Both the swimming pools in my town have boards, and the pools are run by the city.
I agree with you 100%. At the rec. center they have classes for kids, instead of playing outside. So many things gone.

They may have diving boards, but i doubt they are the ones with springs. those were fun to dive off of.

I have to admit, I'm not sure where I stand on this.

Sure, we used to play on steel monkey bars over a concrete "playground", but I also went home lots of times with blood all over my hair and shirt after playing on the ones near my house.

It's tough balancing allowing kids to be kids with the odds of them being seriously hurt or dying.
Children are stupid. They will do the most stupid things that should result in death and when you ask why, you get, "I don't know".

On the one hand, you have people arguing that anything is worth keeping kids safe.

On the other hand, you have people arguing you can't keep kids safe unless you watch them 24/7/365/30.

I have sympathy for both, probably more for the second one because you can't protect kids until they're 30, it's impossible, but I've never had to go to a hospital with a child near death either.
I know I went to the hospital very often. The ER nurses knew me and my brother very well.

So I think we've gone too far, but I don't have kids.

You young whipper-snappers don't even know what a see-saw is! When we were kids see-saws looked like this

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.ndlpcoop/ichicdn.n000074

and we liked it that way.

newrouter - the problem with not letting kids take controlled risks when young is that they end up ignorantly taking risks that can't be recovered from when older. When I was a kid, I had this odd fear of the jungle gym in that I always visualized myself faling down the interior bouncing my head off the bars as I fell. I learned to take care and to face my fear. I could have waited until I was a drunken teenager climbing a transmission tower to get over it but I didn't.

Unfortunately, the "safe culture" usually isn't safe. Adults working far out to sea surrounded by an environment that will suck the life out of them given a chance were denied knives (by some shore weenie, no doubt). Some found themselves tied to a burning oil rig unable to cut free because some idiot thought something bad might happen if adults have knives.

http://towmasters.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/we-dont-need-no-stinking-knives/

Actually, the real funny thing is that after the banishment of the teeter-totter, it still is the standard street sighn symbol used to indicate a park. Just like the standard icon for saving a file is the obsolete floppy disc.

The root of decadence is cadere, to fall.

Another lost relic is the merry-go-round. Every time we visit my parents, the first thing my kids want to do is go to an old weed infested park to play on the rickety merry-go-round. At least kids can still climb trees (if their parents let them)

Sad...

there's a drive-in up the road and you can see where the playground (over grass) used to be- swings, a slide, and jungle gym. 'Our insurance company made us get rid of it.'

Scarred up knees are evidence of a happy childhood.

I think the major problem, especially with the type of jungle gym you show, was kids puting their heads in between the bars and loosing their hold or footing.

Real decadence is depending on government provided contraptions to break your bones. As a child, we would climb in a stand of pine trees and see who could cross from tree to tree and go the furthest, my cousin was the all time winner, but did not stop soon enough and ended up breaking his arm when he fell during a failed attempt to cross just one more time.

Growing up in the country gave us ample opportunity to kill or injure ourselves, from swimming in snake infested ponds and creeks, to hunting with rifles and shotguns from age 8 and up, to having "wars" with bottle rockets and other fireworks.

Farming and Ranching is a never ending series of minor and major injuries, from scraps and cuts, to mashed fingers and toes, to broken ribs, arms, and legs. by comparison, city life is decadent.

I miss diving boards terribly. As an amateur diving enthusiast, I remember testi ng out diving boards all across the conntry in my youth. In particular, I liked the 10-foot board at the hot springs in Colorado. Now, not a one to be found. How many potential Greg Louganis' will never learn how to dive because of the dearth of opportunity?

It's a shame, and it is our litiginous culture that is to blame.

I had an online discussion about freedom once, where the person I was arguing with stated that Americans are no less free now than they were 40 years ago. I noted that when I was 10, I could purchase, on my own and no questions asked, a knife that is now illegal for me to own as an adult, whereas my 10 year old cannot be allowed to wander far from home on his own, lest I lose the kids to child services for "neglect". The answer, though phrased differently, was fundamentally "I am unconcerned with your loss of freedoms; no freedoms that matter to me were lost." And thus we continue the slide.

The real question in my mind is whether we will go the way of Rome, and die as a culture without even noticing it until one of the invaders decides to burn the capitol, or whether we will somehow find the strength to turn out the ninnies, the nannies and the leeches and renew our culture.

That see-saw picture reminded me of my elementary days, when every now and then, just to keep it exciting, you'd quickly jump off at the bottom without warning to see if you could make the other guy slam his butt into the ground as gravity did its thing. Even if you got your feet out and ready in time it was still quite a jolt.

I was on my bike all day long every summer when I was a kid. Nobody owned a helmet or knee pads. Never a summer passed without scabs on the knees or elbows, and after the initial sting of mom-applied iodine, we never gave them a second thought. I understand safety, but I think we've gone overboard.

Hmm,
Let's just say that we have love of God and love of seesaws where I live. Might be a correlation. And no, I'm not telling where I live. But we have plenty of woods to bury nannystaters in... :)

At Baker Heights Elementary in Baker, Louisiana, we called our hemispheric jungle gym the Eagle's Perch. It was stunning. The pinnacle of the playground.

I distinctly remember the year they removed a level from the structure to make it less-than-hemisperic and quite a bit lower to the ground. The Eagle's Perch frightened me in it's original half-domed glory with it's menacing six foot summit. I wanted to be able to climb it and sit on top like the brave kids. I longed for that courage. But after they reduced it to the four-foot "Eagle's Perch Lite," it lost its intrigue. Everybody could get on it and get to the top. But only a few had ever experienced the true Eagle's Perch, and I had not been one of them.

Now, I would have to seek out something else to climb and risk getting hurt to do it. The lure of the Perch was gone and with it, an opportunity for me to overcome an obstacle I knew I needed to overcome.

Take away people's opportunities to go forward into places they fear and they'll develop an unhealthy dependence on the very thing that keeps them safe.

My creed, passed down by my grandfather: It's better to wear out than rust out. Generally speaking, today's youth are rusting out.

Joined an older pool club this summer. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to see a high dive. Hadn't seen one of those in decades.

Diving boards: You can have a diving board if you want one; however, you have to have a twelve-foot-deep pool. Most McMansion build-to-print outfits don't go more than five feet deep, because going down further requires special equipment and specialist workers and special permits, and all that gets expensive pretty fast.

It's not a safety thing; it's a cost thing.

I find it very sad for today's kids that they'll never have the fun of riding a merrygoround, going up and down on a see-saw or even sliding down a real, tall slide. In their zealousness to make the world safe for children, adults have made the world boring and dull for kids. Is it any wonder that kids would rather stay indoors and play video games when there's nothing fun to do outside anymore?

Jungle gyms hell, remember Giant Strides? Take a steel pole and set it in the ground vertically with an axle at the top. Fasten half-a-dozen steel chains to the axle, each with two 6" steel pipe handles at the end hanging low enough to be reached by kids. No padding on pole, chain, or handles. Then get two or three kids hanging on those handles and running an eliptical route, alternately running and flying high in the air while the unused chains and handles flail around them. As the InstaPundit says "What could possibly go wrong?"

I loved those things, lost a lot of blood to them, and never regretted a drop.