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Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

nytimes.com

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Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#161

Post by skavi »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #150

There is good evidence that the rubber "safety" matting that's common on new playgrounds causes significantly more long-bone injuries (broken arms and legs) than previous surfaces like wood chips. Kids test the limits and play up to the point of pain, so they'll leap off structures onto rubber matting in a way that they wouldn't do onto wood chips or pea gravel. In the name of "safety", we're using surfaces that prev…

Why not use rubber mulch then? Lots of playgrounds already use it, and it offers the cushioning of wood chips and the "softness" of rubber matting.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#162

Post by amluto »

headcanon wrote: post #132
magicalhippo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine designs playgrounds for kids, and is very good at it (his designs win 90+% of the competitive bids he enters). He's also worked hard to put in place a playground safety inspector certification system over here. One of his core ideas is that there are two types of safety: subjective safety and objective safety. For example, kids quickly learn that falling from a height is painful, and experiences such…

+1 on seeing examples of this. I'd love to see what a "good" design looks like so I know what to look for should I become a parent.

Here are some I like in SV:

Magical Bridge in Palo Alto. Caters to kids with developmental disabilities and kids who like to scramble over fun obstacles.

Magic Mountain in Coyote Point.

San Mateo Central Park. I think this one might be older than a lot of current standards.

For a playground that gets it all wrong, there’s a pirate ship structure in Vail, CO near the main base. It claims 5-12, but it ends up being very dangerous, even for adults, for all the wrong reasons. Hint to playground designers: make your slides as adventurous as you want, but give a good run-out before the slide dumps you on your arse two feet above the ground. That hurts without adding any sense of adventure.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#164

Post by nemo1618 »

wizardforhire wrote: post #122
nemo1618 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculous. The two are not even remotely comparable.

It’s not ridiculous and I don’t want to get into a flame war over this, because clearly my statement is contentious! Rather I’d like to have the discussion and I feel this is a relevant/appropriate albeit esoteric forum. Yet I stand by my statement. To elaborate: yes the suffering by a parent when witness to the suffering or death of their child is painful beyond words. With few if any experiences comparable. However…

Your original comment claimed that merely watching the (alleged) hypocrisy of grieving parents was more painful than losing a child. That is very different from claiming that the collective suffering of millions outweighs the suffering of one parent. The latter is trivially true.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and send your comment five years into the future, to your 2024-self, via https://futureme.org. I guarantee you'll cringe, or your money back.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#165

Post by erobbins »

s3krit wrote: post #156
achenatx wrote: post #142

My kids (11,6, 3) are so lame they are scared to play outside by themselves. I bought 100 acres with a creek so we would have a place to hike, camp, explore, build forts, shoot guns etc. My kids have been so coddled, they cant even play in the yard for long before they want to come in. Over the last year they are getting better, but when they have friends over, many of them wont even go into the forest and will only…

if you don't mind me asking, when you say your kids 'have been so coddled', well... by whom?

This is my question... must be the schools fault, right?

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#166

Post by Noumenon72 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #127
oska wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A majority of playgrounds are “post and deck” systems with standard swings, slides, and monkey bars in one piece of equipment." This is not true where I currently live. It's a recently new suburban area (less than 15 years old) in an Australian city with a great number of parks scattered through it. Nearly every park has a playground and they are all different and all very high quality. Indeed, I'm quite amazed at…

Yeah, but you're not part of the US legal system, which OP was talking about.

I am and noticed that almost every playground I take my nieces and nephews to has some unique feature that sets it apart. They're not nearly as standardized as McDonald's play places or adult fitness centers. Someone is either marketing variety or designing it.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#167

Post by achenatx »

s3krit wrote: post #156
achenatx wrote: post #142

My kids (11,6, 3) are so lame they are scared to play outside by themselves. I bought 100 acres with a creek so we would have a place to hike, camp, explore, build forts, shoot guns etc. My kids have been so coddled, they cant even play in the yard for long before they want to come in. Over the last year they are getting better, but when they have friends over, many of them wont even go into the forest and will only…

if you don't mind me asking, when you say your kids 'have been so coddled', well... by whom?

our fault for living in a sterile suburb. All yards were fenced off so they got used to playing in a cul de sac close to the house.

One of the reasons we moved was to give them more direct access to nature.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#168

Post by Noos »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #63
redff0000 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your child could have slipped when getting off a train and permanently injured themselves, or in any other number of ways. Low probability high severity events trigger a cognitive bias that makes people attempt to make things '100% safe'. There are two problems with that. 1: nothing can ever be made 100% safe so those low probability high impact events still happen from time to time. 2: making things safe hits a stee…

To put it bluntly, the increased happiness of millions of children is worth a couple children's health, or even lives. That's a tough sell, but that sounds reasonable (well, I can talk, I don't have children). This is basically the same reasoning Yudkowsky presented with his dust speck vs torture argument argument: a sufficiently widespread benefit, however small, will outweigh a sufficiently improbable horrible even…

No, it isn't.

We can all survive with a little less happiness. If our playgrounds are a little more boring, we can all deal. (though if anything they are a lot nicer than the ones I grew up with) Happiness is a good that can come from many sources, and while it's nice to have, if it is reduced, we can usually adapt to it by finding a new source.

Happiness shouldn't be a reason to trade lives.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#169

Post by stuart78 »

I'm all for these, but I do find it somewhat ironic that we've 'productized' the junk yard, making it just safe enough for us to be comfortable with our kids roaming 'free'. If it is a step towards liberation of youth I'll take it, but it is still a half measure.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#170

Post by Noos »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #67
dragontamer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your child could have slipped when getting off a train and permanently injured themselves, or in any other number of ways. But thanks to our laws, we don't have to worry about playground sets. Low probability / high impact events are a fact of life and are a valid cause for regulations. Worker safety laws in the early 1900s were such that people more regularly lost fingers or even limbs in heavy machinery. It still…

There's a difference between playgrounds and work environments: as far as I am aware, workers aren't any more miserable in safer work environment. Children in "safer" playgrounds, are . The value of life is not infinite. It is perfectly reasonable to sacrifice a few to improve the conditions of the many. Funnier, riskier playgrounds do exactly that. That said, the article stated the "safer" playground engendered more…

...you are arguing we should sacrifice lives for fun. Not something particularly necessary, like how many here argue for self-driving cars in that way, but our kids are impoverished because gosh darn it, playgrounds aren't fun any more!

I find it a very poor argument.

The second part..eh, if true than there's merit to it, although I would wager dangerous ones would hurt far more. We did stupid stuff just as much as in the old days as in the new, but iron does hurt a lot more than plastic.

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