What happened to all the teeter totters (aka see saws)? I noticed that all of the playgrounds that I used to frequent as a child no longer have teeter totters. Did our friendly government decide that they were potentially dangerous for children and order them banned from playgrounds? The playgrounds that I used to play in are in Cincinnati, Ohio.
It probably didn’t take a government order. Those things are freakin’ dangerous. I wouldn’t let my kids play on them.
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- I’d bet that it was a liability issue. There’s only really two reasons that playground equipment is replaced, and those are liability issues, or that the equipment needs replacement parts but they are no longer made. As I remember it was pretty darn hard to wear out a teeter-totter, and many were built from a big wooden plank and common fence and pipe pieces anyway, so finding replacement parts wouldn’t be difficult. - MC
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It is a wonder any of us over 20 ever survived our childhoods in pre-safety conscious era. Most of the playground equipment that I played on as a kid are gone. Standalone slides, monkey bars, jungle-gyms, the hooked together tire dealys, etc. And in my day, our playgrounds were paved over or covered in gravel, AND WE LIKED IT!
<slight hi-jack>
We held our company picnic at a local church playground earlier this summer. After consuming a slightly more than appropriate amount of beer, my gaze fell upon the teeter-totters. Memories of how fun they were 30 years ago filled by brain, and I convinced one of my co-workers to ride on the T-T with me.
When I came to a few minutes later, I found that people who weigh more than 35 lbs. should not ride T-Ts. The force of my co-worker going down on her (yes, her!) end catapulted me out of my seat and face-first onto the metal support. I was lucky in that I didn’t knock out my teeth, but I stayed away from that evil T-T for the rest of the day.
</slight hijack>
It’s mostly what MC said, liability. Mrs. Nott once worked for a playground company, and they were nearly destroyed by a few megabuck liability cases involving decades-old equipment. Nobody makes teeter totters or merry-go-rounds anymore, because they’re inherently prone to accidents. Slides and swing sets must be placed on mounds of bark chips or some such soft stuff. Even the rubber-sling swing seats can whack some hapless kid in the head.
Not to mention that in the age of Playstation 2, it’s not likely that kids in this day and age would find teeter-totters to be much fun.
That sucks. Teetor-totters where the only area where us fat kids had the advantage.
Funny seeing this thread. It was just yesterday when I took my anklebiter to the playground that I was wondering what happened to the see saws and merry-go-rounds. I guessed the liability thing.
I miss the old days of ashpalt, steel, and broken bones. But I guess it’s easier to hide hypodermic needles and used condoms in the bark chips.
Aaah, progress.
I used to love teeter-totters! They were lots of fun. I didn’t quit playing on them even when the other kid jumped off at the bottom and I got my front tooth knocked out. This reminds me of the old Bill Cosby routine about playgrounds-
“We used to have a playground when I was a kid. It was an where an old abandoned building had been leveled. There was bricks, you know, broken glass, nails all over the place. Not one kid died! Not one kid got hurt! Every once in a while there’d be a kid that would fall down, you know, and get a little gash. He’d be fine, we’d put a Band-Aid on it, an dhe’d be off playing again. But not one kid got hurt! That was when the grownups got involved. See, the grownups didn’t like us playing around all that stuff. So they came in and cleaned all the bricks and broken glass and everything. That’s when the brought in the JUNGLE GYM!! When they brought in that jungle gym, we lost 185 kids in one week!”
This used to happen to me all the time as a child. I was always the “littlest” and so I spent much of my teeter-totter time flying through the air.
Once, I even flew so high that I ended up standing on my end of the teeter-totter at the top and then just walked down to the middle to hop off.
All in one smooth motion even.
No applause, please. LOL :0
It’s about 10 years too late for me. I remember those things from camp. Us stupid kids would get on them with the sole purpose of threatening to get off when we were on the low end and eventually “cherry-bombing” the other on the high end. Man, did those things ever come down hard!
The see saws where I lived had rubber tires embedded in the ground under them, so the ends came down with a safe thump.
