Danielsaurus

Designing Streets for Play

Kerala Taylor, of KaBOOM!, talks about the opportunities that can exist for play in urban planning and street design. Interesting article, but here’s the real money quote:

Play is a mindset. It shouldn’t be restricted to the playground; neither should it be restricted to children. Play is for everyone and can happen everywhere!

Very true; also very interesting to see this coming from the KaBOOM! organization – whose bread and butter comes almost exclusively from perpetuating the old traditional, prefabricated fixed-equipment playground model. That Kerala, though – she has always been quite the rebel… so who knows.

Newsreel Playgrounds

Alex Smith, of the PlayGroundology blog, has uncovered gold with this collection of newsreel footage dating from 1939 to 1967, featuring kids playing at playgrounds across Britain. Great footage of some adventure playgrounds in there, too.

“Can a Playground Be Too Safe?”

John Tierney, in the New York Times, reports on a new Norwegian research study about playground safety:

Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.”

And:

By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

Certainly, Sandseter and Kennair’s new study is just one more to go onto a heap of past studies – heralding from all disciplines and dating back over the past several decades – that reinforce children’s need for risk-taking, and that acknowledge the paradoxical dangers of a too-safe childhood environment. It’s still good to see the issue once again pushed to the fore, though.

What’s perhaps more interesting, to me at least, is to see how popular Tierney’s article actually is right now; despite only being published yesterday, it currently ranks #3 in the Most Emailed articles on the NYTimes.com’s website – and just speaking personally, I’ve been forwarded a link to it from no less than a dozen different people, from varying and in many cases unexpected backgrounds. (Even for me that rate and the diversity of sources is unusual.) Likewise, I’ve noticed that Lori Gottlieb’s essay in the Atlantic, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy”, has experienced a similar effect: it is still #2 in Most Popular articles there – despite being published nearly a month ago – and it has continued to maintain a similar ranking every time I check it every few days or so.

I’m not sure what this says about us adults, but it certainly appears that children’s lives and play are the vogue topics to discuss right now.

School Playgrounds Yield Better Math Students

A recent Boston University study (whose efforts initially emerged out of the Boston Schoolyard Initiative, a public-private partnership established in the mid-1990s to restore Boston’s playgrounds) considers the important role of environment and play in education, examining whether better school playgrounds have an impact on student achievement.

“I really wasn’t expecting to find anything,” says Russell Lopez, a School of Public Health assistant professor of Environmental Health, citing the relatively small sample of schools. “I thought, even if there is a real effect, there are so few schools involved that it doesn’t have a lot of statistical power.”

When Lopez studied the 2003 results of the fourth-grade English language MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), standardized tests that almost all public school students must take, he saw no discernible differences between children at the 70 schools with new playgrounds and children at schools with old playgrounds.

But when he looked at math scores, he saw a very different picture. In schools where fourth graders had new playgrounds, 25 percent more kids passed the math MCAS. And that remained true after he and his team controlled for factors such as demographics and the number of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

The researchers suggest several reasons for the association between better schoolyards and improved test scores. It may be that students at schools with upgraded playgrounds get more physical activity, which may make them more willing and able to learn once they’re back at their desks. It could also be the result of more parental involvement in the schools. Or, Lopez says, “It could be that students and teachers feel better about going to schools that are not dreary, jail-like settings and that look more inviting. That might set up people to want to learn.”

While Lopez acknowledges the limitations of his ecological study, I believe we’d do well as a society to consider education from a more holistic perspective. Lopez seems to think so, too:

Lopez believes his findings are particularly important at a time when the slumping economy is forcing schools across the nation to tighten their belts. “I worry that the first thing that gets cut is the outdoor space,” he says. “There are a lot of people who think that it’s not important, that all kids need is reading, writing, and arithmetic. And I think what this shows is that getting kids to learn is a broader experience. How places look and how they’re used are as important as what goes on in the classroom.”