname for this standard playground: “KFC,” for kit, fence, and carpet.² American arrangements, which replicate the same dull ensemble, add another threat into the mix: parents. The banal end results of KFC + P mean that we deny children a chance to gain a small bit of independence, to learn a few skills, to meet peers and other generations, and even to get dirty.

Concerns about costs, including liability, drive many decisions about American playground design. Park departments and school boards purchase standard equipment, which they replace when it “looks old,” because it meets their most pressing requirements: it has easy upkeep and it limits their liability. The plastic and metal products need little to no maintenance. To be doubly safe, some authorities shut them down after drizzle or fog because they fear that they may become slippery.

Manufacturers reassure clients that their products meet or exceed all federal guidelines, but the equipment is expensive because the liability cost is built into each sale; local patrons hope to effectively turn their legal concerns over to the manufacturers by buying off-the-shelf products. We have become an increasingly litigious people. Since the 1980s we have nurtured a culture of victimization.³ Parents feel that the smallest injury can be blamed on someone other than their own child. The American legal system sometimes allows generous damages for an injury, and parents often pursue financial remuneration. In Europe or Japan there is minimal financial compensation; the legal system restricts tort damages. Instead, the European or Japanese child is expected to take stock of his actions and consider his own and communal safety.⁴ After an accident, the European or Japanese child would probably say, “What did I do wrong?”; the American child (or his parents) might ask, “Where is my lawyer?”⁵

The difficulty with the American safety guidelines is that they address almost every possibility for injury, both minor and serious. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) published its first “Handbook for Public Playground Safety” in 1981. Those federal “suggestions,” as well as the more technical ones of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) that followed, continue to be updated and remain as effective as legislation. Insurance agents demand that their clients adhere to them. Even Teri Hendy, a highly respected playground consultant and an expert on safety who helped write the ASTM standards, says that these failed institutionally from the beginning because they tried to erase all risk.⁶ She now believes that the ASTM should have focused only on preventing fatal, life-­threatening, or debilitating injuries. She recognizes how attention to minor injuries has overwhelmed our requirements.⁷ Other observers have noted that universally we tend to lump minor and major occurrences into a single category of “injuries.”⁸

The CPSC guidelines demand regularity in the equipment that may itself be a type of hazard. Danish Landscape architect Helle Nebelong argues that the uniform spacing of the manufactured pieces, especially seen in stairs and horizontal ladders, lulls kids into expecting conformity and leaves them unprepared for having to deal with variation.⁹ Children who have never had to assess their surrounds expect every rung of a ladder or a monkey bar to be uniformly separated. These kids have no capacity to make appropriate judgments when they face situations that have not been perfectly engineered. Neuroscientists Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang add that American playground equipment fails to let children distinguish between what is safe and what is dangerous.¹⁰

Another paradox is that the federal American guidelines, which purport to cover everything, miss some real menaces. A glaring omission can be seen in the way the CPSC’s “Public Playground Safety Handbook” (2008) addresses swings. They suggest a “use zone” of “6 feet in all directions from the perimeter of the equipment,” with nothing within that six-foot radius. A change in surfacing color (for example, a large circle) will often identify the use zone. This solution makes sense on paper but means nothing to a toddler rushing through a playground to get from one activity to another. A more feasible solution would be to raise the swings onto a slightly higher plane (such as a low mound) to designate the use zone and to divert a small person, but that is not suggested or encouraged.

The federal guidelines do more than just ensure overbuilt, risk-avoidant equipment. By calling for age segregation, the guidelines reveal a disconnect between playground structure and current thinking on the pedagogy of play. Our playgrounds typically have one area for the two- to five-year-old set and a higher contraption for the five-to-twelve range. Manufacturers have recently added a category for babies, from six to twenty-three months, so we may begin to see a third area for the tinniest users. Although there is a certain logic in separating the smallest most vulnerable users from older participants, contemporary educators and psychologists look to interactions between age groups as the way that older kids push younger ones to mature. They cite the writings of Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) as their source.¹¹ His teachings have been influential since the 1980s, in spite of the fact that he died decades ago and his works were unknown in the West until the 1960s.¹²

The age distinctions on today’s playgrounds hark to the 1950s, when child psychologists Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, both of whom emphasized the successive stages of child development, were the most audible voices.¹³ Today there is growing unease with Piaget’s theories because scientists have shown that not all children go through these predetermined stages.¹⁴ We now believe that older kids can pull along younger ones (“zone of proximal development” is the Vygotsky term) and help them to achieve a bit more socially and cognitively than they might on their own or solely with peers.

