Are Playgrounds Too Safe? Why Anthropologists Say Children Need to Play

Raise your hand if you’ve ever fallen off the monkey bars and suffered more than just your pride.

It’s almost a childhood rite of passage. You climb, you swing, you push yourself, you miss, you cry. Maybe you dust yourself off and limp back to the playground. Or maybe you needed a trip to the ER to set a bone. (But if you were lucky, the cast came off in time to enjoy swimming in late summer.)

Monkey bars, jungle gyms and playgrounds are synonymous with children’s play, often targeted by risk reduction campaigns, sometimes dismantled due to safety concerns and often redesigned to be as injury-resistant as possible.

But a new report by a team of anthropologists at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., argues that these iconic play structures fulfill a biological need passed down from great apes that may be crucial to children’s development. The authors argue that well-considered efforts to mitigate risk may actually be harming children.

In August, authors wrote in the journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health that primates learn to climb at a young age to find food, protect themselves from predators and sleep in tree branches. It’s no wonder that children have a natural affinity for climbing and exploring.

In other words, they’re called sticks for a reason.

“Climbing is part of us. We’ve been climbing for millions of years,” lead author Luke Fannin, a doctoral candidate in the ecology, evolution, environment and society program at Dartmouth College, told CBC News.

Playgrounds provide kids with the necessary challenge to build confidence, take calculated risks and test boundaries, Fannin said. And while kids sometimes hurt themselves on them, we have to find a delicate balance between statistical risk and biological reward.

“We’re not saying playgrounds shouldn’t be regulated,” Fannin said.

“But we need to make playgrounds as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”

Risk vs. Reward

Childhood injuries remain a major public health concern, according to a 2023 report by the Public Health Agency of Canada. The report, using self-reported data from the 2019 Canadian Child and Youth Health Survey, finds that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death among Canadian children and adolescents.

The most commonly reported injury in children is head injury, the report said, but it also noted that children are more likely to require treatment for sports and physical activity-related injuries than for play-related injuries.

Children can sustain injuries from playground equipment — most commonly broken bones — but they can usually recover fully from those injuries, and the risks are generally low, said Pamela Fuselli, president and CEO of the safety advocacy group Parachute Canada, who was not involved in the anthropological study.

It’s about balance, she said — soft play surfaces and lower play structures have helped reduce injuries over the years, but “we also don’t want to take away play for people of all ages.”

“We need to loosen the reins a little bit,” Fuselli said.

Melanie Quilty, a mother of eight-year-old twins from Kingston, Ont., agrees that security measures have gone too far.

“We need to teach them how to do these dangerous things safely … teach them to be confident and trust their instincts,” said Quilty, who works in health care.

Last year, her son, Conner, fell off the monkey bars at the park and broke his arm. He needed surgery and wore a cast for about eight weeks. But Quilty, 40, says she wasn’t nervous about getting back on the monkey bars once his cast was off — she was more worried he didn’t want to.

“I don’t want him to be afraid all his life,” she said.

What role does modern parenting play?

In January, the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) released new guidelines emphasizing the importance of uninhibited outdoor play for children’s development and physical and mental health in the face of rising obesity, anxiety and behavioral problems.

In its guidelines, CPS argued that children today have fewer opportunities for risky outdoor play, in part because of safety measures that “were designed to prevent all play-related injuries rather than focusing on serious and fatal injuries.”

As Fannin argues, modern parenting anxiety stems from our reluctance to allow children to take risks, despite the developmental benefits.

In the past 100 years, modern parenting has moved from a communal to an individual approach, he said. That puts pressure on parents to keep their children safe, which he describes in the article as a “modern moral imperative.”

As the U.S. surgeon general wrote in a September public health alert about the pressures facing modern parents, parents are constantly inundated with information and comparisons thanks to social media and smartphones.

In other words, if a child is injured in an accident on the other side of the planet, today’s parents are more likely to hear about it. At the same time, today’s parents may worry about judgment if they post a photo of their child in a cast on Instagram.

But in many ways, children have never been physically safer. Crime rates have been falling since the 1990s, when many modern parents were children (and might have had some basic memories of missing children on milk cartons and stranger danger).

There are now regulations in place for car seats, seat belts and bike helmets. You can put AirTag on your child and know where they are at any time.

Are playgrounds too boring?

In its January recommendations, the CPS cited 2011–23 data from the Canadian Hospital Injury Reporting and Prevention Program on the types of injuries sustained during popular childhood activities. The rate of injuries from falls on playground equipment was 4,090 per 100,000 — slightly lower than the rate of injuries from playing soccer.

“Some experts believe that uninteresting play structures are a major cause of playground injuries,” CPS wrote in the report, explaining that overly boring structures can cause children to misuse the equipment and take more risks.

Jungle gyms and pull-up bars date back about 100 years—patented in 1923 and 1924 by American lawyer Sebastian “Ted” Hinton. Even Hinton noted the primate connection in his first patent.

“Climbing is a natural mode of locomotion that the evolutionary predecessors of the human race were designed to practice, and so it is almost perfectly adapted to the needs of children,” he wrote.

Much has changed since the earliest jungle gyms, which were essentially a grid of metal posts. As NPR notes, safety concerns have “softened materials and rounded edges.” Smithsonian Magazine explained that the 1990s saw a rise in “ultrasafe” playgrounds designed to minimize harm.

Fuselli of Parachute Canada says he thinks the focus on safer playgrounds has gone too far. And he knows that sentiment is at odds with injury prevention.

“But everything has risks,” she said. And when you balance the low risk of serious injury on playgrounds with the risks of kids not having fun — like the higher risk of obesity and the risk of harm online — it makes sense, she added.

“You know, a kid walking down the street playing on the playground — the actual risk is greater on the street than anywhere else.”