Adventure Playgrounds

Early in April, 2001, The Denver Post printed an article by Mark Obmascik about the "growing wimpiness of modern playgrounds," contrasting American attitudes with the Japanese. Then, in TIME Magazine of April 30, 2001, they spent a goodly number of pages on the subject of childhood, including a piece entitled "The Quest for a Superkid." Obviously, something is bubbling near the top of the social unconscious about some stupid things we're doing to our posterity.

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Sending your child out to play is serious business. Ask any parent who's done it, then heard a cry that wraps primitive fear around his stomach like a hungry python. Most of the time, it turns out to be nothing, but sometimes — oh, the curse of "sometimes" — it's worse, even much, much worse. No wonder we hesitate, especially these days when the media touts every mugger & child-molester far out of proportion to the actual risk.

But we do our children a disservice by coddling them short-term and neglecting them long-term, very much in parallel with Corporate America's short-sighted attitudes toward profits versus customer satisfaction. We are, in effect, sheltering our children from life itself.

I've shared in the raising of four children, two of my own & two of my wife's, so I don't speak lightly about this issue. I've encouraged each of those precious charges to try new things while allowing failure, but nothing too severe. Of course, the definition of "too severe" changed as the children grew in age and capability until, too soon, I could do nothing but give love, provide sanctuary if needed, and offer advice when (and if ever) asked for. So it's been since time immemorial. For all our advances, we should acknowledge that some rules don't change.

An aside: Oddly, many of the same people who don't want to risk their children's knees at playgrounds also carry them around in safety seats inside SUVs, all "safe & sound." Yet they ignore the impact of these same vehicles — & many other aspects of their consuming lifestyles — on our ecosphere, possibly condemning these same children — & their children — to long-term misery if the Greenhouse Effect does indeed bring worse weather, inundated coastlines, spreading populations of tropical insects & the diseases they carry, &c. Continuing the example these parents learn at work, in the corporate "salt-mines."

The playground, whether the informality of a backyard or a wealth of pre-fab forts & bridges, provides the arena for the earliest of these adventures. The danger may be higher because the kids are new to themselves & to this world, but the rewards are even greater. These moments, as Lady Allen of Hurtwood says, enable "[c]hildren [to] come to terms with the world, wrestle with their picture of it, and reform these pictures constantly, through those adventures of imagination we call play."

Exactly! When I found this quote in the "Adventure Playground" pattern in A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander & the Center for Environmental Structure at UC Berkley, I added to my already considerable respect for the insight into humanity provided by this work, along with its companion A Timeless Way of Building. Adventure Playgrounds are places "with raw materials of all kinds -- nets, boxes, barrels, trees, ropes, simple tools, frames, grass, and water -- where children can create and recreate playgrounds of their own." Not soft, cushiony, prefab places that rob imagination, but enable it. I recognized that this pattern had to play a significant role in my book Seeds of Disaster.

My main protagonist Phoebe leads the delivery of public- safety services to a city of more than a million people; she's more a project manager (called a "tactician" in the book's society) than a chief of police, though people do call her that. I didn't want Phoebe to rise to this level of re- sponsibility by the more familiar channels of police work or even fire fighting, so I built a career for her in the third branch of service, counseling. I also needed some incident in her past that turned Phoebe into a workoholic, devoting all of her time & considerable personal resources to the job, something to do with a failed relationship.

A failed love affair can do this to a person better than most anything else. Easy to imagine the affair (Phoebe is, after all, an attractive, intelligent woman. But how to end it tragically? Adventure Playgrounds, like my own philosophy of child-rearing above, do entail risk. In fact, Phoebe notes in Chapter 3 that risk was a necessary part of challenge. Each tactician trained to manage these risks appropriately, predicated on the age and skill of the children involved.

Actually, I extended CES' pattern when I encountered the opinion of Stephen Talbott, author of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in our Midst and editor of Netfuture. He advised that we should be giving our children "a broad-based education in the human and physical worlds," something the right kind of playgrounds do very well. Talbott, along with educational psycho- logist Jane Healy and the Austrian child-development specialist Rudolf Steiner, try to dissuade us from the early introduction of computers in schools. Phoebe's society is extremely automated, yet they strive to place their humanity above their technology, so they obviously would stress their children's physical & social development before allowing them to enter the virtual realm — & its conceptual, symbolic, & abstract thinking — that underlies adult life on the planet.

Simple enough then: give Phoebe's lover a child, depressed by the loss of his mother, put that despondent child into Phoebe's playground during off-hours, put Phoebe into the arms of her lover when the child dies, et voilà: a guilt-ridden over-achiever always striving to mother-hen her whole city.

Such manipulation may lie at the heart of a convincing tale, but it also connects those characters to the very real concerns of their contemporary audience. How do we balance the tactical safety of our own children with the strategic safety of our race? James White, in The Dream Millennium, gives a glimpse of a sapient race who cultivate the play of their children as an investment in their own future. Was he really talking about us, as so many sf authors do? Probably. We'd do well to take his observation to heart.

Keywords: playground, Corporate America, short-sighted, Netfuture, Stephen Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute, Christopher Alexander, the Center for Environmental Structure, A Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, Jane Healy, Austrian, child-development,  Rudolf Steiner, SUV, Greenhouse Effect, project manager, James White, The Dream Millennium