Comparative Playground-ology

The playground at Vermezo park in Budapest.

Thanks to daylight savings time, playground season seems to have come to an end. While the weather during the day is still nice enough that we can make a trip every once in awhile, no more automatically passing some time after school at the playground at Honved ter or the one outside our apartment building. Too dark.

Having young children necessarily means that you become a theorist about playground design. Especially if you aren't chatting with other parents, you need to be just attentive enough to make sure your kid doesn't go tumbling off something, which gives you a narrow range of things to think about. You try to figure out the right balance between engaging and overwhelming, between variety and safety.

In the States, playground design has come quite a ways since I was a kid. Our regular haunt is the one at Williamstown Elementary School, a new, plastic, multi-function structure that is pretty popular. It is in appealing, muted colors, has no sharp edges, and is made of lots of recycled materials, as a sign moralistically reminds you. But it is a place whose functions are very narrowly proscribed -- this is the slide, these are the monkey bars, etc. I don't think kids really like that -- after all, no self-respecting preschooler has ever met a slide and didn't want to skip climbing the ladder and just clamber up the downward part. And at the same time, the structure is a little overwhelming. It commands kids' attention.

In Moscow, playground equipment is ubiquitous and primitive. Rusty slides, unnervingly fast carousels, splintering see-saws. Kids seem to treat them as stage props in their little lives, occasionally useful for a few minutes of fun but by no means the main attraction.

In Budapest, we've met another category of thing. Most playgrounds here have these strange contraptions, which I believe are made by the same company, that are somewhat puzzling at first glance. They are often sets of reinforced ropes, parallelogram-shaped plastic platforms, sliding handles and trolleys. Some come to look like meat racks, others like commando training equipment. They seem almost dangerous until you watch kids grapple with them and realize how challenging and forgiving they are. 

This has been quite enough to keep our daughter quite engaged. She is particularly thrilled with this kind of rope bridge that frightened her at first. We've enjoyed them, but I already heard one of our friends who lives here complain that all the playgrounds have the same stuff on them...