If you squandered learning opportunities in your youth and are seeking a means of rectification, consider returning to a playground.

We all spent time there learning its lessons, but, if you’re like me, you failed to master a few.

I’ve checked out three.

Lincoln Elementary School has the best one. Though Besser Elementary School’s is larger, Lincoln’s has a more comfortable feel — mature trees surround it. Besser lacks this inherent comfort, as does Ella White Elementary School, and Ella White’s playground is too small.

At Ella White, they took a piece of paradise and put up a parking lot.

Change has come to all three.

The big metal twirl-a-whirls are gone. No longer can you create centrifugal forces capable of throwing you to the dirt, crumpled, too dizzy to stand.

Those big steel slides — so hot in the sun they burn your bum — are gone. Teeter-totters worth their salt have vanished. No longer can an overweight kid suspend a taunting classmate on the up end of a teeter-totter plank until they apologize or jump off — twisting their ankle and bruising their ego.

The big jungle gyms are gone.

What happened?

In 1981, a committee — not a playground user among them — composed, I suppose, of engineers, lawyers, and insurance adjusters developed playground safety standards.

This has not just caused equipment losses, but imagination, too, has suffered, and there have been unanticipated problems. Playgrounds have been handicapped in their mission to teach strengths and weaknesses, and the ability to get along.

And a good playground teaches adaptability: the capacity to face a world of risks.

Now, mostly homogenized structures of multi-colored plastic exist where the big swings used to be. They allow only restricted movements from which excitement and risk have been substantially purged.

Some good has come of it: From 2001 to 2008, the Consumer Products Safety Commission reported an average of 13 playground deaths per year in the United States, 10 fewer than were reported in 1980.

But consider this comparison: In 2021, 2,590 children died as the result of firearm injuries in this country, up from 1,311 in 2011. That’s not a 10-death increase, that’s an increase of 1,279!

Firearms are now the leading cause of childhood death in the United States (CNN, March 2023; New England Journal of Medicine, May 19, 2022).

There is a fundamental difference between these two risks: Risks on a playground are assumed by its users. The risks of assault weapons are imposed.

So much for the integrity of our risk-avoidance efforts on behalf of children.

All of which makes Courtney Fredlund’s job more challenging. Courtney is the principal of Lincoln Elementary School. Safe effective educational beginnings are her responsibility. She needs all the help she can get.

Being an elementary school principal carries aspects of life’s most pleasant endeavors, but also presents some of its greatest challenges. When you walk into the office at Lincoln, you can feel the exuberance that flows from the assumption of that responsibility.

Part of Courtney’s job is to teach kids to navigate the structure inherent in a school environment, but she is responsible, too, for helping them obtain the adaptability they need to walk away from that structure into a world of greater self-determination, where risks exist not previously encountered.

A reality that may be gaining a renewed appreciation.

The city of Toronto, Canada, recently banned tobogganing at 45 of its sledding hills. The city said it was too risky (Toronto Star, Jan. 14, 2024).

Trying to close toboggan runs in Canada worked as well as an earlier attempt to ban street hockey. It didn’t. With Canadians, the closing of a hill to tobogganing wasn’t just wrong, it was embarrassing.

But it goes beyond embarrassment — the assumption of reasonable risk at a toboggan run may be better for kids than the avoidance of it.

According to new recommendations from the Canadian Paediatric Society, unstructured outdoor play — in particular, risky play — is essential for the physical, mental, and social development of children.

“We have to reconsider how we view risk and understand that risk is a part of life and that it’s part of our children’s lives,” said Dr. Suzanne Beno, a pediatric emergency medicine physician. “There’s a very positive benefit to allowing children to recognize risk, experience risk, and learn to manage it.”

Proposed new Canadian recommendations provide that children should be kept “as safe as necessary, but not as safe as possible.”

Children are born with the instinct to take risks while playing. Learning to negotiate risk is crucial to their survival. But if they never go through that process, fear can turn into a phobia. Paradoxically, our fear of children being harmed may result in more fearful children (the Atlantic, April 2014).

On the 27th of this month, we will be asked to vote for the renewal of a school millage. Without it, programs will be reduced or eliminated and our deficient playgrounds will have no chance of being remedied.

A risky situation for both our children and us.

If, as it hopefully will, the renewal millage passes, perhaps a few dollars can be made available that, with the help of volunteers, can be used to fix the playgrounds, restoring to them tools necessary to their crucial mission.

This would take some pressure off Courtney and her peers and allow us adults to get together after-hours to work on playground lessons we failed to master.

Doug Pugh’s “Vignettes” runs monthly. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.