The state is the first in the country to mandate compliance with federal safety recommendations. Some long-beloved fixtures–monkey bars among them–will bite the dust, and others such as swings, slides and seesaws will have to be scaled down or modified. Traditionalists scoff at what they see as undue protectionism, but activists say changes are long overdue. About 150,000 children a year wind up in emergency rooms with playground injuries, and 15 or so die. Seymour Gold, professor of environmental planning at the University of California, Davis, says studies place playgrounds among the five greatest hazards to children in the nation. “That’s serious, when you’re up there with chain saws and ladders.”
New and safer playgrounds are still evolving, but some trends are already clear. First, says designer Jay Beckwith, equipment will be lower to the ground. No more 20-foot-tall corkscrew slides. Merry-go-rounds, where kids kept whirling “until they threw up,” could also trap children underneath, says Beckwith, so they’re out. Old-style seesaws are giving way to spring-loaded ones so you can’t “jump off and have your friend’s eyeballs come out of his head.” Heavy animal-shaped swings look like fun, but they routinely flatten passing toddlers. Even conventional swings are on the wane. “Swings are going to be very scarce, and high swings are going to be gone,” says Beckwith. Mandated “fall zones” are so large and the surfacing required beneath them so costly that most parks don’t have the space or money for more than a few. Writing a check for $10,000 to pad the area around two swings is no fun for civic officials.
But will the new playgrounds be any fun for kids? Designers are devising alternative fixtures, like Jack Fischer Park’s water channel, but to some it just isn’t the same. Marin County day-care assistant Kristen Eldridge, 25, has a “major problem” with the new rules. “I had seesaws and monkey bars when I grew up and I’m fine, and generations before us were fine,” she says. “Parents are just getting too busy to take the time to watch their kids.” Terry Norton, an irked mom who fired off an op-ed piece to the San Francisco Examiner, says the new rules will create “plastic-bubble childhoods for kids. Let them get out there and bang against hard things. It’s reality.”
But parents of children who bang against hard things often file lawsuits. It is this hazard, as much as nanny-minded legislators, that’s driving the changes. Besides, “you’re still going to break your arms and fingers,” says Susan Goltsman, a Berkeley, Calif., playground designer. The new rules are aimed at eliminating deaths, she says, not minor injuries. And some of the new stuff is catching on. “Usually you get dirty and everything, but I think it’s fun,” says Josh Hartley of his park’s water channel, which may not be dangerous but certainly offers a taste of reality. Budding civil engineers learn what it’s like to work with bossy colleagues, and even the occasional conspiracy is hatched. “Let’s go terrorize my brother,” says one boy, proving that there are some childhood hazards that no amount of padding can eliminate.
