From "How to Save Outdoor Recess/Build more shade" (The Atlantic).
I find it hard to believe trees were cut down out of fear that children would climb them. Why not just cut off the lower limbs so kids can't climb them?
September 24, 2024
"Playgrounds aren’t shadeless by accident: Many public playgrounds were designed to be treeless."
"In the 1980s, lawsuits over playground injuries made city planners start to see trees not as shade providers but as temptation for tree climbers who could end up with broken arms. Clearing trees in play areas was encouraged... The kids in her class 'wanted to go outside so badly,' [one teacher] told me. But 'after five minutes, their little faces were just beet red,' and they’d huddle, lethargic, under the one tree on the edge of the schoolyard.... If kids do spend August and September recesses indoors, they’ll probably stay in the classroom.... 'They do things like watch movies' during indoor recess...."
From "How to Save Outdoor Recess/Build more shade" (The Atlantic).
From "How to Save Outdoor Recess/Build more shade" (The Atlantic).
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Enterprising young boys don't need lower limbs to climb trees (unless the trunk is particularly thick). You had one yourself. Surely you know this!
As a 1960s recess kid, I don't remember any trees anywhere on our playgrounds. Just large expanses of grass, dirt & asphalt, with all the huge steel climbing stuff that no playground uses any more.
That makes too much sense. Cut that out!
"Why not just cut off the lower limbs so kids can't climb them?"
Was just thinking this. Or fencing. Or barriers on the upper trunk of the tree itself. Raw absolutism when good engineering would've sufficed.
As a 1950's urban kid, I don't remember any trees on the playgrounds. There were plenty of trees in parks and lining the streets, but not in the playgrounds.
Ann said…
“I find it hard to believe trees were cut down out of fear that children would climb them. Why not just cut off the lower limbs so kids can't climb them?”
I dunno about you, but I am strongly in favor of keeping my lower limbs.
Take away their climbing spikes...or just one of them is good enough, really..
Probably more about the clean up. A playground surrounded by trees requires much more maintenance. Plus leaves are slippery and people love to sue when their precious little one slips and breaks a bone.
If you build it, you don't have to grow it. This basic misunderstanding underlies most of our domestic and social dysfunction.
All of our playgrounds were treeless but one playground had a two story 'fort' log structure with a fireman's pole type thing running down the outside. The town planners either didn't get the memo or were trying to cull the herd...
Horrid true story- in middle school they were fixing the asphalt roof. The materials were piled up on the playground but the state said we needed recess so they bussed us to the elementary school for a month. That school had a wide open field with a tall berm structure around the edge to shield surrounding homes from playground noise. My friends and I morbidly joked about how the set up was perfect for snipers. Well...decades later it became that school...
My grade school on the 50s had a nice grove of tall eucalyptus in the middle of the blacktop playground. Nobody climbs those things.
But my other schools were dreadfully barren.
The trees were synbolic of the "burden" that toxic masculinity imposed on feminists who summarily aborted them and built progressive parapets of equity and inclusion in safe spaces. As more girls start climbing, and more boys wear dresses, the green playground will return to favor in liberal climates.
It's plausible that some city planners somewhere, cut down playground trees, but that isn't likely to be why playgrounds don't have trees. It's probably not about the children at all.
Playgrounds generally don't have grass, but have the ground covered with wood chips, sand or something synthetic. Grass wouldn't hold up under the traffic, would be difficult to mow and trimming around the equipment would be laborious.
Trees drop leaves, leaves break down, and the organic material would get mixed in with the ground covering material. That wouldn't look good, and eventually grass and weeds would start growing.
Heh. My elementary school in Alberta was short on trees in 1964, but we 2nd grade boys played with our pocket knives at recess
Maybe someone on the school boards knew a guy in the tree removal business who needed some work.
I get that teachers need a break and recess provides one, but the trend in public schools has been towards fewer adults on the grounds. In Wisconsin, they had a governor once who put more teachers into the schools, and this is a very effective intervention. But, there is no need for teacher licensure, full stop, but also no need for licensed teachers to increase the number of eyes at the school.
But also, tree service is expensive, and those bids go to favored contractors.
Conversely, if you don't grow it, then you don't have to build it.
We had not only trees, but a 10 foot high platform reached by a ladder with a fireman's pole for descent.
In the 1970’s our school didn’t have trees on the playground. There was an asphalt and an expanse of grass. The asphalt was for basketball, dodgeball, tetherball, four square, and stilts. The grass had an open area, the fastest metal slide on earth, monkey bars (high), horizontal bars (lower for flipping and spinning.
Our school didn’t have air conditioning and we were not allowed to stay inside during recess. There were two trees over the lunch tables (which were built by a group of dads).
