Junkyard as Playground? Sounds Like More Fun Than a ‘Safe’ Childhood

The Land When I ws a kid, I used to roam
the streets and woods with my friends, romping through construction
sites as a diversion from the tube steel and asphalt playgrounds
that were the norm for most of my childhood. I earned a few battle
scars in the process, including a perfectly circular black eye from
looking through a loose length of pipe at a buddy who unthinkingly
nudged the other end. If you share a fondness for that kind of
upbringing over eternal hovering over oh-so-precious wee ones who
never seem to be allowed learn how to shake it off and get back
into the mix, you’ll enjoy Hanna Rosin’s take on “The
Overprotected Kid” at The Atlantic and alternatives
thereto—including a playground seemingly modeled on a junkyard.

Rosin
writes:

It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in
just one generation. Actions that would have been considered
paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding
your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your
child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of
good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of “children’s
independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural
neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of
third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had
dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower. When you ask
parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they
might answer that the world is more dangerous than it was when they
were growing up. But this isn’t true, or at least not in the way
that we think. For example, parents now routinely tell their
children never to talk to strangers, even though all available
evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim)
chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation
ago. Maybe the real question is, how did these fears come to have
such a hold over us? And what have our children lost—and gained—as
we’ve succumbed to them?

Rosin details how lawsuits and a growing cultural obsession with
safety fueled a push for sterile, supervised children’s play. The
result, perhaps predictably, is that kids denied approved access to
thrill and a feeling of danger develop phobias and also engage in
increasingly risky behavior with real consequences. They don’t
learn to test and set their own limits.

By contrast, she writes about “the Land,” a playground in Wales
that seems to embody a perfect rejection of the modern safe,
orderly, and approved children’s environment.

It’s still morning, but someone has already started a fire in
the tin drum in the corner, perhaps because it’s late fall and
wet-cold, or more likely because the kids here love to start fires.
Three boys lounge in the only unbroken chairs around it; they are
the oldest ones here, so no one complains. One of them turns on the
radio—Shaggy is playing (Honey came in and she caught me
red-handed, creeping with the girl next door)—as the others
feel in their pockets to make sure the candy bars and soda cans are
still there. Nearby, a couple of boys are doing mad flips on a
stack of filthy mattresses, which makes a fine trampoline. At the
other end of the playground, a dozen or so of the younger kids dart
in and out of large structures made up of wooden pallets stacked on
top of one another. Occasionally a group knocks down a few
pallets—just for the fun of it, or to build some new kind of slide
or fort or unnamed structure. Come tomorrow and the Land might have
a whole new topography.

The Land sounds like an odd, new, and interesting experiment.
But it’s actually a reversion to the sort of “adventure playground”
that was popular in 1940s Britain. Even though it’s a decades-old
idea, it’s different enough for the modern world to be the subject
of a documentary by Erin
Davis (see part of it below).

Rosin also discusses experiments in New Zealand,
covered by Reason in January, in which school
officials minimized playground rules and saw important improvements
in behavior, and reductions in bullying.

Rules-wise, it seems that less is more when it comes to
childhood.

Read Rosin’s full article
here.