I don’t get it. How can playground equipment that we grew up around now be classed dangerous by the same people who played on them when they were young?
Insanity!
Most playgrounds seem to have these rubber mat things under them now. Call me stupid, but they seem a hell of a lot more dangerous than just pure grass and dirt!
Craaaaazy.
I broke my arm all to hell on a teeter-totter when I was six years old. It was a horrible fracture, tooks hours of surgery to put it back together. Of course, we were not using the teeter-totter as it was meant to be used; it was being used for the Bucking Bronco game, in which ten kids pumped one side up and down while you tried to stay on at the other end. It was great fun up until the point where my left forearm snapped like a carrot stick.
So, thehellwithem. I’m glad to see them go.
In my grade school, we had a concrete courtyard full of playground equipment including a free-standing slide, several teeter-totters, monkey bars, etc.
Now, I’ll be the first person to suggest that our liability-conscious society has gone a bit too far on safety, but even I have to say, “What the hell were our parents and school administrators THINKING?”. An 8 ft high slide, coated in ice, with a concrete pad under it? We were eventually banned from it after a kid when headfirst off the back of it onto the concrete, but after the hoo-haw settled down they opened it up to us.
We used to bring our slipperiest sunday shoes to school and wear them in recess. We’d sneak water out and pour it down the slide so that it became sheer ice. Then we’d slide down it crouching on our feet, launch off the end, and have contests to see who could slide the farthest on the ice-covered concrete. It was absolutely freakin’ insane, and kids were constantly getting hurt at school because of stuff like this.
The Merry-Go-Round was always fun… kids would stand around it and spin it up to ungodly speeds, while other kids tried to keep from being thrown off. And then there was trying to dive onto it - misjudge your timing, and you’d get a metal rail in the teeth.
Were our parents really that oblivious to the dangers? Or was society in general so much more dangerous then that the risks seemed reasonable?
Society used to be more dominated by men, and hence the risks in general were more accepted. In my day, a broken leg or arm was really no big deal.
Quite a few years ago, I watched a program on the parenting differences between men and women. A scene of two parents involved in the climb of a toddler up some monkey bar apparatus seemed quite telling. Dad was encouraging the kid from above to climb higher while Mom was down below waiting for the child to drop about half an inch into her arms.
I don’t argue with the Mrs about the safety of our children, but I do keep it to myself, my exasperation with her need to have our kids driven to school every day, even when it is only about a mile to school.
But aside from the above comments, by far the major reason for the lack of teetet-totters is the insurance companies who don’t give a damn about the kids, only their profit margins. They are the most powerful unelected force in society today, and the kids are suffering for it.
By the way, kids still tobogan,ski, play hockey,skateboard,ride bicycles, all more dangerous than teeter-totters, but it seems insurance companies are not involved in these areas or the groups involved are willing to pay the insurance costs.
By the way, kids still toboggan, ski, play hockey, skateboard, ride bicycles, all more dangerous than teeter-totters, but it seems insurance companies are not involved in these areas or the groups involved are willing to pay the insurance costs.
At least as far as skiing goes the powerful ski lobby has rammed through legislation granting them immunity from some of this liability. At least in New Mexico and I assume anywhere else with a decent ski industry.
As I recall, a lot of injuries involving playground equipment were not accidents. Let’s face it; for a lot of kids, childhood is all about being a danger to themselves & others.
I saw a comedienne named Elvira Kurt who did a hysterically funny bit about this very subject of how dangerous our childhoods were. One of the things she mentioned was Lawn Darts. Can you imagine anyone inventing such a thing today? 
[hi-jack]
We used to play a game called mumbly peg. It was played with a pocket knife (many kids carried them even in elementary school). How about that for something you’ll never see again on the playground? I guess marbles might even be considered dangerous.
[/hi-jack]
kniz was mubly peg considered a safe game in your time? I am trying to remember which stupid and dangerous game that was. Is it the one where you put your hand down on a flat wood surface and stab the blade between your fingers as fast as you can or is it the one where you throw the knife at each others feet. We all played these games but not at school. If we did I hope the teachers would have confiscated our knives.