There were injuries, broken bones and what I now realize were concussions. The head injuries were mostly from doing raised somersaults using the vertical bars supporting the slide 2 or 3 feet off of the ladder. If you misjudged the flip your head would hit the backside of the metal ladder. But we all survived and had a lot of fun.
"the fastest metal slide on earth"
Did you bring a sheet of wax paper to school to make it faster?
Many of the newer playgrounds in Texas have shade structures on them. I had my grandkid out this weekend at a couple of them, and while the blast of summer has passed, it's still plenty hot. Some of the newer playgrounds stretch shade cloth across the playground houses and slides and climbing surfaces as a functional architectural accent, too which is a great idea, but probably a maintenance headache.
The playgrounds I had as a kid were mostly treeless, but I suspect this was not because they were perceived as a hazard - considering the things we were climbing on. I suspect it was just the custom, the construction standards of the time. Bulldoze it clear, throw out some grass seed, plop down slides, swings, monkey bars, etc. If you plant a small tree in a playground hoping it will grow, it wouldn't survive a week of recesses.
This is absolutely true. I have a property that borders a grammar school's playground. My property had a very large tree on the property line that would provide a significant amount of shade for the children. But these kids were destructive slobs. Junk food wrappers everywhere, these children kept ripping the privacy panels out of my chain link fence, heck they even tried to tear the chain link fence out of the ground (unsuccessfully). And loud. Also when did children become so huge? I swear some of these 12 year olds are over six feet tall and 200 + pounds. Anyways I got rid of the tree. It was a beaut, sixty, seventy feet tall and decades old. After that the kids migrated to the other side of the yard to congregate under a much smaller tree and a bunch of shrubs (now that neighbor is amped up and it's hilarious).
Just install some kid size rat-guards on the trunks, like are used on ship's mooring lines.
I don't remember any trees on my elementary school playgrounds. There were brush lines we were prohibited from going into without express permission to go get a ball. Maybe a few on the older kid playground but no one climbed them since there were 1960s approved climbing devices. My out of school playgrounds were Civil War battlefields where we climbed on cannons and on monuments to regiments from Wisconsin, Illinois, etc. Didn't see a monument to Confederates until I was in my late twenties and visiting Norfolk, VA.
In the 1920s, our playground had open pits of tar, which would sometimes catch fire, but we loved it. And most of us survived.
Around here, it seems like parks departments love to plant trees, especially in the middle of fields that, if it weren't for the trees, could be used to play soccer or kickball. I don't remember caring much about shade when I was a child. Not even in South Florida (where my elementary school didn't have air conditioning).
Cutting just the lower limbs off would require a judgment. No one wants to take the risk of being wrong. Too many lawyers in the world today. First thing, let's ... oh wait.
Cutting just the lower limbs off would require a judgment. No one wants to take the risk of being wrong. Too many lawyers in the world today. First thing, let's ... oh wait.
We played basketball outside during recess. No shade, hot as hades. The metal play equipment was untouchable. Teachers would ask me if I was okay, my face was so flushed from heat. We didn't care; recess was worth anything.
“Why not just cut off the lower limbs so kids can't climb them?"
It takes an EdD to answer that question. Or maybe several.
This article proposes that kids climbing trees might reduce anxiety disorders. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10567-020-00338-w
Open pits of tar. Did they catch kids too?
At Sea Isle Elementary in the '60s there were no seas or isles, but the school sat at one end of a large public park that had a little pavilion and the normal set of slide, monkey and parallel bars, etc.
But we were forbidden to go across the field to use it during recess, which we spent on the barren school yards.
The best times were had in the area of rough wooded ground, several acres in extent, that occupied a central area of the park grounds. It, and the taller-than-the-tallest-kid gullies nearby, became our refuge and battleground until everything was cleared and flattened some years later.
We had big, mature elms in our school playground.We also had summer activities organized by the school underneath those wonderful shade trees. It was very nice.
The school also opened the library in the summer.
Summer was great.
Cutting trees costs money.Not planting trees does not.As Heinlein said the answer to why is usually”money”
mid=60 - mid-70s elementary school, the school playground was just a huge expanse of blacktop with some monkey bars, pull up bars, and one of those carousel things. No trees anywhere. My guess is that along with the mess trees would make, they also didn't want the hassle that the roots would eventually start buckling the pavement.
If kids have to be in school over the summer and have to have recess take them to the park on a picnic or nature walk, or go to a pool, or yes, take them to the library. I once lived in a town where the schools the park and the pool were all in the same area.
Were trees really banned from playgrounds because kids might climb them and fall off? They might fall off the jungle gym, the monkey bars, or the slide. They're not as high, but still could do some damage.
I think it was more that the little devils might not pay attention to where they are going, run into trees, and have concussions that way. You can't play football or baseball with trees on the field. Children are like Kennedys. They're liable to drown chasing a ball into the ocean or to ski into a tree. The shootings, auto accidents, plane crashes, overdoses, and naked photo exchanges come later.
