It seems there is not a single front or back yard anywhere that does not have yellow, red, blue and green plastic playgrounds, toys, bikes and playhouses tossed around. Don’t get me wrong. I know why. Price is right and kids seem to love ‘em . Doesn’t make a difference if it is in front of a doublewide trailer or a million dollar home. These multi-colored plastic blights are everywhere.
I miss the old days when parents would build playhouses out of wood, and swing sets and jungle gyms had steel or wooden frames, and regulation size basketball hoops were attached to the garage, even if you were too little to shoot that high, you loved trying.
No, I am not a child toy hating Grinch.
But does every damn toy have to look like it was made by elves on LSD?
Hear, hear. What child psychologist/marketer decided that children must have eye-hurtingly bright primary colors? All the big chunky plastic toys I see are cobalt blue, blood red, and chrome yellow. If anything, I’d think the kids would be overstimulated by the violent tones. And, yes, they do look ugly lying around in heaps in front yards, driveways and even streets.
They look even uglier when, after being left there for a couple of years, they get bleached out by the sun.
I wouldn’t even mind the bright colors so much if each piece of equipment were the same color. It’s the nasty clashing that adds to the ugly. It also bothers me that they add the color green. Red, yellow and blue are primary colors. Why add a secondary color like green, but none of the other secondary colors? It throws the mix off.
Really good, safe, wood and metal equipment is incredibly expensive. The few parents I’ve known who had them, couldn’t afford not to sell them after their kids out-grew playsets. The cheaper plastic stuff just gets tossed I’ve noticed.
I must disagree. Those things are incredibly nifty.
[ul]
[li] They’re cheap. A wooden playset costs way more.[/li][li] You can find them at garage sales, “gently used”, for a couple of dollars. Never seen a wooden playset at a garage sale.[/li][li] They’re easy to find, being available at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and just about every toy store you can name. Wooden playsets require a trip to a Menards or Lowes.[/li][li] They’re easy to buy. You just walk into the store and put it into your shopping cart. A wooden playset usually has to be ordered from a floor person at the Menards or Lowes, and someone has to go and fetch it, and it has to be loaded into your car.[/li][li] They’re lightweight enough that a 100 lb. housewife can schlep it home and set up in the yard. [/li][li] They require no expertise to assemble, thus Mom can do it herself. A wooden playset requires at least a passing acquaintance with tools.[/li][li] They’re bright colors. Primary colors rock. Red, blue, yellow, and green, while not conforming to the adult technical definition of “primary colors”, are still the four basic colors that are universally taught to preschoolers–black and white, purple and orange, pink and brown, come much later. [/li][li] They don’t give you splinters. I have yet to meet the wooden playset that didn’t give somebody at least one splinter per summer.[/li][li] If somebody falls and bonks his head on it, it hurts a lot less, and doesn’t open up a ghastly scalp wound, if he falls on plastic.[/li][li] The plastic, sitting in the sun, doesn’t get as hot on little bare feet as wood does.[/li][li] The plastic slides alone are worth the price of admission. The metal slide that is standard on a wooden playset is just too damn hot to slide down on a July afternoon, unless you install the playset under a big tree, but usually “under the tree” is where all of Mom and Dad’s stuff gets installed. Virtually every wooden playset I’ve ever seen has been installed smack-dab out in the middle of the back yard, in the sun.[/li][li] When the grass around the plastic one starts to die from traffic, you just move the thing over 30 feet and let the grass come back. With a wooden playset, you have to resign yourself to not having grass around it.[/li][li] So you usually put shredded bark under your wooden playset, and then you have pieces of shredded bark all over your yard. Or pebbles, which are harder on the lawn mower. But with the plastic one, you can have it on grass any time, as long as you don’t mind moving it around the yard.[/li][li] When they get mud on the plastic ones, you just hose 'em down, or if they really need a scrubbing because somebody smeared dog poo all over it, you just drag ‘em into the driveway and scrub it down with Pine-Sol. And you can up-end it to get at the bottom. If something really disgusting like dog poo gets on your wooden playset, you’ll have an interesting time getting it clean, plus you end up with Pine-Sol all over your shredded bark.[/li][li] And they last a lot longer than you might expect–those Little Tykes playground sets will last through three families’ worth of preschoolers, no problem.[/li][li] They’re cheap enough that when they break, you can just throw them away. That’s actually considered a Good Thing, because usually by the time it’s broken, your kids are grown anyway, and you don’t need a home playground anymore.[/li][li] When your kids are gone, you aren’t stuck with a wooden playset that’s taking up space you could use for a spa, or a bigger garden, or a hobby hut. And you aren’t stuck with the task of trying to sell it through an ad in the paper.[/li][/ul]
In what particular mine shaft do you dwell?
Parents still build playhouses out of wood. Swingsets and jungle gyms still have steel or wooden frames. Basketball hoops are still attached to garages. What you seem to have missed, on one of your infrequent forays up into the light, is that people also have Little Tykes and Fisher Price playsets in their yards. The world is a big, wide, wonderful place, at least the parts of it that aren’t 300 feet underground and poorly lit, and there’s room in it for people to have basketball hoops attached to their garage, and for people to have Fisher Price Grow To Pro adjustable basketball hoops in their yards.
