Home

The great American swing set is teetering

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

Posted 3/19/2006

The big steel swing set, long a staple for kids in search of high-flying thrills or leisurely daydreams with best friends, is disappearing from the American playground.

Along with other types of equipment, such as stratospheric slides and Batman-type sliding poles, tall swing sets are being replaced by safer and more cost-effective, less-thrilling modern alternatives.

"It's all gone by the wayside," says Mark Peterson, superintendent of parks in Plymouth, Minn. "Unfortunately, from a thrill factor, the big tall swings are gone, the big tall slides are gone."

As safety standards trickled down over the past 25 years, schools, cities and day care centers have been quietly replacing swing sets with all-in-one climbing structures that child-development experts say promote both physical fitness and social skills.

Head out to a playground today, on this first day of spring, and you might notice: Though swing sets still exist, there are fewer each year. Only 57% of school playgrounds and 50% of child care centers had swings in 2004, though they still held sway in public parks — 79% had them, says the National Program for Playground Safety, down from 95% four years earlier.

And though smaller swing sets still dot backyard lots, the glorious 16-foot models and their cousins, the 16-foot slides that generations of kids grew up loving and fearing, are vanishing. Disappearing as well: traditional seesaws, sandboxes and those metal merry-go-rounds from which you tried to throw your little brother. (Somehow he always hung on!)

Though 94% of playgrounds had slides in 2004, only 13% had seesaws, and your little brother's smiling now: Only 7% of playgrounds had merry-go-rounds.

Such thrills are now replaced by cooperative play, climbing challenges and upper-body strength. The new buzzword? Brachiating, or hand-to-hand travel on what used to be called monkey bars (now "horizontal ladders").

Safety advocates say it's wise to ditch the outdated, unsafe equipment, but even equipment makers say swing sets stand apart.

"It's kind of a shame that they're going away," says Ann Marie Spencer of Game Time, an Alabama manufacturer that still makes them — though none over 8 feet tall.

The original ab machines, swing sets forced you to work those stomach muscles to gain altitude. And, Spencer says, whoever thinks they don't promote cooperation never heard best friends say, "If you push me, I'll push you."

But in many cities, both space and cash are at a premium, and swing sets take up both.

Scott Burton, a St. Petersburg, Fla., consultant and president of Safety Play Inc., says schools and cities could keep swings if they'd replace hard seats with soft straps.

"Everybody's afraid of being litigated against," he says. "They just tear it out and don't replace it."

Actually, swing sets may be safer than other equipment. A Lancet study in the United Kingdom in 1997 found that the risk of injuries in falls from monkey bars was seven times that of swings or slides.

But U.S. playground safety standards, first proposed in 1981 and widely adopted in the 1990s, led local governments to balk at swing sets. The standards call for costly new playground surfacing — instead of simply burying four poles and scattering a bit of gravel, builders are urged to resurface beneath swings to cushion falls.

"Fifteen or 20 years ago, you could buy a swing set and plop it in a piece of ground and not think much about it," says Steve King, founder of Landscape Structures Inc. Now a 16-foot-tall swing set requires 32 feet of surfacing, both back and front. What was once a bargain at $800 is less so when the rubber "impact attenuating" surfacing costs $4,000.

"We have dumbed down and sanitized our playgrounds — especially public playgrounds — to a point where they don't hold (kids') interest as long," King says.

But a few advocates say it doesn't have to be that way.

Donna Thompson, executive director of the National Program for Playground Safety, says many injuries occur because kids aren't supervised or are playing on outdated equipment. "Some of the playground equipment that's out there has been there for 50 years."

Just ask Judi Kidd. In 1994, her son Andrew, 5, fell 9 feet from a climbing structure. He suffered a concussion, dislocated his jaw, broke four teeth and split his chin "all the way around his jawline."

Five years of plastic surgery followed, and Andrew, now 17, is something of a playground-safety celebrity. But his mother doesn't recommend pulling up swing sets.

"Part of a child's work is their play," she says. "They have to do it."

Parents simply need to learn how to supervise their kids, she says. That includes knowing how to spot unsafe equipment. As she learned, the structure that Andrew fell from had been recalled and mothballed in 1979, but workers unknowingly reinstalled it in 1990.

And those padding standards make sense, she says. Andrew "landed on nice, hard Indiana clay, which is very close to concrete."

 Home