Treadly and Me

Now here's something that really, really gets up my nose: KATU 2 in Portland reports that school districts in Oregon are removing playground equipment like swings and see-saws and even banning the game of tag - because of the risk of injury:

Today, kids find themselves grounded, victims of a culture of fear and injury litigation.

A growing number of school districts are going so far as to ban the game of tag and are even posting signs that read "no running on the playground."

Is there real danger on the modern playground?

Safety advocates say yes and want to eliminate it.

Their first target: swing sets.

They've convinced Portland Public Schools to remove all swings from elementary schools playgrounds.

How incredibly sad. But this ludicrous comment made me laugh out loud:

In Salem, an elementary education director says "we don't encourage the game of tag because it encourages fights."

What the …? What is this bozo thinking? Kids can and will fight about anything, anywhere, anytime. They don't need the pretext of a game of tag to initiate conflict. On the contrary, I'd say running around trying to catch each other is a terrific way for kids to avoid fights.

Lies, damn lies, and complete ignorance

This very idea is so ridiculous that common sense alone should have been enough to dismiss it. Evidently not.

And then, toward the end of the story, we get to some statistics:

National statistics indicate 34 percent of kids are overweight, with obesity projected to be nearly 50 percent in the year 2010.

But safety advocates point to different numbers, saying playground accidents cause 200,000 injuries nationwide each year, and 17 deaths.

Doing the numbers

But those numbers are actually quite hard to compare, so let's tabulate it using some data scraped together off the web (so they're going to be reliable, aren't they?) about the USA on demographics, playground injuries, obesity, and motor vehicle accidents:

	Percentage	Number
Americans aged 0-14 years (2006)	100%	60,000,000	[1]
Americans aged 6-11 who are overweight (2000?)	30.3%	~7,000,000	[2]
Americans aged 6-11 who are obese (2000?)	15.3%	~3,500,000	[2]
Americans aged 0-14 seriously injured in motor vehicle accidents (2003)	0.42%	253,000
Serious injuries due to all playground accidents (1999)	0.34% [3]	205,850
Serious injuries due to public playground accidents (1999)	0.26% [3]	156,040
Americans aged 0-14 killed in motor vehicle accidents (2003)	0.0043%	2 136
Americans aged 0-14 killed in all playground accidents (2000)	0.00003%	17	[4]
Americans aged 0-14 killed in public playground accidents (2000)	0.000008%	5	[4]

[1] In round figures.

[2] A guesstimate, calculated for 6-11 years assuming population numbers are evenly spread across 0-14 years.

[3] Assuming one child per serious accident and that the victims would almost always be in the 0-14 years range.

[4] Actually 147 recorded deaths for the entire period of January 1990 to August 2000, which is close enough to the annual figure quoted in the news story.

Analysis

OK, OK - these numbers are so full of holes you could drive a truck through them. The actual numbers are almost certainly dead wrong but they're good enough to make some rough-and-ready comparisons.

We observe that American children are:

• about as likely to be injured in a playground accident as they are to be injured in a car accident.
• twice as likely to be accidentally killed on playground equipment at home than on public playground equipment.
• over 100 times more likely to be killed in a car accident than in a playground accident.
• over 400 times more likely to be killed in a car accident than in an accident at a public playground.
• about 13 times more likely to be obese than killed or injured in a playground accident in any given year. (Hmm, that's a particularly dodgy one - I'm not sure you can really compare these two in this way, given that an accident is a single event in time and obesity is an ongoing state).

A sense of proportion

Before I go too much further, let me say that any child killed or seriously injured is one too many. There must be no worse suffering than to see your own child seriously hurt.

But kids sometimes do get hurt at the playground. Then again they also sometimes get hurt in cars. Come to that, obesity ain't much fun either with health effects that include:

• asthma
• type 2 diabetes
• hypertension
• orthopaedic complications
• psycho-social effects & stigma
• sleep apnoea

However cars are far more deadly than playgrounds. And in a roundabout way, obesity is more deadly than playgrounds too: the criteria for defining obesity "identifies children that are very likely to have obesity persist into adulthood", with all the associated health and life-threatening problems that arise from obesity in adulthood.