Fans of current playground design have always had a fallback position: the equipment may be dull, but at least it provides a way for kids to experience heavy-duty exercise. Recent research shows that that position, too, may be untenable. A limited preliminary study shows that the mere presence of equipment does not increase physical activity, possibly because children spend time waiting in line or because there isn’t much opportunity to use it.¹⁵ Today’s equipment is good for handgrip and hand coordination; it does not address upper body, core strength, or conditioning.¹⁶ Children need exercises that activate locomotive skills, such as running, jumping, hopping, and skipping. Government guidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention implore parents to see that kids get aerobic exercise in addition to bone strengthening and muscle strengthening activities.¹⁷

We need innovative solutions, yet playground patrons often forgo architects, landscape architects, or other artists, because they believe (mistakenly) that their expertise and their designs will be too expensive. Eliminating design professionals contributes to bland results. The good news is that, when they are brought in, designers—who are also cognizant of potential lawsuits—are enhancing projects without elevating costs. It is a “win-win” situation for all involved, with the results suggesting that we might see more creative designs that do more and cost less than the ordinary stock items. Jackie Safier, the donor for the Helen Diller Playground (2011) at Dolores Park in San Francisco, where landscape architect Steve Koch altered the positioning of off-the-shelf equipment and mixed it with pieces of his own design, wisely states, “Spend money on the designer and it will pay off in the end.”¹⁸

Fencing

While the familiarity of standard-issue playground equipment may leave children feeling bored, the high fence that typically surrounds a play area makes it explicit that child’s play is an activity restricted to firm boundaries. It circumscribes their actions, making sure that their play world is confined. The playground has come to resemble a caged island, one that reinforces the notion that children are being raised “in captivity.”¹⁹

The ever-present fence might be understandable if its intent were to keep small children away from traffic. Cars pose a very real threat to youngsters, and we, of course, have to do everything possible to keep small fry from going into the street. But fences are hardly the only solution. Landscaping, often with thick shrubbery, achieves the same results without appearing to place kids in “jail.” An alternative approach retains the fence but masks it with plants or architectural elements. Architect Linda Pollak (Marpillero Pollak Architects) is someone who points to untapped possibilities for incorporating a resting place with benches or adapting a climbing or swinging apparatus into an enclosure.²⁰

Today, with playgrounds often quite far from streets, the high fences mirror parental fears more of trespassers coming in than of kids getting out. A New York City municipal ordinance makes it an offense to enter a playground without a child in tow. Other cities have similar ordinances or have warnings to the same effect. Signs on gates reinforce the message; they not too subtly remind parents to be diligent, to be suspicious of a single adult.

It is good news for society and parents that worrying about playground abductions is a gratuitous gesture. It turns out that “stranger danger” is a very real paranoia, but that the underlying fears that provoke it are not realistic. Historian Steven Mintz, an authority on the history of American childhood, points out that these fears emerged first in the 1970s and do not seem to be abating.²¹ He uses the sociological term “moral panic” to explain how overwrought fears replace legitimate concerns, eventually immersing us in a culture of fear. According to Mintz, absurd but prevalent conclusions about safety and risk take hold and force the hand of politicians; fear rather than facts dominates how policy is written.²²

The possibility that a stranger will abduct a child from a playground is infinitesimally small. Abductors are usually people children know, not strangers.²³ The last nationwide statistic for abductions dates from 1999;²⁴ that year, there were 262,215 abductions. (Follow up research started only in 2010 and has not concluded.) Of those, strangers or slight acquaintances were the perpetrators in only 115 events.²⁵ One writer puts that number in context as follows: for the 59 million American children who were age fourteen or younger in 1999, the risk that any one of them would be abducted by a stranger was 1 in 655,555. The same author notes that, less than five years later (2003), 285 children (younger than fourteen) drowned in swimming pools, and 2,408 died in automobile...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The problem
• 2. Risk and Independence
• 3. Failing and Succeeding
• 4. Executive Function
• 5. Friendship
• 6. Nature and Exploration
• 7. Paths
• Conclusion: Paradigms
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Plates