Maybe you enjoyed being completely unable to get the ball through the basket way-up-there when you were five, but maybe some of us prefer to enable our children to experience the sense of accomplishment that comes when they’re given a task that’s do-able, and they do it. It’s all about scaling things down for the little kids, the same way that little tables and chairs and doll dishes are scaled down to kid-size. And I think this is the main point that you’re missing: Those plastic playsets are just the right size for very small children (preschoolers) to have a good time on them. They’re “just their size”, and that’s the main psychological attraction. Older kids aren’t out there shooting hoops with the Fisher Price gadget; they wouldn’t be caught dead with “toddler toys”. They wanna be in the driveway shooting hoops like the big kids.
If the trailer-park aspect of it bothers you, just go on back down your mine shaft, we be fine without you…
Hear, hear, and hear again. I’m pretty sure even as a kid, I found these colors garish. Sure, it’s easy to identify a kid’s toy by it’s obnoxious colors, but I’d have been just as happy if those toys had come in some nice earth tones.
Sure, the plastic chunky things may be cheap, but the “just throw them away” mentality is setting us up for an environmental crisis. Those things will never, ever, ever break down in landfill, and in our throwaway society that’s a big problem. It’s for that main reason that I don’t like those things, and if I had kids they would get some less volatile alternatives to play with.
Wooden play structures could at least be burned, or would eventually decompose.
Aren’t they all made out of thick HDPE now, and as such are as easily recycled as your milk jug? Well, asides from having to be broken down now, but still, it’s not as difficult as one would imagine.
I bought my boys a steel frame swing set a year or so ago. It’s pretty basic–slide, three swings, glider, bench swing, spin pole–and it still took five people over four hours to assemble it. Passing acquaintance with tools or not, there’s no way I could have done that on my own, which I hope is the point DDG was trying to go for there.
We had one of those plastic things given to my daughter by an aunt. For her birthday 3rd in July however, my mother and MIL decided that she needed a real wooden swingset/playset/fortress. We all looked around to see where we could find one that we liked. My town is a fancy play-set manufacturing center for some reason. The ones they make here however, cost between $2000 and $6000. We decided that was too much. My wife found one at the local BJ’s warehouse shopping club for a little less than $1000. The thing looked pretty nice. It has a climbing wall, three swings, fortress, picknick table, slide, and vertical hanging bars. We bought it.
My wife’s uncle offered to help me put it together. By the end of the first eight hour day, we only had all of the hundreds of parts inventoried, and four poles squared and put into the ground with a few suppoorting pieces of wood. This pattern continued.
To make a story about an extremely long process short, it took two of us almost 5 eight hour sessions to put that thing together. That’s right, almost 80 man-hours were devoted to that thing. It is a thing of beauty but god-damned. I can see why people stick to the plastic ones.
The irony is dripping from this thread faster than it can be collected.
First we have DMark with a complaint about an ugly suburban blight – garish play equipment on lawns. Not so ironic, until you realize that his location key lists five locations: four largely without suburban lawns, and – Vegas, America’s subtle, tasteful playground.
Next we have, joining DMark’s crusade against bright colors, the chromatically subdued duo Teela Brown and Ashes, Ashes.
Leaping spiritedly to the defense of plastic playsets we have Duck Duck Goose, whose name is a children’s game that requires no equipment at all.
Finally we have Amazon Floozy Goddess, who seems to unironically pine (Har!) for the days when children’s toys were more flammable than they are now.
I swear the whole thread is a plant by the Rusty Jagged Metal Playground Equipment Corporation.
There’s a nice wooden set in the back yard of the house we’re renting – quite the luxury set. Of course, our landlord is single and childless, and our youngest is 21, so at this point it’s just sitting there rotting. Even if our landlord would okay it, I’m not sure if it could be disassembled and moved. I guess I need to make friends with some people with young children who could at least enjoy it, because my dogs aren’t at all interested.
When my kids were little, the plastic ones weren’t available yet, so we got one of the metal ones (at that point the wood ones were just beginning to be made for home use and were waaaay out of our price range). We had to uproot that thing and move it three different times, and each time was a major pain in the kiester. Especially the time that I discovered a nest of digger wasps at the base of one of the posts and ended up with a hand three times normal size. I finally gave up and left it in the yard of one house for the next person to deal with.
I totally understand why people get the plastic ones. If they’d had them when my kids were little, I would have gotten them myself. Ugly bright colors or not.
HDPE burns rather well and contains almost as much energy as oil does. If it cannot be recycled into other products burning it will at least allow us to recycle the energy.
I wrote my MSc thesis on the environmental economics of recycling plastic and I was amazed on how comparatively clean burning those types of plastics are compared to other sources of energy.
