Remaking Playgrounds, With Perils
inspects British schools.
Late last year, Ms. Spielman announced that her agency’s inspectors would undergo training on the positive side of risk. “Inspections will creep into being a bit more riskaverse unless we explicitly train them to get a more sophisticated understanding of the balance between benefits and risk,” she said. “That’s not the same as being reckless and sending a 2-year- old to walk on the edge of a 200-foot cliff unaccompanied.”
Britain is one of a number of countries where educators and regulators say a protective culture has gone too far. Australia last fall introduced new standards for playground equipment, i nstructing operators to consider the benefits of activities that could result in injuries. Cities and school districts in Canada and Sweden are following suit.
Beginning in the late 1970s, parents were buffeted by warnings about hidden dangers on playgrounds and predators lurking in suburban neighborhoods.
Play spaces changed: Plank swings and steel merry-go-rounds disappeared, and impact- absorbent rubber surfacing was spread over so- called drop zones. A market appeared for safety- certified fiberglass boulders. The result has been a gradual sterilization of play, said Meghan Talarowski, an American landscape designer.
“It’s a rubber floor, a little struc- ture surrounded by a fence, it’s like a little play jail,” she said of playgrounds in the United States. “As a grown-up, you’re sitting there on your phone, waiting for them to be done.”
In contrast, aspects of the Tumbling Bay playground in London would make a safety conscious park manager blanch. Its six- meter climbing towers, with natural, gnarled boughs lashed together with willow wands, were made by hand. Waving grasses stand higher than an adult, which could block sight lines, along with boulders and expanses of sand that could contain animal feces or sharp objects.
Support for riskier play in Britain has built to the point where even prominent safety advocates endorse the idea.
But change on the ground is patchy and society recoils every time a child is seriously hurt. Play- ground deaths are extremely rare — they occur once every three or four years in Britain — but they tap into a parent’s worst fear.
Safety re- evaluations occur regularly after playground tragedies, said David Yearley, of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. “As a society, it’s difficult to say, ‘ We need to accept a one in 60 million chance of death,’ ” he said.
Ask the teachers at the Richmond Avenue Primary School, though, and they will tell you that exposing children to limited risks while they are young will help them survive.
“You’ve got to get out there and find your position in the world,” Debbie Hughes, the school’s head teacher, said. “If you don’t give those children those creative skills, that risk, that take a chance. If they don’t have all that risk out there when the child is four, the adult isn’t going to do that.”