Playground Musings - II

As a followup to the last post, a few weeks ago, my family took a walk around our neighborhood and to our local park. Gorgeous day, about 6 pm. We walked through four blocks of housing, and did not see a single child playing. Got to the park, and there was one family there flying kites, and one middle-aged guy shooting hoops. Walked back home; saw nobody else along the way. From the park, we could see the backyards of a number of houses, many with their own play structures. But no kids using them. I can’t help but think that you just don’t see kids playing outside as much these days, at least in unstructured (i.e. non team-sport) play.

Let me see if I can knock off my other playground thoughts quickly.

1. Thinking about how playgrounds have changed in the last thirty years. The play structures of today were pretty rare when I was growing up; I don’t remember seeing many (in the U.S. at least) until the early 80’s. That’s a good thing; I think a lot of those structures would be really cool to play if I were a kid. On the other hand, playgrounds are missing a number of items that used to be standard: see-saws, merry-go-rounds, those funky animals-on-springs that you ride on. I don’t think a single park in Westminster has any of those, although I’ve seen a merry-go-round or two in other suburban parks. About half of the parks in Westminster don’t have swings.

Those were pretty fun things to play on; I assume the reason why they’re gone is for safety or liability reasons. Without digging into the safety statistics, I can’t tell how warranted that is, but it does seem unfortunate. And there is a tradeoff here – isn’t obesity a major health crisis in this country? Don’t we want kids to exercise more, and isn’t a good way to do that to make playgrounds more fun? Although, at the same time, I wouldn’t put any play equipment in my backyard that I would consider a safety risk (in particular, a trampoline, which seems to have gotten a lot more pervasive). But it seems like progress should have enabled us to have it both ways – fun equipment that is safer than it was 30 years ago.

I haven’t really dug into the topic much, but I enjoyed this article which discusses some the same of the same concerns: http://www.utexas.edu/features/2007/playgrounds/index.html.

2. A few of the parks that we take our kids to have the same general pattern – a smaller toddler section for the younger kids, and then a much larger main structure for the older kids. The toddler structures are more than sufficient to entertain a toddler; if we had one in our backyard, our daughter would love it. It was interesting then to observe that from day one my daughter always gravitated towards the largest, riskiest, highest structure in the playground. She only turned to the toddler section when bored with the larger one. I’m not sure what that signifies, except possibly that often our kids want to challenge themselves more than we’re ready for.

3. We went swingset-shopping earlier this year. You basically have two options: the tradational metal A-frame structure with various types of swings and maybe a slide. Prices generally run from $100 to $350. There don’t appear to be too many vendors. Or you can get a wooden structure. Huge number of vendors. Huge variance in the price. It’s hard to get a handle on the median price. Walmart has one as low as $288; seems like for most vendors the low end starts around $500 or so, and the high end goes into five figures.

We settled on a fairly nice metal one, at least for now, which cost about $250. But the process made me think about the meaning of inflation. In 1972 or so, my parents bought us a nice swingset that was fairly comparable in features to the one we bought this year. According to the government’s CPI data, the value of a dollar has decreased by about a factor of five in the past 35 years. So if that rate applied to swingsets, then my parents would have dropped about $50 for our set back then. That’s probably about what they paid. Looking online, I found a quote for $59 for a comparable set here: http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/prices/1972.html.

But the interesting thing is to think of how the CPI can be misleading. For this apples-to-apples case, it looks like it tracked well – mostly. One quibble: I bet the set we bought this year is safer and made of higher quality plastic and steel so it lasts longer. So the 2007 set is better, and the comparison isn’t quite even.

More importantly, the standard of living (in this case, the standard of swingsets) has increased as well. Our playground in 1972 was one of the best in the neighborhood. There’s a good chance that the one we bought this year was the worst one bought in our neighborhood – all the ones I’ve seen around us are nicer wooden sets. I’ll pull some numbers out of the air, and say that the price of the average swingset went from maybe $40 in 1972 to $800 now, or a twenty-fold price increase.

I don’t have a coherent point to make here; it’s just interesting (for me) to think about.