thinking about it more because of the little guy that should pop out any time now … some of the stuff i can fully agree with, but what have we come to with this:
instructions for how to play on a playground? isn’t that part of a parents’ job, to tell their kids not to do crazy shit that might get you hurt? doesn’t this just mean you need common sense as an adult? are there really instructions on playgrounds back home, wherever home is for you?
why isn’t it made for parents to play with their kids? some of the most fun i had as a child was riding a see-saw (teeter-totter) with my mom or pop when i was a wee lad. there must be a way for parents to be able to have fun with their kids, or are we beyond this?
don’t get me wrong - i want to have a safe place for my kid to play. i hope that loose bolts and such can be taken care of. but play still needs to be fun too. next thing you know, kids will have to go to bushibans so they can pass the test on playground instructions before they can go play.
unfortunately, this is the way the world has become.
back home in my town, an unsupervised child was playing in a playground when the child fell off something and broke her leg.
The parents (who weren’t there at the time) tried to sue the local authorities and succeeded in obtaining a few thousand pounds in damages.
Questions not asked: Why wasn’t the kid supervised?
What was a 9 y.o. doing playing alone outside?
The council then just ripped out all the towns play equipment.
What I would do to go back to those happy, pressure free times.
Of course, this could fit into the wider spectrum of Taiwanese shirking any responsibility and passing it over to someone else to deal with/be responsible for.
Why? I climbed trees, swam in lakes, rode my bike to the store and back way before I was 9 years old. The human body can endure a lot. Skinned knees, broken bones, concussions, etc. Children die in freak accidents regardless of how much supervision they are afforded. A rusty, mangled, jungle gym, rather than infecting a small child, will teach children to avoid obvious danger. I say let 'em go. Climb that tree and jump from it when you get to the top! If you’ve got the balls!
One of my fondest childhood memories was sledding down the stairs in a cardboard box and getting flipped out of it, landing upside down at the bottom of the stairs, yet I’m still alive. I used to swing across dried creek beds on old vines, run around junkyards, build forts in the woods, climb trees, hang upside down on monkey bars, etc. all before the age of 9, completely unsupervised because my mother knew that gravity would serve as a better teacher of safety than shaking a finger at me ever would.
I hope the kid, whose parents sued and subsequently caused all the playground equipment to get ripped out, got excluded from play with all the other kids because their parents were smart enough to tell them that if that brat had gotten hurt while playing with them, his (or her) parents would sue them.
I think it was an apt punishment. I would have gone so far as to put a plaque in the vacant lots where the equipment had been to thank the family for ensuring that no one in that town would ever have fun at a park again. I would include a picture of the kid as well to let the other kids personally thank him or her in any way they deemed fitting.
Has playground equipment really gotten that much more dangerous since we were kids or are parents nowadays becoming overprotective anal-retentive idiots who keep their children from getting (gasp!) boo-boos?
As we discussed a while ago in another thread, one fo the things I like about Taiwan is that this sort of thing (oversensitivity to possible dangers and the threat of being sued) is still rare.
I remember being really disappointed when local authorities around NZ ripped out all the good playgrounds (with forts, witches hats, huge slides, mouse traps etc) and built tiny little platic things that even a 4 year old would have difficulty having fun on.
Lots of lawsuits over playground accidents in the litigious US. My brother worked for a contractor that got a public contract to build a couple dozen playgrounds and they had strict safety requirements to comply with.
I don’t know about other playgrounds in Taiwan, but the one next to my house is great. It’s as safe as any rational adult could hope for, with a big soft rubber mat under all the equipment and lots of great colorful plastic slides and things to climb and swing on. I take my daughter there every day. She’s only 13 months old, but she loves it, going down the slides, bouncing on the bouncy things and on the weekends when the place is teeming with hyperactice children screaming and running about, she’s ecstatic. The only danger I’ve seen there is of getting run over by another kid.
