It's National Playground Safety Week!
Oh joy! National Playground Safety Week! The week when 20-somethings can look back and remember the day, nay, the hour when playgrounds went from insanely fun labyrinths of dangerous wood and metal to orange and red plastic monstrosities capable of generating enough static electricity to reanimated a recently decreased pet.
Anyway. Here are some playground safety tips from the CPSC that will likely make the playground nearly as safe as, but not quite as fun as, a library. The world is quiet here.
- • Never attach ropes, jump ropes, clotheslines, or pet leashes to the equipment. This can present a serious strangulation hazard to children.
• Make sure children remove their bike or other sports helmets before playing on the playground. Helmets can become entrapped in playground equipment, posing a strangulation hazard.
• Purchase play equipment that meets the latest safety standards.
• Smooth sharp points or edges, and close open "S" hooks and cover protruding bolts.
• Check for openings in guardrails or between ladder rungs. Spaces should be either less than 3 1/2 inches or more than 9 inches so that they don't present an entrapment hazard.
• Always supervise young children to make sure they are safe.
• Install and maintain at least 9 inches of wood chips, mulch, or shredded rubber (for equipment up to 8 feet high) or sand or pea gravel (for equipment no more than 5 feet high) as shock absorbing material under the playground. (Dirt and grass, which are the most prevalent surfaces under home playground equipment, do not adequately protect children from serious head injuries.)
• Install protective surfacing at least six feet in all directions from play equipment. For swings, the surface should extend, in back and front, twice the height of the suspending bar.
Even though we are being smartasses, these are all really good ideas, so be sure to do them. Here's one from us: • Do not allow any dastardly villains to call the slide as their "home base." —MEGHANN MARCO
Springtime Is the Right Time To Swing Into Playground Safety [CPSC]
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"...when playgrounds went from insanely fun labyrinths of dangerous wood and metal to orange and red plastic monstrosities capable of generating enough static electricity to reanimated a recently decreased pet"
Oh how I miss those days. Back when I was young we had a playground with this giant metal cylinder mounted parallel to the ground (so that it could rotate) with a metal bar just above it. You got onto the cylinder by holding onto the bar and climbing up and the goal was to spin the cylinder with your feet and stay on it without having to either grab the bar above or get thrown into the wood chips. Those were the days...
I don't think I've ever seen someone throw themselves farther than 10 feet from a swing that was 10 feet high. The 2 times the height rule seems overly cautious.
I remember those slides joopiter is talking about. Those were fun. Not only were they super hot in the Texas sun but the ground at the end was worn and packed from 10 years of kids landing there. Hevean forbid a kid land on his butt or break his arm and actually learn from a mistake. I'm all for protecting kids from death and life altering accidents, but sometimes you have to let them figure things out for themselves (such as, the metal slide is hot in the summer, just like the fajita skillet at On the Border).
Remember when getting hurt on the playground was part of growing up? It made us all tougher in the long run, and gave us cool scars to show off to our friends.
I worry these kids are all going to grow up to be whiny little wusses with their lawyers on speed dial any time they stub their toes...
The picture reminds me of my carefree playground days, when I used to hang out with Laurence Olivier and he used to pull people's teeth out for fun. Good times.
Bah, kids don't play on playgrounds anymore anyway. They're too busy surfing the net, eating hamburgers and sodas, and watching crappy cartoons.
The best playground items were those merry-go-round things.
I have fond memories of holding on for dear life as we'd get one of the older kids to spin the thing as fast as possible.
Succumbing to centripetal force meant that you'd fly off and onto the gravel (or pavement in some cases) and get all manner of abrasions. Then not realizing how dizzy you are, you try to stand and fall down and hurt yourself more.
As soon as the stinging and the dizziness abated, I'd get right back on and do it all over again.
The possibility of injury is what made the playground so much fun. Kids really are missing out.
I recall with much fondness the bonebreaker that was, oh so much fun that we called 'the gate'.
Set in a 6 foot circle of asphalt was a post aobut 4 feet high. Attached to that post was what looked like a normal gate for a wooden fence... with one adaptation: a 1x6 attached to the bottom like a step.
That thing would swing freely around the post so fast it was scarey. If someone stepped in the way *BAM* both rider and pedestrian are instantly damaged. Even if you're jsut pushing--- one wrong move and that gate slaps you in the back of the hand and the next day you're in a cast.
