Playground equipment-Playgrounds without swings just aren't playgrounds

Playground equipment-Playgrounds without swings just aren't playgrounds

The game was simple. You picked a swing. Mine was usually the third one in from the fence line at Rosedale Park playground. Then you swung as high as you could, as high as you dared, pumping your legs, pushing and pulling with your arms, watching the ground drop away and feeling your stomach drop away just a little bit, too.

Then you jumped, jumped off and jumped out as far as you could before landing in a tangle and drawing a line in the sand to mark the spot. Farthest jump won. There were other playground attractions at Rosedale Park: green and yellow teeter-totters (ideal for bumping your pal to the sand); a wading pool (for splash fights); monkey bars (for chin-up contests) and the dizzying entertainment of the push-it-yourself-merry-go-round (two pushed and one crouched in the middle, getting woozy).

But the swings, the swings were king, the purest symbol of playground freedom. They were the closest a kid could get to flying. And now they are gone, or going, and have been for years, disappearing two-by-two from North American parks and schoolyards.

Reduced in number. Reduced in height. Reduced in fun/fear factor.

It is hard to pinpoint when, precisely, the war on the swing began. Maybe it was back in 1993, when a young Dalton McGuinty, the Liberal MPP for Ottawa South, argued eloquently in the Ontario Legislature in support of adopting the Canadian Standards Association’s national guidelines for playground equipment.

“Let’s consider this issue of playground equipment. It is specifically designed for children to play on it. It is designed to attract them. It is designed to invite them. It is designed to entertain them,” Ontario’s future premier said.

“They want to swing. They want to slide. They want to have fun … but what I think the CSA standards do is place some kind of reasonable limitation on the element of risk associated with playground.

Over the next decade, it happened, in Toronto and in cities across the country to a lesser extent.

Teeter-totters, merry-go-rounds, monkey bars, jiggling-bridges, wooden forts, sand and swings began vanishing.

“The playground industry set these new supposed safety standards — the Canadian Standards Association [in 1998] — and 75% of the members were actually from the playground industry,” says Jutta Mason, a community gatekeeper and self-appointed playground protector of Dufferin Grove Park in Toronto’s west-end.

“Almost overnight they were taking out a slide and suddenly a jiggle-bridge didn’t jiggle anymore and certainly the old swings — you have seen the dumbed-down ones and they have no radius — and that is what killed the swing, and it killed a lot of other things, too.”

A contemporary swing, when occupied, must sit 30-centimetres above ground to meet CSA guidelines. It must be separated from the neighbouring swing by a minimum of 60 cm and be a minimum of 75 cm from the supporting structure.

While altruistic in intent, the CSA’s playground regulations were designed by risk managers, not playground specialists, or child development experts. Or kids. Swings are still out there.

There just not the same swings as before.

“The most basic change with the swing was to have a safety surface put beneath it,” says Mary Lou Wilmott, a regional play consultant with RecTec Industries in Delta, B.C.

“When you and I were kids, the swings would have been planted out on the grass or sometimes over asphalt and you would always get the mud pit under the swing where you killed the turf from dragging your feet.

“So the first thing was having an engineered wood fibre or a rubber surface or pea-gravel put in that would absorb a fall, and then they gave minimum spacing around swings to allow for kids flying off the front to see how far they could jump.

“And then they went from allowing, for instance, three swings in a swing bay to two swings because there was always that kid in the middle — if you were trying to run the gauntlet and go in front of the swings.

“I’m not sure if the overall height has come down. We can go up to about a 10-foot crossbeam and I’m never sure if, when we were kids, we just imagined it being way taller than that or if it really was.”

Ms. Wilmott says there is a delicate balance to be struck in the playground industry between keeping kids safe and keeping playgrounds alluring.

“Ontario, in particular, has gone crazy in terms of safety,” she says. “Kids have got to be able to challenge themselves. If there is no perceived risk they won’t play on it. We still want to build in some risk because, if it is so low to the ground, the kids are going to think it is lame.”

Dufferin Grove fought back against lameness, defending their little park with its wooden forts and old school swings against city officials. The winner, in the end, was nostalgia. And fun. Dufferin Grove stands today as a sandy, tree-dappled reminder of a more innocent and yet more risky era — when swing sets were about soaring, not being anchored near earth.

My old swing, the third one in from the fence at Rosedale Park, is gone. And so is the fence. So is the swings metal support structure with the peeling yellow (or was it red?) paint. So are the nine other swings that used to be there, some 30-years-ago, replaced by a pristine sextet lacking the height, swing radius and fear-factor of its high-flying ancestors.

Plastered to its sparkling green supports is a “warning” sticker: “This playground equipment is designed for children 5-to-12 years old. Remove scarfs and mittens with draw strings. Check for hot surfaces. Adult supervision recommended.”

Things were pretty quiet at the playground on a recent morning. A pair of grandparents kept watch over a young boy as he scrambled about on a shiny new fort; a caregiver chirped away on her cellphone, gently rocking a stroller with a baby inside; while another caregiver plunked her charge — a little girl with pigtails in a pink hoodie and tights — into a kiddie swing.

The girl’s mouth was set, unsmiling. Perhaps she sensed how lame the new swings were. Her nanny gave a push, a second and a third. A breeze stirred the little girl’s hair. She pumped her legs. Her face broke into a radiant grin.