As Sarah Miller recently lampooned over at The New Yorker, parents today are bombarded with “long-form think pieces about parenting” that purport to show how some new studies have finally, after all these years, proven the correct way to raise a child — and how the rest of us have it all wrong. So much for Dr. Spock’s “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

The latest addition to that genre is Hanna Rosin’s “The Overprotected Kid” in The Atlantic, which argues that the next generation is on the path to ruin thanks to, of all things, safe playground equipment. Apparently, common sense improvements like replacing the asphalt on playgrounds with grass or rubber can somehow be connected to “depression, narcissism, and a decline in empathy,” as well as “college-age kids taking psychiatric medication,” and even “a fear of growing up,” culminating in the next generation’s “inability to think for themselves.” (What’s next? “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!”). The primary solution to this societal collapse, we are told, is “a new kind of playground.”

We might as well start our analysis with this “new kind of playground.” The idea of “adventure playgrounds,” which Rosin traces back to Lady Marjory Allen, a British landscape architect from the 1940s (though it’s my understanding she got the idea from C. Th. Sørensen in Denmark), is to “encourage a ‘free and permissive atmosphere’ with as little adult supervision as possible,” which will in turn enable kids to “face what to them seem like ‘really dangerous risks’ and then conquer them alone.” Rosin’s exemplar for a “new kind of playground” is The Land in England (“The Land”), a playground made up of commercial refuse in which children sit on broken chairs, jump on “filthy” mattresses, start trashcan fires, and toss around discarded wooden pallets.

In the most general sense, it’s obvious that children need to learn independence and to be responsible for themselves. And surely it’s good for kids to try their hand at designing and building new structures from the tools and materials available. (If you have young kids and lots of cardboard boxes everywhere thanks to Amazon Prime, check out Makedo.)

Yet, if the key is to have “as little adult supervision as possible,” then “The Land” quite plainly does not fit the bill: “The park is staffed by professionally trained ‘playworkers,’ who keep a close eye on the kids but don’t intervene all that much. … [A] playworker is always nearby, watching for impending accidents.” I’m glad to hear that, but if we take at face value all of the arguments in “The Overprotected Kid” about the terrible harm inflicted upon children by supervision and safe environments, then The Land is worse than your typical playground, because it fails to let kids actually exercise independence (and actually suffer the consequences) and it creates a false sense of security even in truly dangerous situations.

Let’s step back to the core of the supposed problem: what, really, is wrong with safer playgrounds? According to Rosin, playgrounds today are harmful to children’s development because of their absence of needlessly dangerous components like asphalt (something not even found at adventure playgrounds) and exposed openings on climbing structures, a “problem” that stems from — what else? — lawsuits. As Rosin writes:
Continue Reading Asphalt Playgrounds Will Not Save The Next Generation