Montreal playgrounds of the 1970s...

*post cross-posted on my Livejournal blog*

I've been watching the first Passe-Partout boxset and in one of the real-life movie segment, there's a group of kids playing in a Montreal playground. There was concrete everywhere (with maybe a very thin covering of sand in the summer). Nowadays, the city playgrounds are different -- the ground is covered with a rubber mat of sorts, merry-go-rounds no longer exist and exposed metal parts (think slides) have often been covered or replaced by other materials like hard plastic. Maybe the city of Montreal was influenced by the movie Kramer vs. Kramer (in a particular scene, the son falls off the monkey bars in a playground and Dustin Hoffman rushes him to the hospital in those pre-911 days).

Similar to the Passe-Partout DVD sets, there's also the Sesame Street Old School DVD (vol. 2 to come out late summer or in the fall!). On it, there's a disclaimer reminding people that the DVD may not be suitable for today's kids (betcha this is due to this one movie where kids play Follow the leader in a dump, in which they walk on a unsteady plank, go through a pipe, etc.). In the "wussification" of childhood (as some people call this trend), people become so scared of their little kid risking a scraped knee that more and more schools in the US are banning the good ole game of tag.

Freak accidents will happen, but kids need to learn that sometimes you do fall off and hurt yourself. Is a scraped knee a much bigger deal to today's kids than it was for us back in the 70s and early 80s? Personally, I only had a few truly memorable injuries due to rough playing: one concerned my teeth in grade 1 or 2 when I fell off the wooden ladder in gym class, another was a broken arm in grade 2 when I slipped on an icy patch in the schoolyard. Guess what? I survived both incidents.