So, is there really real danger on the modern playground? Sure. But in comparison to other potential causes of injury and death, public playgrounds are relatively benign.

The school districts that are clamping down on school playground equipment have made a fundamentally stupid and ignorant decision, and they are doing a gross disservice to their students. Surely it is far better to identify and manage the risks associated with playgrounds than to just take the bolt cutters to the swings?

Risk management

The big risks are falls and strangulation. In the USA, between 1990 and 2000, falls accounted for 79% of serious playground injuries and 21% of playground deaths. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends installation of appropriate protective surfaces under playground equipment. And it's probably an impossibility, but kids shouldn't be allowed to climb up slides or descend slides head first.

More than half of playground deaths were caused by accidental hangings (this section of the CPSC report in particular does not make for pleasant reading):

Most of the entanglements involved items tied to the equipment, tied around the child's neck, or both. Ropes, jump ropes, shoestrings, cords, sashes, and leashes were among the items involved in these types of incidents.

As were bike helmets in two cases. Clearly these sort of items and playground equipment just don't mix, but:

These incidents illustrate that children can be unaware of the inherent dangers of using the playground equipment in conjunction with objects that are not part of the structure.

Recommendation? Check what kids are wearing and don't let them use anything on or near playground equipment that could present a strangulation hazard.

Generation Duh

A little while ago I read a mini-review of a book called XYZ: The new rules of generational warfare by Michael Grose. Now I'm not a big fan of this tendency to pigeon-hole people into "Generation <insert favourite letter here>" market segments (I know I've certainly never identified with anything that my cohort is supposed to be and do) but something about this struck a chord for me:

Generation Z (born after 1991) … is a bubble-wrapped collection of kids: trapped inside the safe confines of the home, squeaky clean, organised to within an inch of their lives.

Grose believes these kids will find it difficult to withstand the rigours of the workforce - that they may be less resilient as employees.

… "These kids are risk-adverse, they're not great problem-solvers, they're not resourceful," he says

It rings true, doesn't it? Kids that are kept at home more, taxied everywhere in enourmous SUVs, not even allowed to risk a grazed knee at the playground - these are kids that are missing out on something: their own childhood.

Comments

pedaller 11 May 2006

Treadly, I couldn't agree more, kids today are missing out on important parts of their own childhood. Children need to learn to take risks, and learn that each risk comes with a set of consequences, and the time that children learn this is during play. I find it absolutely amazing that there is a growing body of literature in child behaviour and psychology stressing the importance of play at the same time as "authorities" are restricting play equipment.

Having said that, kids are ingenious in what they consider play equipment to be, a cardboard box the toy came in becomes a pirate ship, space ship, car, bus, train, house, etc, a fence is just a piece of play equipment designed to be climbed, kitchen shelves become steps to climb, etc, etc. Everytime we limit access to these we also discourage kids from using their imagination and learning about risk and consequence.

And we also seem to forget that kids' injuries are worn like a badge of honour, often for life. I still wear the scars of a fall off a slippery dip when I was about 10 years old and convinced I could fly. While my parents thought it just about the dumbest thing I had ever done, I learnt that I can't fly, that gravity pulls things to the ground, and that it hurts if you fall from a great height. I was the hero of the playground for some time as I had to tell the story over and over and answer questions about what it was like, so I learnt a lot about story telling, interacting with other people, and possibly others learnt from my mistake and didn't repeat it.

Every time a kid breaks an arm or a leg they learn a valuable lesson in risk and consequece, but they also learn a lot about interacting with other people as they tell stories and get the cast signed.

As for driving kids everywhere, how are they supposed to learn any road sense at all if they are never let out to walk themselves?