So, does the article make a valid point? Yes, play equipment for kids shouldn’t have sharp, rusty metal edges and the like, but instructions? Give me a break. Must’ve been a slow day for the consumer group that was responsible for the article being written (either that, or other local playgrounds are in worse shape than the one near my house).
we’ve got a fairly new one just up from my house as well … this is partly what prompted my original post. i really hope that taiwan doesn’t turn into america is this respect - it’s your fault that my kid broke a fingernail, where are my millions?
as for whether kids always need supervision, is guess it matter how direct this is. i imagine i’d want some adult that i trust around just to make sure no whacko tries anything funny, or if a kid did get hurt, at least to have someone to call for help … but i didn’t always have supervision growing up, no matter how much my parents may have wanted it. yeah, i got hurt once in a while, and learned what not to do from that.
i guess most 8 year olds have cell phones now though, so the phone call is easy …
I hate to break the news to you, but soft rubber isn’t necessarily safe! It’s a lot easier to twist your ankle on something like that. It gives just enough to let your ankle twist, rather than let it straighten up immediately and result in a mild sprain rather than a severe sprain with ligament damage. Kids need solid ground. Bones will break from time to time. However, on a rubber mat, all bets are off. Twists are unpredictable and can be much more severe than a clean break.
I say move her to hard ground. Her bones are soft and not easily broken. Encourage her to climb trees and jump from them–onto firm ground.
Not a danger at all. The worst that could happen is a black eye or a skinned knee: should be a rite of passage.
And why not? What’s wrong with a little cut here or a laceration there? I know that we don’t like to see these things happen to our kids, but much worse things will surely happen later. Why shelter them completely from a little bleeding? It builds character! Physical pain is always more bearable than the other kind. We know that so why should we waste our time?
That’s going a bit far, wipt. There should be regulations such as the equipment being in good working order so that sharp edges and rusty edges are cleaned up and rounded. Preventable dangers should be avoided, but that doesn’t mean that your child should be tied up in their bedroom until they outgrow their awkward stage. No equipment is 100% safe unless it were on the moon where gravity wouldn’t be such a factor. I, for one, am glad to see plastic slides which add color to playgrounds while not being a danger (remember what metal slides in the summer were like?) aside from getting a mild shock…that’s where firm rubber asphalt comes in to ground the shock.
No one disagrees that kids will get hurt no matter how good the equipment is. Where the argument is is whether or not people take it to extremes through lawsuits and ripping out playground equipment.
Yeah, maybe so. But no one ever filed off the stray bark on the tree when I dropped from a high branch! I still got all my ribs! Maybe I lost a little blood that I didn’t have to lose, but I’m still breathing.
170,000 children are injured,(in america) some fatally, in playground accidents annually, 1995 article
70% from falls
40% related to lack of supervision, estimate naysi.com/kidbits/KB07.htm
Parents should watch their children but they also should have reasonable expectations of the inherent safety of playground equipment.
I don
Last month I was in a playground accident. A four year old boy lost control of the motorized jeep he was driving and rear ended me as I was leaving a classroom. After sending me sailing over him, he hit the wall and wrecked the front of the jeep. Him? He’s fine, no damage. Me, I have torn ligaments, sprained ligaments, cartilage damage and am only recently off crutches for the most part. Stairs are still a problem. Daily physio for the next month and still the possibility of surgery. What galls me the most is that although the jeep has been taken out of commission for now (and repaired) the school has replaced it with a bigger motorized tractor which also has a high speed. The children in this school range from 18 months to 12 years of age. That jeep caught me at the back of my legs. Had a baby been hit, it would have hit that child full on and trapped it between the wall and the jeep.
Playground equipment is the responsibility of adults to maintain and supervise. Children do not yet have the ability to consistantly comprehend cause and effect. It is up to adults to be aware of dangers and to remove possible risk to others. Being safety conscious is not neccesarily being over protective, it’s quite simply being smart.
Oh yes, the school owners have said that it would never happen to a child and the children love those toys so, they’ll stay. Yesterday the Education office made an inspection (no, I did not instigate it). Apparently, they don’t see a problem either! Is it just me? :s
