Get out your engineers, lawyers and psychologists everyone—its time to go to the playground!  Similar to many childhood experiences, the modern playground as a concept is now the place to share “best practices,” “conflict resolution techniques,” and equipment design methods so that kids cannot get hurt.  For those who want to research and plan their playground instead of just looking for a ball and an open field, there seems to be a whole industry dedicated to playground design and management for you to tap into.  Can you believe it?

Its amazing what you can find executing random web searches.  My wife bought a book recently which dedicated some pages to playground etiquette.  I thought it was interesting that some author devoted a section of a book to the topic, so I did a quick search.  The increased emphasis on safety and rules (and I believe perhaps litigation avoidance?) was recently highlighted in the Wichita Eagle.

I noticed that the article cited the etiquette suggestions as being provided by the National Program for Playground Safety, run by the University of Iowa, so I went to that site.

From the site there’s more to research still with many useful links.  Among the more entertaining I found that: There is at least one magazine devoted to playgrounds.  There is a program (business?) out there called Peaceful Playgrounds which helps playground designers with playground design.  There are various playground equipment manufacturers who are listed on the National Program for Playground Safety’s site, which claims to accept advertisements.

All this is enough to make going to the playground seem quite the daunting task.  While I think that things like safer play equipment and “safe fall” areas are a good idea, I hope we aren’t taking the fun - and unstructured learning - out of being a kid.