Have you ever taken your kids to the playground and wondered how the city approved the playground’s absolute death trap right in front of you? Random openings with a 10-foot drop into the mulch below, a metal slide in direct sunlight, and, lo and behold, no fence between it and the parking lot. This makes it very difficult to actually sit and relax while the kids are playing. If you feel like the people who design playgrounds disrespect families, you’re not alone.
“Why don’t more playgrounds have shade?” begins one parent’s post on r/Mommit. “My city has recently been considering removing some playgrounds that aren’t used much in the summer. Yeah, they don’t use them in the summer because you can make fried eggs on the slide! Buy some shade or overhead cover, or at least plant a tree near the equipment, something! I don’t understand why shade is not a priority at all in a playground that has a lot of metal play equipment.”
“I say this all the time. A new park/splash pad was built around my house. I looked up how much it cost…over $2 million. Couldn’t they have spent that money on shade?” one commenter replied.
“Ugh, that’s infuriating!!” wrote another. “We had to do a fundraiser to cover part of our elementary school playground because we didn’t have the budget for it in our new school building! In Florida!!!”
In a similar post titled “Will we finally have a playground with proper shade?” another parent commented that yes, even in very hot states, shade seems to be an afterthought in the minds of playground designers.
“We’re in Tucson and I whine about this all the time. Some parks have crazy slides that are never in the shade!! It’s hotter than the devil’s butthole almost all year round. I don’t understand.”
Of course, lack of shade isn’t the only thing parents have to deal with in public playgrounds. In fact, some new facilities are apparently being built in such a way that child care providers cannot even see where their children are.
“We have a new playground that opened last year and they have three huge artificial hills in the middle of the playground, so you can’t see the kids on one side and vice versa,” one parent wrote. You’ll probably see a bunch of parents sitting on a hill, nervously looking around like meerkats.
And of course, there are the characteristic random openings on the sides of the play equipment, which makes no sense at all considering they are always part of the jungle gym two floors above ground. If Reddit is to be believed, kids really are falling off Reddit. It’s not just an intrusive thought that we all have. And there’s a new trend of building playgrounds with metal slides. Not only does it heat up like a frying pan in the sun, but it’s also so incredibly smooth that it’s literally become a meme.
As one mother pointed out, a surprising number of playgrounds have no fences, or at least no legitimate fences at all to actually contain human children. “As a parent of a runner, I would request that a fence be installed. Not something like a wooden post and a few boards or three feet of grass in front of the parking lot (where no one drives the speed limit in the first place). Something that is actually fenced in with some kind of latch. What on earth are city planners thinking about families on playgrounds?”
But deep within the comments, one mother’s call to action stands out.
“In my area, most public playgrounds have a public comment period during the design phase. If your park district or municipality has an email list, join it. Specifically, see if there is a planning department email list. I was able to provide comments on recent playground renovations, and I was thrilled that they incorporated one of my requests into the final design.”
Yes, across the country, we all seem to be struggling with some aspects of our local playgrounds that are being built with absolutely no regard for the peace, comfort and safety of our families. This is pretty discouraging when you’re literally building a place that’s explicitly family-friendly. But when you reach out to local officials about your concerns during planning (and afterwards!), you may be surprised at how eager they are to listen. Maybe it’s time to email the city parks department about the broken latch on the gate at your local playground…
So, who should you call to build your coffee shop or wine bar? in line playground?