The point I was trying to go for is this: Middle America ain’t as feminist yet as the columnists would have you believe. The Moms who own a drill and a posthole digger and could assemble a wooden playset are still in the minority. Hence my comment.
I own a drill, and I know how to use it. I recently put Barbie stickers all over it to keep the Better Half from using it, because he is notorious for burning out drills. The last drill he burned out was technically my drill, hence the Barbie stickers on my new drill.
And then there are powerful cultural factors mitigating against Mom setting up the playset. There are many, many XX-chromosomes out there who still automatically leave certain tasks up to the Menfolk. I live on the Middle Class, Middle Age, Middle Ground, Middle American planet where I, my sister, my sister-in-law, and all of my contemporary married female friends, whether with kids or not, would instinctively assign the task of “obtaining, bringing home, and setting up the new wooden playset” to the male of the species, i.e. Hubby. Because that is something that, out here in the Heartland, Guys–and especially Dads–do. “Daddy” spends the entire weekend setting up the new wooden playset, cursing and grumbling and making extra trips to Menards. Not “Mommy”. “Mommy” is allowed to go down to Wal-Mart and bring home a really huge plastic toy, because that is what “Mommy” does, is shop for plastic toys at Wal-Mart.
Even though I would be better at setting up a wooden playset than my husband would, being better at reading and following instructions (although lacking the upper-body strength to manipulate 2x4s around), even then I’d have to let him do it, because otherwise he’d have to tell everyone at the Post Office that his wife set up the playset. And he’s not some growling Neanderthal, either–he’s a fairly forward-thinking 21st century kind of guy. But the gender-assigned tasks bias runs deep in our culture, and some things are just “guy things” out here in Middle America. This especially applies to things requiring physical strength, like digging post holes and dragging 2x4s around. And yes, yes, yes, I know there are women who can benchpress a Hummer and men who have trouble lifting a cup of coffee. That’s not the point. The point is that most people still automatically assign the heavy lifting to the guys.
Actually, I and all my female relatives and friends do have that “passing acquaintance” with tools, being long-standing Women’s Libbers–we empowered ourselves years ago by learning to tighten our own loose kitchen drawer screws.
But culturally speaking, where we’re at, it frequently causes less friction if we pretend we don’t. Because it all boils down to getting along, and you can’t get along with a husband who thinks it’s his job to set up the wooden playset, and there’s his Missus out in the yard with a cordless Black and Decker in her hand.
So maybe I should have said, “For Mom to assemble a wooden playset requires at least a passing acquaintance with tools–and a husband who she is absolutely sure would not have his masculinity threatened by the fact that she knows what an allen wrench is.” Because there are a lot of men out there who would be seriously threatened by something like that.
Hence the attraction of the plastic “tote it home from Wal-Mart” playset.
I miss the old days, with large, deadly, metal playground equipment. I remember in elementary school, we had the following equipment:
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[li]Three sets of swings (ones that you could actualyl go high on, and jump off of, and have fun with)[/li][li]TALL monkeybars (as in, even were I to climb them today, my feet would be at least a foot off the ground.)[/li][li]TALL rings (see above)[/li][li]A zip line, the tall end of which was maybe seven feet off the ground, the low end about three.[/li][li]A “clatter bridge”, I think we called it. It was a small, suspension-esque bridge with the boards on the bottom held up at odd angles. Hard to describe, but you couldn’t get a sure footing if you walked across it and it “clattered” as you walked on it.[/li][li]Two metal…“things.” They were both just odd conglomerations of metal bars put together different ways for kids to cluimb on, the tops of which were 6-7 feet above the ground.[/li][li]A wooden “structure”, we called it. It was a fort-type thing, with a wooden ramp on one side, a ramp made of of tires on the other, a regular slide, a “tube” slide, a ladder in the middle, monkey bars on one side and rings on the other, and a little cage thing underneath.[/li][li]And my favourite thing, the climbing bars. It was two metal bars, side by side, ten to fifteen feet long, suspended vertically in a wooden frame, connected to it by chains, so they could move around a bit. The point if this thing? For kids to climb up the bars, of course! Yes, kids (well, usually only my friends and I were brave enough) would wrap our arms and legs around a smooth steel bar, and climb up ten feet in the air, only to slide back down again.[/li][/ul]
I haven’t been back to that place in years, but I know the climbing bars are gone. Odds are, the zipline is, to (it was on it’s last legs when I attended,) and probably at least one, if not both, of the metal thingies. Oh, and the tall monkeybars and rings, too, I bet. The wissification of America, because God forbid a child get hurt! What, did the children die when I was a kid? Did the teachers round us up at the end fo the day and count heads?
“Well, a good day today, we only lost five of them! The parents of the survivors will be very pleased!”
I remember a slide they had at my cousins’ school. It was literally about 20 feet high, very narrow, metal so it got hot as hell in the sun. You could work up a real head of steam going down it; there were at least one or two broken bones a year. And yet it stayed there through my whole childhood.
Man, kids can’t have fun trying to kill themselves the way we used to any more.
