Maybe that’s the point…maybe .the people behind the “safe” playgrounds aren’t candyasses, they’re a fiendish cabal of eugenicists!
By the way…I guess we’re all agreed that all Bush jokes now have to be three feet tall, and topped with PVC piping?
Isn’t there one in Napoleon Dynamite?
The same could be said of older kids who are given modern stability-controlled, antilock-braked, multi-airbagged vehicles by both drivers’ ed programs and by their parents for their daily use once they are “trained”.
If I was running driver’s ed I’d put 'em in old stuff with bias-ply tires and drum brakes all around and instead of having 'em sit around a classroom watching movies when the weather was rainy/icy/snowy, I’d get’em out there in a big empty parking lot learning to cope with what might happen if Daddy’s new Lexus suffered an electronic brainfart.
See Mythbusters, episode 34. That was a fun one 
I’m 62 … Just think of the things I got to play on / with when I was a kid… Bawaahahaha
I have driven an 48 Ford regular everyday car and a 32 Dodge panel truck with a cloth top that was my Mom’s regular car. We could have our long guns in the window racks of our pickem up trucks in the school parking lot.
4th of July fun included forts and slingshots and cherry bombs roman candles and bottle rockets…
When I went into the Army, I was the fastest foxhole digger. I had been practicin for years…
We had ropes and actual grapevines in the big trees of the woods nearby… Tarzan had nothing on us.
Most fun as a local group was the day we had 12 kids in an 18’ canoe with one life jacket, two cushions and one inner tube and 6 paddles. Age range was 4 - 14. Lake patrol came up as we were screaming and splashing and was going to take us all in because we did not have enough life jackets.
We just flipped the canoe and all swam off in different directions. Shore was only about 200 yards away and the youngest headed that way while the older of us headed even farther out into the lake. The patrol was left to get the canoe and paddles and stuff as our parents sat on the cliffs above and laughed… The lake patrol learned to leave us alone… We used to have to swim out to the chanal maker and back before breakfast every day of the summer. About 1/4 mile each way. We all did it by age 4.
*::: law does not say you have to have a life jacket to go swimming Bawahahaha ::: *
Hey, my location says “Ottawa, finally”. I grew up in Wisconsin. (And I’m 21, by the way.)
My current goal is to find and play on a teeter-totter or merry-go-round somewhere in Ottawa. Anyone in the Ottawa area is welcome to join me, particularly if you know where any of these things are.
Oh, and when I told my boyfriend about this thread, I got to hear some of his stories. He grew up in the countryside outside of Ottawa, and he and his friends had to improvise a lot of games due to lack of playground equipment. A couple of their favo(u)rites were the “Double T”, where they would pick up one kid’s little brother and drop him on his head, and “Hit Mr. Man”, where one kid, Kyle, would hang upside down from a trapeze by his knees, and everyone else would… well… hit him. Repeatedly, and really hard. Oddly enough, Kyle really liked this game and was always suggesting that they play it. Gotta wonder what happened to him…
Hell, when I was little, and my parents put up my swing set, they didn’t bother to cement the frame in. My cousin and I used to make a game of trying to make the frame rock back and forth when we were on the teeter-totter.
I think there’s a tether ball at the elementary school were my mother works. I’ve heard her mention it. I’ve never come across one, so I wouldn’t know.
Oh man. How pathetic. Are these the same children whose parents scamper off to the Capitol Building to mold the laws that govern our mighty nation, but who are frantically calling an attorney the second their child scrapes a knee?
Time was. I was 8, in the 3rd grade. A fellow with a very unusual name came to play. We walked up the block to the old Community Center, and were playing on an all-red steel tubing stagecoach, which was sorta kinda like this one, but all metal tubing including the wheels.
My friend and I were hanging upside down by the backs of our knees, which used to be a time-honored childhood passtime until it was outlawed… He fell suddenly and landed on his head on the tubing of the wheel.
Unconscious boy. For… a minute? More? Seemed a few eternities to me, but was likely just a minute. He awoke, very scared. Cause, he didn’t know me. At all. Didn’t know his own name. Didn’t recognize his parents when they drove over to get him. Didn’t know much of anything. Most of it came back in the coming months, but not all of it. That accident was the end of a nice friendship.
Now? My parents and I and my brother would have lived in abject poverty forever because of the lawsuit. The Community Center would have closed from the cost of the lawsuit. And of course, my friend would have had the same level of injury.
Kids run, jump, turn, tumble wrestle, fall and get hurt. Rarely are they badly injured, but yeah it happens. It’s how we learn to be cautious. Through first-hand experience.
Design a playground that bans running and is so plastic-soft-padded-safe that it lacks any edge or thrill or excitement, and you’ve stopped making playgrounds.
Pitiful. Just pitiful.
Cartooniverse
Dear GusNSpot-we need people from your stock. Breed a few more. 
Across the street from my elementary school (gr 1-6) was a farm, and a number of us would go over to John’s place after school if our parents said it was OK. We’d climb up to the upper level of the barn, and then jump out. Not into hay, but hay wagons. Flat wood. BANG! Why we never broke bones still amazes me. Any injuries were comforted by John’s Mom, and that was the end of it.