As one of the kids who grew up in relatively unrestricted playing environment (read: no purpose-built playgrounds, the whole city/town/village was our playground) I am wondering how today's kids manage to develop any skill in the physical world, since parents are constantly around and the kids are super-dependent on the supervision and restrictions.

> 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.

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.

> I'm not an expert, but I find it quite likely that, yes, playgrounds do magically change brain development.

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.