Strict safety rules for equipment and low budgets at childcare centers were largely blamed for playgrounds that don’t make kids feel like playing, Kristen Copeland, MD, of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and colleagues reported.
“Fixed playground equipment that meets licensing codes is unchallenging and uninteresting to children,” they wrote in the February issue of Pediatrics.
The other main problem cited was pressure to focus on academic readiness at the expense of physically active play time, Copeland’s group noted. –via Medical News:Playgrounds Too Safe to Keep Little Kids Active – in Pediatrics, General Pediatrics from MedPage Today.
According to the researchers, kids quickly mastered the boring playgrounds, and looked for new challenges by walking up slides the wrong way, or otherwise going out of their way to play in ways the space wasn’t intended to permit.
So… it looks like it’s the budding hackers who can find emergent fun in a round-edged, flat-planed, rubberized playland.