And even if no one gets hurt while you're riding it, eventually iut gets going so fast you can't hold on anymore and you get thrown off of it--- direclty into the nearby equipment or onto a bike path.
Ah-- what a great toy--- and it tought us a valuable lesson: scarey stuff is scarey for a reason... but can be managed within limits.
... and while you're at it, wrap your kids in 2 feet of bubble wrap before they go out to play.
This is crazy ... do these people realize how few kids are seriously hurt on playgrounds every year? I'll bet there are far more injuries inside the home from everyday things - slip and falls, etc. If we dumb down playgrounds and make them injury-proof, kids are not going to want to play on them anymore. They will get bored and go inside and sit on their asses playing XBOX.
We used to do cherry drops, or if you were really good, death drops from the high bar on the playground. Fond memories - sniff sniff.
I remember learning how to do back flips from the gym bars in primary school. Well, learning how to do belly flops onto a 1" rubber mat layered over asphalt. There more for absorbing leaking bodily fluids than protection (learning that tilting your head back is the best field-hospital cure for a bloody nose). Monkey bar fights. Tying kids to the bars to tickle-torture them. Warball. Roshambo. That dumb game where you hurl a tennis ball at a handball wall and the next kid has to catch it or kneel ass-up so every player could take a shot... Ah good times!
Sure, boys were feral, destructive animals, but we got it all out on the playground. No Uzi rampages for us!
KCS: Cherry drops! Thank you - I forgot what they were called.
Hasn't the increase in childhood obesity coincided with the loss of kick-ass playgrounds? And ditto to everyone who is lamenting the loss of the merry-go-round. We might as well stop funding NASA now because no one in the next generation could handle the centrifugal force.
There was a much better, less depressing article in the NYT recently about how some neighborhoods are bringing back real playgrounds on account of kids needing to feel the sensations of being up high and coming down fast and being off balance in order to develop normally. I hope they do go ahead and bring them back, because this business of trying to make playgrounds injury-proof is for the birds. It messes kids up and makes grown adults act like toddlers whose tantrums take the form of lawsuits.
@tvh2k:
Back when I was young we had a playground with this giant metal cylinder mounted parallel to the ground (so that it could rotate) with a metal bar just above it.There's something like that at a modern-style wooden playground near me, except the cylinder is wood, and the metal bar is in front of you, making it easier to grab if you start to fall ('course, it also makes it easier to hit your head).
We called the game where you would have to catch the tennis ball off the wall bum-ball (no idea why). I was under the impression that we made it up. Guess not. Man did it suck when you didn't catch the ball and every jerk got his chance to whip a tennis ball at you. It was much better when I got to be the jerk. @trai_dep:
I'm all for putting some woodchips down as padding and filing down sharp metal bolts sticking out of playground equipment, but come on, has any of us here ever heard of a kid strangling themselves with a helmet, swing rope, or dog leash on playground equipment?
All the stories in the comments here focus on some fractured bones, scrapes, cuts, or burns from metal slides in the sun-- the strangulation potential just seems a little far-fetched.
We have had a trampoline for 2 1/2 years which I was convinced would be the death of my three children, although the only injury was from two 250+ adults wrestling on it (sprained ankle, and I didn't feel too bad!) So I traded in our trampoline for a nice, big, wooden swingset.
Long story short, within the first 24 hours of owning the swing set, we had one very bloody nose, one got-the-wind-knocked-out-of-him, and one set of staples in a kid's head. So the day of dangerous swing sets aren't over, at least at my house!
I'm happy to say that I was part of the very last generation that was still able to purchase toys made out of metal, battery cases didn't have screws on them, and I could happily crack my skull flying off a swingset right into the steel jungle gym. A world before horrid inventions like consumer-level anti-bacterial soap existed.
Are kids getting dumber, are parents getting lazier, or is the government becoming scarier? In any case, the kids are receiving the short end of the stick.
Playground equipment was the most fun in Alaska growing up. Everything was metal, therefore made good times when you stuck your tongue to it (which I did). The best were the freestanding metal slides that were coated with snow and ice. We had to climb and hold on for dear life so we would slip and fall. At the bottom the older kids had created a sheet of ice so slick that if you timed it just right you could slide off onto your feet and skate across. Most kids though fell at the bottom and slid across on their back or stomach.
Man, we used to hang upside down from monkey bars over concrete and slide down metal slides the temperature of molten lava. Kids are way too sheltered these days. :)