PLAYGROUND ACTIVISTS RESCUING CHILDREN FROM THE TEST SCORERS,
DRAKE BENNETT, BOSTON GLOBE - In recent years, noted architects have turned their attention to designing playgrounds, even as public agencies and private charities dedicated to expanding children's access to playgrounds have sprung up. . .
"There's a real international playground movement taking hold around the world, and it's really very exciting," says David Elkind, a professor of child development at Tufts University and author of the recently published book "The Power of Play.". . .
All in all, the average child's life is more regimented than it was 20 years ago, with more young children in day care, more lessons and rehearsals and practices, and less free time. The fact that communities are getting serious about play, proponents hope, means leaders recognize the extent to which it is endangered in modern society.
At the same time, this reexamination of playgrounds is triggered by the conviction that, in the United States in particular, playgrounds have become rather unfun -- designed with only safety in mind, they've lost the capacity to excite or challenge children.
Playgrounds have always been places where the need for free, even rambunctious, play bumps up against parental fears about safety. The new playground advocates are trying to find a better balance. "The history of playgrounds," says Roger Hart, director of the Children's Environments Research Group at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, "is a history of containment.". . .
In the past 11 years, working with tens of thousands of volunteers and various corporate partners, the nonprofit organization KABOOM! has built nearly 1,200 playgrounds all over North America, using a collaborative method in which local children help design the playgrounds that are going up in their neighborhoods.
According to psychologists and specialists in early childhood education, to be valuable, play needs to be creative, but there also has to be an element of danger. "Children need vertiginous experiences," says Mary Rivkin, a professor of education at the University of Maryland. "They need fast and slow and that high feeling you get when you run down a hill. They need to have tippy things."
If there's no challenge, no pain of failure, she argues, there's no learning -- and less enjoyment. Indeed, according to Hart, one problem with trying to child-proof playgrounds is that children, trying to make the safer playground equipment interesting, come up with unforeseen and often more dangerous ways of using it.
Some playground advocates also point to the rise in childhood obesity and related diseases as a reason to get more kids playing, but they're careful to point out that play is not just about physical activity. "Play and sports are totally different," says Doris Bergen, a professor of educational psychology at Miami University of Ohio. "When they play, kids make their own rules -- then they have to negotiate to get others to follow them. In sports, adults make and enforce the rules for them."
DRAKE BENNETT, BOSTON GLOBE - In recent years, noted architects have turned their attention to designing playgrounds, even as public agencies and private charities dedicated to expanding children's access to playgrounds have sprung up. . .
"There's a real international playground movement taking hold around the world, and it's really very exciting," says David Elkind, a professor of child development at Tufts University and author of the recently published book "The Power of Play.". . .
All in all, the average child's life is more regimented than it was 20 years ago, with more young children in day care, more lessons and rehearsals and practices, and less free time. The fact that communities are getting serious about play, proponents hope, means leaders recognize the extent to which it is endangered in modern society.
At the same time, this reexamination of playgrounds is triggered by the conviction that, in the United States in particular, playgrounds have become rather unfun -- designed with only safety in mind, they've lost the capacity to excite or challenge children.
Playgrounds have always been places where the need for free, even rambunctious, play bumps up against parental fears about safety. The new playground advocates are trying to find a better balance. "The history of playgrounds," says Roger Hart, director of the Children's Environments Research Group at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, "is a history of containment.". . .
In the past 11 years, working with tens of thousands of volunteers and various corporate partners, the nonprofit organization KABOOM! has built nearly 1,200 playgrounds all over North America, using a collaborative method in which local children help design the playgrounds that are going up in their neighborhoods.
According to psychologists and specialists in early childhood education, to be valuable, play needs to be creative, but there also has to be an element of danger. "Children need vertiginous experiences," says Mary Rivkin, a professor of education at the University of Maryland. "They need fast and slow and that high feeling you get when you run down a hill. They need to have tippy things."
If there's no challenge, no pain of failure, she argues, there's no learning -- and less enjoyment. Indeed, according to Hart, one problem with trying to child-proof playgrounds is that children, trying to make the safer playground equipment interesting, come up with unforeseen and often more dangerous ways of using it.
Some playground advocates also point to the rise in childhood obesity and related diseases as a reason to get more kids playing, but they're careful to point out that play is not just about physical activity. "Play and sports are totally different," says Doris Bergen, a professor of educational psychology at Miami University of Ohio. "When they play, kids make their own rules -- then they have to negotiate to get others to follow them. In sports, adults make and enforce the rules for them."
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