On the last day of the summer holidays, a boy of about nine fell off a high climbing frame. He was brave but in shock, clutching at his limp (probably broken) arm. Parents and carers stared, worried for him, but feeling that peculiar dull thud that hits us every time misfortune befalls someone else’s kid.
It wasn’t a bad accident but I realised afterwards that it was the first time (in adulthood) that I had seen a child hurt in a fall from playground equipment.
It happened in the playground that opened this summer at Parliament Hill, on Hampstead Heath in north London. The local children love this place. It is a marvellous, challenging space for them to play in and that’s what makes it unusual.
The heath’s director of leisure and events, Paul Maskell, confirms that the new playground was designed to offer some higher-than-usual climbs for older kids. “We had an inspection recently and the playground has been passed by The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. We have done as much as we can. But children need to learn to take risks and learn risk mechanisms, and falling off is a learning resource. If we can’t let our children take risks, it is a sad world.”
Only by taking risks in a controlled environment can children learn how to judge risk, make mistakes (which can be painful, even when you land on a soft surface) and move on to bigger challenges. All children need an adrenalin rush – but we have become so risk-averse on behalf of our cotton-wool-wrapped offspring that we have forgotten that they need to taste that heady feeling of slight danger.
By allowing them to take risks, to express their physical needs through more than simply “letting off steam” and running about, we might even help overcome some of the problems that have been all over the media in recent weeks, as experts debate the effects of a sedentary, stressed, toxic childhood”.
According to play experts, we are denying our own past when we prevent our children enjoying the level of risk-taking that was natural – and accepted – for anyone who grew up before the 1980s. Bernard Spiegal, principal of specialist consultancy Playlink, suggests that adults should go back into their own memories: “It is very important and not a minor piece of knowledge that we were all children. Ask people what they did as a child and the common thread is that people played unsupervised, climbed trees, made tents and hiding places.
“Then you ask – what about people now? We should all know everything we need to know about play, we have understood what it is like to be a child. Now look at a playground. What on earth has that got to do with the experiences we had?”
The state of the modern playground may not be something to which most parents have given much thought, but its history offers a quick guide to our changing attitudes to play – and to parenting. Deborah Jaffé, author of The History of Toys, says the first adventure playgrounds were created by children, who roamed bomb sites unsupervised during the second world war. Fathers were away, mothers at work, and children were left to create their own excitement. Some of these sites went on to be developed as formal, supervised playgrounds, and the adventure playground movement has never lost touch with the need for challenging play space for older children.
After the war, a new generation of formal, fenced-in, local authority playgrounds was built, using equipment designed by men who had been in the army. These are the old-fashioned witches’ hats, rocking horses, roundabouts, high swings and giant slides that live in our collective memory. Jaffé confirms they had some advantages: “These playgrounds were like assault courses and were very good for letting off steam.” They were also dangerous. Witches’ hats – a combination of a climbing frame and a roundabout – caused five deaths in a single year.
According to Alan Sutton of the campaigning charity London Play, the landscape of playgrounds began to change at the start of the 1980s when new legislation and a campaign on the TV show That’s Life helped get the old equipment removed.
The problem was that the necessary removal of the dangerous old equipment also led to a blurring of the concepts of risk and hazard. It’s a vital distinction, and holds the key to changing our attitude to play. Sutton explains: “The easiest way to think of the difference is that a risk is something you can judge, for example, how high you can swing, and then jump off the swing and fly through the air. This is good. Children learn physical literacy this way. A hazard is something you cannot judge. For example, is the swing’s pivot almost worn through and about to give way unexpectedly? This is to be avoided.”
When the old equipment was uprooted, Sutton says, “the baby went out with the bath water”. Risk started to become a four-letter word to be eliminated. And that’s how we have ended up with a generation of children growing up using boring playgrounds. In some areas, there is almost no play provision for children who want something more demanding that a slide rising a metre off the ground or tame climbing frames with extra wide steps. According to Rospa, of 38,500 children taken to hospital each year with playground injuries, only 0.5 per cent receive in-patient treatment.
Many local authorities, schools and other groups responsible for playgrounds have for two decades been embracing what Spiegal of Playlink describes as a “risk illiterate” attempt to minimise all risk to children. It’s been a long, slow, miserable decline. School playgrounds are an especially neglected area, often now just dull areas of asphalt.
Hattie Coppard, of play design consultancy Snug & Outdoor, has worked on many school playground projects. She says: “Where playgrounds are bleak and barren, it encourages stereotypical and stressful situations. You are more likely to get accidents in a bleak space as the children are running around and bump into one another.”
Aware that most schools can’t afford to build new playgrounds, Coppard has been working with them to create a kit made up of movable, modular shapes that children can use to create their own imaginative play, or just to build things to jump off. She says that introducing these simple, non-descriptive objects transforms the play. “We have dramatically changed playgrounds and the relationships between age and gender groups,” she says.
Poor play environments are not just the fault of boring (or non-existent) play equipment. Spiegal says parents and carers who get too involved in play are also damaging kids’ rights to play independently. “We should create spaces where freedom can take place. There should be fights and falling over – children learn from experience – and then you learn not to do that again. If there are some things that can only be learned from experience, then taking them to a risk point is actually a public obligation.”
Hearteningly, those responsible for play areas are being urged to take a more robust attitude. In August, the Health and Safety Executive launched its new “sensible risk” principles at an adventure playground. It said: “We believe that children should not be discouraged from taking part in activities that carry an element of risk, but rather the risks they encounter should be sensibly managed. Those who organise such activities should not be put off by unnecessary paperwork.”
Coppard confirms that there is definitely a collective swing away from risk elimination, and we can expect more inspiring playground installations in future: “We are now realising that the idea of cutting out risk is counter-productive. It is probably far more important that kids graze their knees or even break an arm than never learn how to cope with risk.”
It’s a hard step to take for parents, like me, who are used to hovering around their kids exhorting them to be careful. I almost lost one child to illness and even by north London standards, I am neurotic about physical welfare. So I took Spiegal’s advice and dug out the memory of my 1970s childhood. We made dens, paddled in a deep stream and roamed the fields – all unsupervised. To allow my children the freedom to make their own mistakes on the Hampstead Heath climbing frame now seems like the least I can do for their future wellbeing.
Great public playgrounds
■Grays Beach, Essex: a huge riverside playground with the UK’s largest play galleon, loads of sand play (including facilities for disabled children), water jets, plus paid-for attractions such as mini-golf and pedal go-karts. Café.
■Hengrove Play Park, Bristol: the biggest free play park in the south of England, opened in 2002. Attractions include a 12m-high dome with a jungle play area inside, challenging equipment for older kids and sand and water play for young children. Café.
■Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath, north London: new playground installed in 2006 with equipment for older kids plus a sand play area and paddling pool.
■Princess Diana Playground, Kensington Gardens, London: excellent imaginative play area for younger children, with a giant pirate ship as its centrepiece. Café.
■Telford Town Park, Shropshire: huge play areas for all children, from babies to teenagers, within a city-centre park also offering paid-for summer fun fair and mini-train. Café.
List compiled with help from play experts and parents on Mumsnet.com
