July 25, 2011--Monkey Bars

I dropped Rona off at the Rising Tide, our local organic store, to get some raspberries. Since it was hot I waited in the air-conditioned car and leafed through the Times.

It was Customer Appreciation Day at the Tide, and the way they showed appreciation was by turning their parking lot over to various organized versions of fun-and-games for kids.

The most merriment seemed to center around something called a Bouncy House.

For the uninitiated, it is an inflated rubber playpen sort of contraption. A 15-by-15-by-15-foot cube packed with slides, climbing places, and things from which to hang. Its most noteworthy feature is safety. A kid can crawl to the highest spot and then, intentionally or not, tumble off only to be trampolined back up to another padded shelf or bounce off one of the swollen walls.

To keep kids for suffocating in wall-to-wall plastic and from bouncing onto the asphalt of the parking lot, the otherwise open sides of the Bouncy are secured with flexible nets. I saw a number of kids crash, screeching with pleasure, into these and then ricochet back onto a pile of others tumblers. A good time, clearly, was being had by all and the mothers (the parents were mainly mothers) could feel secure that their little-ones, in what otherwise looked like mayhem, in fact were safe.

But wouldn't you know, that as I sat there in comfort with my paper, in the Science section there was a revisionist article about children's' playgrounds, safety issues, and the unanticipated consequences of making these places too safe.

Eagerly, as a kid who grew up in hardscrabble Brooklyn schoolyard playgrounds, where we had 10-foot-tall sliding ponds, splintery seesaws, and rickety steel-pipe monkey bars, all riveted to cracked cement, I eagerly read on. (As can you via the article linked below.)

In New York and pretty much elsewhere the playground games of my youth are kaput. There are no more tall slides, seesaws have been banished, and monkey bars are even more difficult to find. Also, these days the ground beneath the Bouncy Houses and other plasticized, "safe" playground equipment is securely fastened to interlocked rubber mats.

So if somehow Little Billy or Sally figure out how to escape or topple from their Jungle Jims, at most they will "suffer" a modest bruise and wounded ego. And urban litigators will be left with only ambulances to chase.

But there are now critics of safety-first, litigation-proof playgrounds. First, they claim, there is no real evidence that these newfangled schoolyards are safer than the ones in which I hung out. More important, they say, for developmental reasons children need to encounter managed risks so they can, step-by-step, as life's realities encroach, overcome unreasonable fears. Further, rubberized playgrounds are boring and no longer are supplying enough of the excitement, thrills, and challenges kids require to become appropriately risk-taking adults.

And when they do fall off the monkey bars, if they are fortunate enough to still have one in the neighborhood, rather than that experience engendering fear of heights, studies show quite the opposite. Even children who before the age of 9 have been hurt in a fall are less likely to fear heights than teenagers who didn't.

Thanks to the parks commissioner who grew up in the neighborhood, the Upper Westside of New York, in Fort Tryon Park a 10-foot-tall set of monkey bars has been preserved. And just as the new studies are showing, kids still find it exciting and challenging.

Ten-year-old Nayelis Derrano was recently observed about halfway up, at the third level of bars. She paused, looked over at her mother to check to see if she had climbed high enough. Her mother smiled, indicating she could go even further, which she proceeded to do. She made it all the way to the top and when she descended-obviously thrilled with herself--said, "I was scared at first. But my mother said if you don't try, you'll never know if you could do it. So I took a chance and kept going. At the top I felt very proud."

She paused, then added,"It's kind of dangerous, I know, but if you think about danger you're never going to get ahead in life."

I wonder what the kids in the Bouncy House would have to say to that.