I have a friend who design playgrounds, and he operates on the principle that there's two kinds of safety. It's the objective safety I mention above, and there's the subjective safety which you mention. Kids should have objectively safe playgrounds, but they should be allowed to challenge their subjective safety feeling.
The objective safety has mostly to do with the design and maintenance of the equipment. The subjective safety is more due to the design of the playground itself and the elements in it.
One example is a climbing wall. With the right layout, sufficient impact sand or rubber on the ground around it as well as proper maintenance, it can be objectively very safe but still allow kids to feel they push their boundaries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924858
Very cool, thanks, keep posting!
(My own photos)
My understanding (based on some news article I read a couple years ago; take this with a pinch of salt) is that in practice, the injury rates from de-risked playgrounds are not materially lower than injury rates from older riskier playgrounds. The main difference is that the new playgrounds are less fun.
Our parents would just let us do our stuff. And although we were bruised all the time only one of us broke a bone once.
In the same time my friend with over-careful doctors as parents broke arms/legs roughly four times. And other kids with paranoid parents had similar problems.
Our parents thought us early on that we need to judge these risks ourselves, while these other kids would be extremely scared of harmless stuff at one point and overconfident in other more dangerous situations.
Also, when it comes to "our parents in the past would let us do anything and I came out ok" sounds a bit like survival bias to me. In Sweden, far fewer kids die today than in the 70s, so perhaps there's some merit to bicycle helmets, safer playgrounds and not letting your kids eats whole grapes unattended before the age of five or so etc.
Maybe the parents were not so much paranoid as reacting to their kids either doing dumber stuff or being more clumsy or having weaker bones.
How does that follow?
For something to be abandoned, there needs to be social agreement that it is a bad idea. This is meaningfully different than something being a bad idea.
human beings are often not rational
Goodness, I've instructed mountaineering courses, and I see plenty of adults who do this. The main difference isn't that the adults are smarter, but that they stopped trying to have fun.
Unless the playgrounds magically changed brain development so that kids got well-developed executive function much earlier than human children develop that under normal circumstances, there is no conceivable playground design that could do that.
And older playgrounds weren't, in any case, designed to do that, or with the risks built in intentionally for any particular purpose. They were built with less structured consideration of risk, which made the actual risks (and the obviousness of them, even to adults) essentially random.
I'm not an expert, but I find it quite likely that, yes, playgrounds do magically change brain development.
I think it's well-known in developmental psychology that your experience of, interaction with and reasoning about the world around you shapes how your brain develops.
They don't change it enough to make executive function develop early enough to make that story plausible, which we know because some of the studies on how and when executive function develops which make it implausible occurred with people who grew up with those old playgrounds.
Pretending children are just smaller adults is as much of a problem as excessively infantilizing them, if slightly less popular of a problem the last couple decades.