Why not accept tree-climbing as part of growing up? For the environmentalists, how can you truly love trees if you've never been able to climb one?
My kindergarten playground had a rusted car body that we climbed all over. All the glass, drivetrain, and interior had been removed and the doors were welded shut, but you could crawl in through the window openings.
If there were trees, this distracted all the boys away from them.
School = Hell.
Maybe off topic, but when my twins were that age I knew several parents of kids with broken arms. They got them on monkey bars. Even rubberized surfaces aren't as forgiving as good old-fashioned turf. (Ask any football player.)
My solution was to actively train my kids on how to fall off the bars without hurting themselves. It's not hard. If you're tired and you know your going to fall arch your back so you see the ground. Your hands and arms will naturally be positioned to absorb the impact.
(Oh, the Heinlein reference was brilliant. Had the same thought. Maintaining trees costs money.)
For fuck's sake- I grew up playing outdoors in Summer without shade- nothing has changed but the fact that the kids of today just spend all days indoors and aren't acclimated to normal Summer heat.
Hell isn't mandatory.
Last year, my town built a fenced playground for little kids in the Arboretum next to the shelter. They edged the fake grass patches with foot-sized rocks. I assume it was all professionally done, so there are probably others like it. Lawsuits and permanent brain damage just waiting to happen.
In fourth grade, on a horizontal-ladder monkey bar, I got a nickel-sized blister on my palm, and it popped, all on my first swing. There's something wrong with my skin.
On occasion. They get to contribute to science for future generations.
This isn't about the kids. This is about liability. Trees can be climbed still, but on a city or school playground, someone falls, those people sue.
We live in a forest area now, so trees are everywhere. When my kids were younger (1 yr to 8yrs between the 2 of them) we spent a lot of time at playgrounds in northern Sacramento, which gets crazy hot. There were some trees, but most playgrounds had really nice shade and modern playground equipment tends to have a lot of places to hide and find cover even when there's not an intentionally built shaded cover.
For 8 years at my parochial elementary school, we had 30 minutes of recess after lunch, in a chain-link fenced area next to a busy street. The unleveled area was entirely asphalt paved, with a small flat area suitable for small kids to play kickball and dodgeball and so on. The giant oaks growing in holes in the asphalt produced vast numbers of acorns, small but dense and with very hard shells, which made great projectiles individually or by the handfull. We also played on the Monkey Bars, which had hard dirt under them. Nobody died, but a lot of kids learned about taking care not to let knees hit the ground and not to start acorn wars. Sue? The effing CHURCH? HAHAHA. At least our parish didn't have any kiddy diddlers, just scowling nuns and perfectly decent priests. One drove an MG ragtop.
"Why not just cut off the lower limbs so kids can't climb them?"
That would generate more work to be done to maintain the parks. Also, don't forget that humans are primates and many kids can climb trees that don't have limbs that are low enough to reach from the ground.
Another thing is that trees can fall over and branches can break off. That creates another avenue of possible liability.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tree-injures-disneyland-visitors/
As a city planner for over 40 years, I'm always amazed at how many things we get blamed for (traffic--not us), barren playgrounds (Parks folks, some of whom may be planners), etc., etc., etc. I've spent a large portion of my career working for and implementing plans that were specifically designed to improve shade in the city; downtown, neighborhoods, parks, parking lots. A true story...a few years ago I had to sign-off on plans for a school's new playground, which was an amendment to an earlier approval. I live in the Mid-Atlantic now and thought "It gets hot here. We should support shade and grass in playground areas so it's a more pleasant environment for the students at recess." When I added trees to the plan, one of the staff from the school called me and said, "Why would we do that?" "Shade, "I replied...they planted the trees. They look great now.
The best time to plant a tree is always 15 years ago, the old saying goes. The Dallas- Ft Worth metroplex has grown at an astonishing rate for the past 40 years, especially the Dallas side. Most places around there, when I'm visiting, are spread out before you as a sea of roofs, one right after the other. But in the early communities, the trees that proud homeowners planted 30-40 years ago, have grown nicely. Now the sun-blasted streets have become shady avenues, and it's no longer a stark sea of roofs. It makes a huge, I mean, huge difference to have shade trees.
My kids go to a private Catholic school affectionately known as "the little school in the woods." The school and playground are literally in the woods. It is glorious.
"Why not just cut off the lower limbs so kids can't climb them? "
What a grisly suggestion! A more humane method would be to have each kid equipped with an iron ball securely attached to an ankle.
In any case, the hands are the most integral part needed for climbing and without two, you're dead in the water. So, removal of one hand would prevent tree-related falls.
"This isn't about the kids. This is about liability. Trees can be climbed still, but on a city or school playground, someone falls, those people sue."
They need to lose.
Young boys, trees: self assembling
John Henry
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