Some Thoughts on Playground Safety
Posted by Erik Wemple on May. 2, 2008
Washington City Paper

In today’s Slate, Tom Vanderbilt does good work in attacking the blight of playground equipment on America’s lawns. You know the landscape: Brightly colored swingsets and slides, no kids on them, sitting on a pitch of grass. They’re eyesores, they never get used, and they become a big environmental liability when it comes time to dispose of them.

So good on Vanderbilt there.

Bad on Vanderbilt here:

In her book American Playgrounds, Susan Solomon notes how the fear of injuries and their litigious consequences forced the closing, or banal “post-and-platform” retrofitting, of many playgrounds. Gone are the kinds of things that defined my own childhood: terrifying metal “monkey bars” pitched over a pit of hard gravel or the towering, twisting, all-metal “tornado slide,” as we called it, which was at once the most exhilarating and the most dangerous thing in my young life.

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Let’s take this thing point by point. I’ll admit I haven’t read Solomon’s book. But I can tell you this: I have a couple of very young kids and wherever I am, I’m always in the market for a playground. I haven’t had trouble finding them, either. So if there’s a big trend toward closing playgrounds, perhaps there were too many to begin with.

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