Students play at a playground at a public school in Toronto.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Amberly McAteer is a writer in Toronto, and a former editor in the Opinion section at The Globe and Mail.
It’s a scene that has played out dozens of times this summer: My husband pushes our two-year-old daughter on the swing at our local park, in sync with all the other dads. They all stand behind their vaguely entertained kids, stare out into the abyss, and say nothing. Meanwhile I try, and fail, to have a basic conversation with another mom while my older daughter is climbing up a slide.
“How old is she? Is she in camp? Mine goes to a – " before we are running in opposite directions. Her son has gone into the forbidden wooded area behind the playground, and my four-year-old has climbed to the top of the impossibly high jungle-gym thing and is standing with one foot out of the curiously large gap at the top.
I try to stifle my panic, but a “Be careful!” escapes, as I position myself underneath her potential fall zone and brace for catching 35 pounds. Both kids then go down the slide a few times, before we all just kind of shrug and go home.
We’re lucky to live in a neighbourhood in west Toronto that is rife with parks and playgrounds – six within a 10-minute walk – and all given nicknames by my kids based on their visual themes: the dinosaur park, the froggy park, the choo-choo train park. The options are seemingly endless. But while all sound great on paper, all are extremely similar, and they manage to engage my kids independently for about three minutes until I’m inevitably pulled in to entertain them with a make-believe game. (Our current favourite is “coffee shop lady,” where my two girls take my order for imaginary drinks and food, and I pay with wood chips off the ground. They then take my money and run, and I chase after them, yelling, “Give me my cookies.”)
As I’m running after them, a thought always crosses my mind: Shouldn’t our playgrounds be better than this?
The mediocrity of these spaces is not for a lack of trying. In Toronto, the Playground Enhancement Program spends millions identifying and overhauling 22 of its nearly 800 existing playgrounds every year, tearing down old wooden structures and sandboxes to replace them with modern builds made of plastic and metal. The aforementioned “froggy park” in my neighbourhood, the Queens Avenue Parkette, was one such chosen space. It got its theme during a revamp in 2022, and lime-green amphibians now surround the stairs leading up to the slide – which is too hot to touch most of July and August – which sits next to a strange car-dashboard structure, in the shape of a frog, obviously. I’m convinced no one’s touched it since its arrival.
In Vancouver, the city’s recreation department currently lists 13 playgrounds identified for a makeover, and states that the overhauls “look ahead 10 to 15 years or beyond.” Yet their new futuristic playgrounds don’t sound much different than current offerings: They promise rubber surfacing, plastic play structures, swings, slides, picnic tables. Snooze.
A young girl on a climbing apparatus in a playground in Montreal, on May 30, 2020.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
In fact, the common North American playground hasn’t evolved much since its inception in the late 1800s. Originally conceived as a way to get children to stop playing in the literal streets of poor working-class areas, the playground soon became a social-status symbol – and maybe the most consistent, unchanging facet of community design over the past evolution-heavy century. If you don’t look too closely at 100-year-old photographs, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were relatively current: swing sets, see-saws, climbing structures and that mysterious pole no one ever knows what to do with.
Canada’s first public playground was opened in Saint John in 1908, and the push to build similar kid-dedicated outdoor spaces in Regina, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Hamilton, Toronto and Montreal sparked the Playground Movement in this country. That campaign was led predominantly by the National Council of Women, which advocated for spaces that would let kids be kids (instead of miniature workers in an industrial society) and argued that playgrounds improved social and physical well-being in crowded cities.
It was a revolutionary idea for the time. But today, we know so much more about how children play, and what creates a happy child. And while most North American playgrounds are still stuck decades in the past, Scandinavian countries – as usual – seem to have things figured out. As any mom on social media would tell you, Copenhagen, with its off-the-charts happiness index, affordable daycare, luxe baby cafés, no-fee public health care and tuition-free universities, seems like a mecca for a wonderful family life – and the city’s playgrounds look like they’re out of a dream.
Ellie Owens, an American mom who lives in Copenhagen with three kids under five years old, has amassed a huge social-media following by creating videos of the city’s unusual playgrounds and their unique elements. In one, children stop and go on tiny, city-provided bicycles in a pretend town, complete with traffic lights; in another, they slide down a massive octopus’s arms; in a third, kids climb and balance and hang off a giant plane structure, with no obvious safety measures in sight. All the spaces seem to have one thing in common: chilled-out parents, watching their kids from a distance with a coffee or glass of wine in hand from the designated café, a hallmark of Copenhagen playgrounds. (A real-life coffee-shop lady at the playground? I am stunned.)
