80 ways to die...

On the right, you're looking at a certified death trap. It officially offers more than 80 possibilities for a kid to get killed. How, you say? Believe me, you'd be amazed.

Our school and kindergarten (I'm the head of both) got a visit from Lekeplasskontrollen ("The Playground Control") about a month ago. Our local authorities are making an effort to make sure that the playground installations are in accordance with Norwegian law and EU standards, so they contracted Lekeplasskontrollen to come and have a look around all our schools and kindergartens. And boy...did they ever find enough material for their reports...

The main hazards are spots up high where kids can get their head trapped and places jacket cords might get caught, causing danger of choking. Then you have the danger of falling onto sharp or hard objects, and so on and so forth.The depicted apparatus has about 30 spots where a kid's head might get caught and more than 50 spots where jacket cords might snag. Brrrr... Luckily, all those things can easily be corrected by our janitor.

Some of you might think this smacks of hysteria (and I know a lot of parents think so). After all, we survived childhood, didn't we? And wow, did we do crazy things, eh? And we lived to tell the tale(s). All very, very true. But for people of my generation and older, there's at least two significant differences to then and now.

a) Our playing and the games we played were rarely defined by some playground installation. Hey, we hardly knew what a playground was. Sure, they existed, but there weren't all that many of them around. So we used what we could find - nature.

b) In nature, no one is liable to charges if you fall off a cliff or from a tree. In a playground, someone is.

So, we get checked out and try to make sure that we've got a safe playground. "Hey! If you make the playgrounds safe, kids will never develop a proper sense of what danger is!", I hear you say. I couldn't agree more. And that is not the aim of making our playgrounds safe. We want the kids to be safe from death, not necessarily from bodily harm - everyone needs to learn what is clever and not-so-clever to do. A broken leg or tooth might teach you a valuable lesson for later. Dying won't.