KABOOM Play Facilitator at the ready Beyond Active Play – The value of cohort flow through play I’ve devoted six decades to creating active play systems. The most recent project has been exploring augmented reality to provide ways to expand the benefits of active play. Two things have motivated me to pivot in a new direction. First, the bruhaha about the metaverse and all that silliness that has ensued makes working on augmented reality problematic. But more than that, the current situation of the children displaced by the invasion of Ukraine has compelled me to look at ways to help ease the t ..read more

Over the past three months, I have been working diligently to get large-scale loose part play systems to children displaced by the invasion of Ukraine. It turns out this is extremely difficult. Here’s why, Children’s right to play is often given lower priority than providing food, shelter, and medicines, even though play is crucial to children’s well-being, development, health, and survival in crisis circumstances. Play helps refugee children who have experienced bereavement, violence, abuse, or exploitation to overcome emotional pain and regain control over their lives. Children use play to ..read more

Photo copyright: powershot This is a blog, not a book, so I won’t go into all the historical precedents that set the stage for the loss of childhood that started at the end of WWII. Instead, I will lay out the forces, point to more in-depth sources, and suggest ways to protect childhood. Commercialized Education The imposition of top-down education instead of bottom-up learning has become so ingrained and institutionalized that savvy parents turn to private or homeschooling. Homework in the elementary grades, which was nonexistent in the ’60s, has become ubiquitous and onerous, and testi ..read more

The first playstructure to be designed to the standards recommended in this blog One of the challenges when consulting a school on their new playground is that we ask the parents and children what they would like to include. The problem is that this cohort has little understanding of the very different roles playgrounds have in different venues. The tendency is to select events that are more suitable for parks than schools, like high slides. Everyone agrees that they would like the playstructure to have lots of challenges. However, if by challenge, we mean engagement, then we must recognize th ..read more

A few nights ago, I met the girl of my dreams. It was just as they say. Our eyes locked, and no words were needed. Our connection was only for a few moments. But we knew that was enough, and then she was gone. One of the results of this pandemic lockdown has meant a lot more time to sleep and, perchance, to dream. The encounter cited above was one such dream, and it had a profound impact. For in that dream, I realized that I was just five years old. In most of my dreams, I’m middle age, not my true age of 80. So it was stunning to reinhabit my earliest self. However, as I contemplated this fu ..read more

KIds In – Money Out While the frog cooking in a slowly heating pot is a myth, the fact of normalization is all too real. For children, everything that surrounds them is “normal.” That’s why as a culture, we abhor things like child abuse. Adults are supposed to protect kids because of this inherent vulnerability. But what if adults, too, have become blunted to things that exploit kids. It’s hard to tell when it became OK to market to children to make sales to adults, but it goes a long way back. Today, it is an advertising core practice. If it was just product marketing, this pernicious habit c ..read more

City News Service, Jaime Chambers Look. You have to have your head in the sand if you don’t see the increase in natural disasters. But unfortunately, we only have ten years to start to reverse the damage to our environment. While most people are fixated on CO2, the problems are everywhere and equally complex and difficult. What does the climate catastrophe have to do with playgrounds? First, let’s lay out the facts. When communities are hit with disasters, how do they adjust their budgets? Logically they prioritize recovery projects. Once those are brought under control, communities adjus ..read more

Pandering. That’s all this is—instant gratification for parent maleficence. Look how happy she is. Oh, and she loves the parrot and little Froggie. And there are five other toys she can play with. I can’t wait to get it home. A 10-second search on “are baby jumpers good for child development” turns up this … “Baby jumpers are fun, but they are not beneficial in any way. In fact, they promote movement that is detrimental to the motor skills your baby needs to be developing, according to Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. First of all, babies aren’t mature enough to control their own body m ..read more

Recently, I’ve been a member of a play advocates cohort, discussing ways to promote play-based learning, intrinsic play, true play, self-directed play, or … Since we are all in agreement about the essential need for more play, it is astounding that we can’t agree on the words to use for what exactly we are promoting. I suspect that our advocacy comes from our different professional orientations. Those of us, who are primarily playworkers or teachers, use different ways of talking about play than scholars. Those who are designers have yet another way to talk about our work. The image above was ..read more

What do say Bev…want to head out to the playground? A few days ago, I posted an article I wrote in 1997 about the “wired” child. In it, I site the trends that were emerging that would increasingly make public playgrounds irrelevant. The most impactful prediction was the rise of virtual reality as intelligence spreads from the computer and enters the environment via the internet of things (IoT). The earliest manifestations of these trends were the X-Games that had launched when I was writing that piece. I took my own advice and started BOLDR, a range of rock-climbing products for parks. What wa ..read more