Playground bullies

Ugh, another one of those "lawsuits are killing playgrounds" stories in the New York Times Tuesday...

All of these stories hew to a typical formula: Wise elders bemoan that kids are getting lazy/fat/fearful/depressed/stressed out because lawsuits have deprived them of the tall slides/monkey bars/other dangerous equipment of old, from which to take risks and exercise their growing muscles. All such stories, including the one in the Times, use the author's own sepia-toned childhood memories of "unstructured free time" as a benchmark for measuring the new "nanny state" and its efforts to protect children from injury.

Every time I read one of these, I have to think that the authors haven't spent much time on playgrounds lately, because the rare new playground equipment going into the lucky few places that can afford it, is really, really cool--way cooler than anything I ever played on as a kid, and it's far from boring. Right now, my local city playground is about to install a rock-climbing wall that's high enough to give the geezer parents in our neighborhood heart palpitations.

Apparently, though, the folks at Common Good, the tort reform group that is the genesis for much of the "dumbed down playground" news coverage, think turning your knees into hamburger every time you go out to play is a character-building exercise. They think that our litigious culture has given kids a "bubble-wrapped" existence that doesn't subject them to enough risk. If they don't break a few bones falling off monkey bars, Common Good argues, they won't grow up to be risk-taking "entrepreneurs" (or maybe insurance defense lawyers, in the case of Common Good's former executive director Franklin Stone, whose bubble-wrapped quote appeared in the Times).

Really, though, these death of the playground stories miss the big picture. Besides the fact that there isn't exactly a big parent constituency lobbying for more dangerous play structures, drive around any suburban gated community and you'll see all that's missing at the playground: a swing set in every yard, a Moonbounce in every basement. The biggest threat to the modern playground is not the lawsuit, but the lack of investment in public parks and public schools.

I wish that lawsuits were as effective at directing municipal behavior as Common Good's luminaries believe. If they were, the D.C. parks and rec department might clean up the broken glass and condoms off our playground in a more timely fashion. In some areas of the city, the only way to get city workers to a playground is to report the presence of a corpse in the sandbox. Kids in our city face plenty of risks when they venture on to the playground. Unfortunately, they're not the sort of risks that can be remedied in a courthouse.