Monkey bars were invented 100 years ago and can now be found in thousands of playgrounds from sea to shining sea… and parents are getting edgy, and there is a growing movement to take away the monkey bars. Someone might fall off.
Has it truly come to this? They’ll take away our monkey bars? All in the interests of “safety,” of course. You can never have too much safety.
But! Anthropologists at Dartmouth University say monkey bars are good for you (https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2024/09/risky-play-exercises-ancestral-need-push-limits). As are very many forms of play–in most of which there is always the possibility of injury. Oh, my. Did that really need to be said? Really?
I think too much safety is… unsafe! We have muscles and bones that have to be tested, exercised, if they’re going to stay healthy. Monkey bars, swings, see-saws–they all fill that necessary function.
By living in such a way as to avoid all risk of injury, we court injury!
I fear for the future of common sense.
I think common sense is sadly, a thing of the past. There are many illustrations of that.
Between being over-sheltered, and living a bit out in the countryside, I wasn’t exposed to monkey bars, all that much. I wish I had been. While I eventually built up upper body strength, it would have served me well to have had more of this sort of exercise.
While I am certain that it’s possible for a child to be injured on these, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it happening. This suggests to me that such problems are quite rare.
The process of growing from a fully dependent infant into a a self-reliant adult requires a lot of intermediate steps. There is the obvious need for physical exercise, but also for learning the judgment required to perform challenging physical tasks, and this can only come from experience. I can’t help but think that building those skills in the relatively safe environment of a playground is a lot safer than finding out the hard way in a more dangerous situation.
It’s a fact of life that sometimes children do quite dangerous things, because they don’t know any better. Monkey bars should be the least of any parent’s worries.l
I agree. Parents should provide guidance, but the children need to be exposed to the real world. We did some dangerous things growing up, but we also learned.
So what if children get hurt while they’re playing? — as long as it isn’t a permanent and/or life-threatening injury? It’s good preparation for life, where we often get hurt, whether it’s physically, emotionally, or financially. We learn to come back from being hurt. Anyway, when I was a kid growing up in the South Bronx, we didn’t even have the sandy ground shown in the picture above. We had concrete. Scabby knees and elbows were a mark of honor. We gloried in our iodine smears and band-aids. 🙂
The monkey bars at a pre-school where I interned were a blast. The children and I had so much fun with them. After Covid I drove by that day care and all the monkey bars had been removed – how sad.
That’s a symptom of culture rot.