Natural Playground

On a very frigid November day, I took the kids to the playground.  I guess only in Minnesota do we head outdoors as if the windchill weren't registering at 14 degrees.  I had the day off though and a saving grace with young kids is to be able to get outside.  And besides, cold or not, there was a particular playground I wanted to see for myself.

Two years ago, the Tamarack Nature Center in White Bear Township built a "natural play area" on 2.5 acres.  Our local Pioneer Press wrote this article that sums up the experience. 

"Aside from the greenery, it's these rocks and sticks and sand - what playground designers call "loose parts" - that make naturalized playgrounds different from traditional playgrounds. In a traditional playground, children mostly slide, swing or climb and run on the play structures. They use their big muscles. Naturalized settings offer more variety and more things to manipulate, which means kids tend to slow down and use their minds and imaginations more."

Part of me questions whether the existence of this play ground is sad sign that our kids are so nature-deprived that we need to construct a "natural" play area for them.  According to the Pioneer Press article, the motivation behind the natural playground is that kids didn't know what to do in nature.

"Tamarack has five miles of trails that wind through 320 rolling acres of restored prairie, oak savannah, tamarack swamps and cattail marshes. But few children were playing there."

The nature center's director observed that patrons of the park with kids didn't know what to there besides hike.

I've shoved aside my own nay-saying, though, and have declared the playground awesome.  There are practical reasons to love this particular set-up.  It's fenced in (without feeling enclosed since the area is so large), so I don't have to worry about my kids wandering off.  My biggest worry at playgrounds is not that they'll fall and hurt themselves or have sand thrown in their eyes, but that I won't be able to keep track of them.  Also, we live in the city, which has its perks, but the reality is that we have to drive to experience a more natural setting, such as prairie.  And lastly, if you put a lot of cool things in one spot and call it a playground, kids will come.  There's a need for kids to have the opportunity to interact with other kids.

Ultimately, I find nothing wrong with a contrived "natural" environment that gives kids a starting point for play and creativity with other people their age.  If our kids' generation is experiencing the nature deficit described in Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, we have to start somewhere.  At least my kids don't fit the demographic the much-ridiculed Toy 'R' Us ad, which depicts nature as dull, is aimed at. (If you haven't seen the commercial, check out this bit from the Cobert Report where Stephen Cobert sarcastically reports, “Nature is boring. I played in it once. There was nothing to buy. It sucked.”) 


What I've taken away from the natural play area is that this is just one of many fun ways for kids to experience the outdoors.  Kids need a mix of experiences.  They have every-day experiences of going on stroller walks, visiting traditional playgrounds and kicking up leaves in our yard.  Then they have summers at the lake cabin, bonfires at Grandma and Grandpa's and the occasional trip farther afield to a national park or the ocean.  It's not much different than the time my mother-in-law and I took the kids out to lunch near a local college and then let them run around on the campus quad instead of taking them to the mall for lunch and the indoor playspace afterward.  We weren't in the woods or on the prairie, but the kids made their own fun with what they had available.  They experienced fresh air, sun, chased squirrels, delighted in listening to their voices echo off the buildings and tried to climb on everything they could pull themselves onto.