The wooden playsets are made with pressure-treated wood, so you couldn’t just take it apart and burn it in your own fireplace. I don’t know what happens if that stuff gets into a landfill - do the chemicals leech out and get into ground water?
FWIW, both the tot lot in my neighborhood and the preschool where I teach have big metal and plastic playsets (jungle gyms) made by Little Tykes that are green and tan - very pleasing to the eye, and well-made.
I hate those fucking things, especially the ones in my back yard. (Sent by my mother for our kids, so we can’t just throw them out.)
One one hand I like Fischer Price because they are a big employer a town over from here. On the other hand the bright colors have got to fucking stop.
My Dad was a welder when I was a little kid. He built me the coolest swingset in the world. The monkey bars were at least 9’ off the ground (He was 6’4" and could hang from it.) It had swings, rings, a trapeze, ropes and all sorts of places to fall from and maybe break your neck.
Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t trying to get rid of me, it probably had lead paint too.
[QUOTE=bouv]
I miss the old days, with large, deadly, metal playground equipment. I remember in elementary school, we had the following equipment:
[ul]
[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.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
You mean a jungle gym?
Besides a standard swingset (with 2 swings, a teeter/totter and a slide) we had a thing in our backyard that had 4 seats surrounding a center post. The handlebar and foot bar were connected to each other, and you pumped them back and forth to make the thing spin around in circles – the harder you pumped, the faster you’d spin. We loved that thing! What the heck is it called?
This article argues that the new “safe” playgrounds aren’t even safer, because kids just find more extreme ways to use them.
YES! I knew there was a wrod for them, but for the life of me it decided to remove itself from my personal dictionary.
Wow. ‘No plastic crap in yards’ is my cause.
Great Thread!!
Yeah, I hate all those little eyesores in the back yards everywhere. Loud, obnoxious, too many bright garish colors, way too small and safe… the toys are kind of annoying, too.
What?
Somehow this surprises me not at all :).
Just a crazy old WAG, but might it also be possible that the old fashioned, dangerous playground equipment forced us to learn to be careful, and this new “kid-safe” equipment teaches kids to go and do whatever crazy-ass thing that pops into their heads, because the world is all “kid-safe” now?
Possibly. But I didn’t survive childhood by being safe or smart. I think I was just damned lucky. We used to take waxed paper and grease up those big metal slides to make them faster. We could reach escape velocity on a hot day when you’d get a lot of wax onto the slide! I still have some slight scars on my shoulder from trying to go down head first one day.
The plastic stuff is ugly, and I don’t doubt kids still find ways to hurt themselves. That’s part of being a kid: let’s find a way to make this perfectly harmless activity really dangerous!
It wasn’t exactly chlorine in the gene pool, but the first time I burned my ass on the slide, I learned to be cautious of *all * metal, certain times of the day. And when we couldn’t use the jungle gym, we used our imaginations and came up with other things to do. Like annoy the dog and ruin the grass by running under the sprinklers. Good times.
Really, all I ask is the colors be pleasant, and not as though somebody ate a factory’s worth of crayons and shat all over the yard.
Those plastic play sets last maybe a year around here, the sun is brutal. Nothing like putting your foot through brittle plastic on your way up to slide. I’m glad to hear they’re recyclable. Now to get people to recycle instead of toss.
My dad called it a whirlygig, so that’s what we called it. That was a cool toy. Get that thing rotating fast enough, and you could generate enough torque to tip it over.
I also hate the look of yards littered with this plastic crap.
I’m pregnant with our first and I’m very excited, but not about the way my house is going to look with all of the primary-colored toys and other contraptions in and around it. Not much I can do except pick up some empty boxes behind the local liquor stores and have my child make his/her own fun.
I remember when my school had the really great jungle gyms made of thick steel. There were two playgrounds. One you could see from my parents’ backyard and one on the other side of the school. Just this summer, they replaced the “old-school” steel with plastic playsets. I happened to be home one weekend to witness the assembly of it.
My brother was home about a month ago and told me he took a walk over to the other side and they had completely gotten rid of the other playground.
I had so much fun over there. Damn. 
As a minor correction, gnomes use LSD. Elves tweak.
Well, it isn’t funny until someone loses an eye.
Since when does everyone come with an innate knowledge of tools?
You aren’t making a sensible point. DDG’s statement is that there are plenty of women in the world who don’t know how to use tools. There are also plenty of men in the world who don’t know how to use tools, but shouldn’t she be able to assume we all know that as well? Does she need to point out every little niggling thing just to appease the few who will see subtexts utterly unsupportable by either textual analysis or personal history if she does not?
This… just isn’t worth it. Pile on her and me and whoever else you want. I have better things to do.
Totally agree with the OP. However, just to interject a positive note into this thread, I want to praise Step 2 for taking the high road and making plastic children’s playhouses and activity centers that are not total eyesores.
Our 3 1/2 year old son has the Cottage, and we’re all very happy with it- the brightest part of it is the red door. Price and ease of construction were definitely the reasons why we stayed away from wooden yard toys.
The human vision system basically has four primary colors: red, green, blue, and yellow.
Your eye only has three kinds of cones, to sense red, green, and blue light, but they’re combined and contrasted in such a way that you experience two dimensions of color: red<->green and blue<->yellow (yellow being equal parts red and green). That is, any color is experienced in terms of whether it’s closer to red or green and whether it’s closer to blue or yellow.
Kids don’t know about color theory, or why we use the primary colors cyan+magenta+yellow with ink and red+green+blue with light, but they do know what their eyes are telling them.
If you have better things to do, why bother pissing on about this?
DDG’s statement was this:
That statement implies that moms don’t seem to have the passing acquaintance with tools needed to set up a playset. It’s a blanket statement that gives the impression that the poster believes that women aren’t able to use the tools to set up the playset, and so purchase the easier but uglier product to use.
DDG then came along to clarify what she’d said. She explained why she chose that particular sentence and what she’d actually meant in saying it. I have no issue with what she was saying, merely how it was presented in the first place, so I left it well alone and let the conversation get back on track.
Go kids! Hehe. That’s GREAT. Not that I’m saying I like to hear of kids in danger, just that well, kids being kids, they’ll find a way to have fun and make something dangerous no matter what. And with all the sawdust around-damn, that would be so much fun to kick up and make a big, dusty mess. Wee!
When I was about, oh, 12, we had our family reunion like we always did at a nearby park with picnic groves and swing sets and the huge metal slides. We somehow managed to rig up a water slide-hooked up a hose up to the water pump and snaked it up to the top of the slide. Damn, the mud was EVERYWHERE. That was FUN.
But the sucky thing about the metal playset was, as mentioned-the sun. That same park had a huge playground right by the lake and only one of the slides was usable during hot weather-the one that was under a little grove of trees. And that one had a lot of jagged metal sticking out. And they were old and rusty, which guaranteed a few tetanus shots that summer.
Another thing-my father once did a funeral for a little girl who was killed when one of those old rusty slides collapsed. Probably one of the worst in his career.
So the plastic ones are safer-although they generate static electricity. And yeah, they’re ugly, but c’mon. These are for KIDS. Kids who like to wear their favorite striped shirt with a pair of plaid overalls.