Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Courtesy Michael Lopez comes a report of boring playgrounds.

I don't like "dumbing things down", any more than the next person. And "dumbing down" is a problem. But the thing with the playgrounds is, I'm not convinced that today's playgrounds are all that boring.

There is a wonderful playground a few minutes' drive away from our house, on the site of a small nature park (whose grounds will soon be stopped being lovingly tended by AmeriCorps volunteers, unless....well, that's another issue). It's the type of thing the article bashes: no teeter-totters, no jungle-gym, no merry-go-round. There is a cluster of slides of differing heights (eight in all, I think) and climbing-apparati of different types (regular ladders, sloping and curving ladders, etc), along with two faux-rockwalls. The grounds are too heavily wooded to allow swings, but just about every park in the area has swings, and that particular lack is made up for by the nature trails that go down to the side of one of the local streams, where there are rocks a-plenty for throwing and skipping.

This playground is always busy: there are always at least five or six families there, on slow days, and on holidays the place is virtually packed. And the kids are all having a blast. With all of those slides and climbing doohickeys, there is little waiting involved -- the kids just go onto the next thing, there is plenty of room for parents to wander around and watch, and so on. And best of all, the slides are made of plastic, so even in the hot summer sun they don't reach tremendous temperatures the way the metal slides of my youth always did.

I don't get the desire to romanticize big assemblages of metal pipes that rose from the un-padded asphalt; nor did I ever find teeter-totters particularly compelling. I mean, Bobby and Cindy Brady's desire to set a world record aside, going up-and-down while watching the same person going down-and-up kind of loses a bit of cachet after a few minutes, didn't it? I thought it did, anyway. Merry-go-rounds were fun, I admit. But quite frankly, I don't think kids are really missing out on much if they're not getting the experience of spinning on one of those things until sick.

Plus, I think people are misremembering things a bit. Scaling a metal teepee that's twenty feet high? Come on. Twenty feet doesn't sound like much, I know, but it's higher than we think. That's three Shaquille O'Neals, standing on each other's shoulders. The house I grew up in wasn't even twenty feet high, and I know nothing I ever climbed on a playground was higher than my house.

I think people are mistaking the reason for the good times they had on those deathtrap playgrounds. They remember the fun, the games with their friends, the good times -- but then they assume that because the objects on which they played those games aren't around anymore, that the kids of today are missing out somehow. Well, my daughter and I were at one of those new-fangled playgrounds today, and the sounds of kids laughing are still the same now as they were when I was getting hurt by falling off a lattice of Miss Scarlet's murder weapons. Maybe what's important is not if we find these playgrounds boring. Maybe what matters is if the kids find them boring. It's anecdotal evidence, I know, but the fact of my experience is this: I've long since lost count of the number of times my daughter has complained, begged to stay and go down just one more big plastic slide, or even cried when I told her it was time to go home. I can only remember a handful of times when she asked to leave...and those were because she had to go to the bathroom.

The playgrounds are fine. Let the kids play on 'em. And let's stop assuming that our own childhoods were, by default, happier.