A children's playground in Farup Sommerland, in Nordjylland, Denmark.Peter Bischoff/Getty Images
The parents are happier, the children have more confidence – and “it is entirely common sense,” Ms. Owens tells me on a call as her kids climb on “the pirate playground,” an actual giant ship that her kids go into and hang off the sails. When I hear a shriek, I ask if she has to go; no, she says, that was a squeal of joy – and there’s city-employed staff there keeping an extra eye out.
Ms. Owens tells me that on North American playgrounds, she was caught up in “hover culture.” I’d never heard the term, but I immediately understood. “I used to feel this pressure to look like I was a good mom to the other parents – so I’d hover more closely to my kids, and they’d hover more closely to theirs. I never wanted to appear like I wasn’t extremely concerned about my toddlers’ safety.”
What’s so glaringly missing from my playground monotony in Toronto – and it’s not just the wine – is that parents aren’t given a space to relax, and so we don’t. And obviously, when kids are given more independence on the playground – and parents aren’t constantly chasing after them – they gain more confidence and have a better time.
But this dynamic is not possible without the right environment, Adam Bienenstock tells me. As the owner of Canada’s biggest natural-playground company, Mr. Bienenstock lives and breathes children’s outdoor recreation and development. His team, based in Hamilton, has created more than 4,000 natural playgrounds in Canada and the United States; think giant logs, boulders, real grass and natural, curated spaces for imaginative play. He might hate the status-quo playground more than I do. “They have made something solely for the minority of kids – the most fit, the most active kids, the king-of-the-castle types, and these are the ones who least need physical activity,” he says, adding that the standard playground focuses on gross motor skills – and nothing else.
What’s more, he says, these efforts to bubble-wrap these spaces aren’t even really working. He points to study after study that should be essential reading for city playground designers. And recent research out of Winnipeg is especially compelling; hospital rates were 39 times higher on plastic and metal structures than in an equally risky natural environment, he tells me. “The more engaged a child’s senses are, the more likely they are to assess risk and avoid injury,” he says. What frustrates him the most – and there are a lot of things – is that the standard playground space by and large excludes children with sensory-integration issues, such as those on the autism spectrum. “We are not giving these children any space to play and explore with their senses.”
Aggressive, bullying behaviour also nearly disappears in outdoor, natural play. He says that for an average eight-year-old child, the “roam rate” – the physical distance away from their parent – is about 150 metres; decades ago, it was exponentially higher. “So all of these things that kids needed to be healthy – empathy, collaboration, self-reliance – we now need to get them these things on a playground,” he says. “People who manage play structures do not realize that they are now offering a fundamental health care need.”
One of Mr. Bienenstock’s projects – a sprawling natural playground in the town of Normal, Ill. – was featured in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, a New York Times bestseller that sounds the alarm against dangerous, detrimental social-media use – something I think of often, as a mom of two young girls – and offers answers to restoring meaningful childhood. Among his solutions are playgrounds like the one in Normal, which get kids outside, let their imagination run wild, and offer risk and independence in the natural environment, with all of their senses engaged.
After my call with Mr. Bienenstock, my youngest daughter, as if she overheard my conversation, requests a trip to the playground – on a 30-degree morning in late July. She climbs up the 12-foot plastic structure, sits down at the top and then touches the slide – “Too hot, mama! I’m stuck!” – and soon, I’m on my way up too, jamming myself into the structure to retrieve her. I hear Mr. Bienenstock in my head: “Designers of these silly things should be forced to crawl around in them.” The rubber surfaces, the plastic tunnels and the hot metal bars seem even more potently offensive up close.
By the time I reach my daughter, we’re both sweaty and angry, so I take her to relax under the oak trees nearby. We play hide-and-seek in the shade, climb across a few logs, pick clover and tear up some grass in our hands. She collects a bouquet of leaves to bring home. Before I know it, we’ve been there for an hour.
The answer to finding the dynamic I’ve been missing – engaged, curious kid with a calm, observing parent – has been literally in my hands and under my feet. If our playgrounds can’t evolve beyond boring slides and swings and dangerous plastic towers, we’ll play in a new way – or, more accurately, the oldest way.
My daughter looks up at me and exclaims, in her little toddler voice: “This is funnnnnn.”