The hammering and the whirring of electric saws finally ended and we were left the last one standing. Our neighbors erected a climb, slide and swing structure making my family the lone hold-out in building our children personal playgrounds. Every other family on our cul de sac has some sort of play structure in their backyard, except for one family of renters.
This seems crazy to me because we are a block away from a park where there is a playground. Admittedly, this Tot Lot, as it’s called, is not the greatest, but it suits the needs of young children just fine. It has two slides, a bridge, a pole, climbing bars and a round of swing-sets. Last year the city constructed a shade pavilion making it much more accessible during the searing summer months. Nothing in our neighbors’ yards are terribly impressive and they are all smaller than the public playground. I understand building something if you live far away from a park, because it’s a pain to have to load the kids and drive every time you want to them to play outside. Still, we are within sneezing distance of slides, so I wonder why everyone seems to need their own?
I suspect it’s more our our consumerist culture sneaking into parenting: I love my child, so I’ll give him the world. The trouble is, kids don’t want the world. They want to play. With friends. After the initial two days of newness play, each of these structures has been abandoned. Only when a gaggle of kids come over for a birthday party do they get any use. The rest of the year they look like the glut of empty condos littering downtown Miami: lovely structures waiting to be filled with people who aren’t coming.
Have we forgotten the purpose of play? To us grown-ups it seems like goofing off, but for kids, it’s their job. After breakfast, sometimes even before breakfast, Max rattles off his plans for playing each day. I play trucks, semi-truck, swoosh. I’m gonna cook. I’m gonna paint…. Other than eating and sleeping, it is all he really does. It’s easy to envy his easy-breezy life until I recall that all mammal babies play. It’s a crucial aspect of development where a host of essential skills are practiced to perfection. We see it when lion cubs wrestle or even when a kitten stalks a butterfly. Our human babies are doing the same thing: developing gross motor skills when climbing and fine motor skills when coloring sidewalks with chalk. Children need a variety of play activities so they can develop wholly.
Playgrounds don’t just cater to gross motor skills; it’s not merely about going down the slide. The social skills learned on a playground are just as important. Taking turns, sharing, creating games, negotiating rules, controlling anger and selfishness are all really important for kids to practice daily. Of course children who attend daycare or school get plenty of socialization, but there is another aspect of development that only a public playground can foster: community. Schools divide children by age and daycares reflect similar economic backgrounds. The local playground is for everyone. Little kids learn daring moves from bigger kids. Older kids learn how to be gentle and look out for smaller children. Almost everybody lives right in the neighborhood, so they have a vested interest in keeping it nice. Not only can kids make friends, but moms and dads can connect to other parents who live nearby too.
Our culture is trending towards isolation. Technology has made it easy for people to work from home, but walk into any coffee shop at ten or three o’clock and you will see it filled with workers on laptops and Ipads. Isolation isn’t good for our spirits, which is why these makeshift offices have sprung up. Surely all these workers could make coffee at home as easily as they could work from home, but they need something else: the energy of other people. Kids need that too. That’s why even a top-of-the-line personal playground isn’t as much fun as a small one filled with other children. We are humans. We are social creatures and we need one another. It’s good to develop skills of independence, but it’s a mistake not to recognize our interdependence as well.
These are all classic Max shots. (Oh, how he’s grown!) Of course he’s alone in these pictures which might not make sense to pair with this article, but I won’t post pictures of other people’s children on the Internet. My favorite is the close up of his face. That was the grin from coming down the slide. I can’t believe I caught it.
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