Human nature itself has also helped perpetuate this design paradigm, simply because we are creatures of our experience. Our common experiences usually shape the conventional wisdom, or paradigms, by which we operate. When most adults were children, playgrounds were asphalt areas with manufactured, fixed playground equipment such as swings, jungle gyms and slides, used solely for recess. Therefore, most adults see this as the appropriate model for a playground.
Children’s History of Contact with Nature
Modern humans (homo sapiens) evolved and have lived in intimate contact with nature, in the savannahs and forests, for almost their entire 120,000±-year history. The cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals allowed our ancestors to dwell in permanent settlements, to expand their population more rapidly, thus beginning a long, sad divorce from nature (Manning 2004). It wasn’t until recent history that most people lived in cities. But even until very recent history, children still grew up with intimate contact with nature.
Throughout most of history, when children were free to play, their first choice was often to flee to the nearest wild place—whether it was a big tree or brushy area in the yard or a watercourse or woodland nearby (Pyle 2002). Two hundred years ago, most children spent their days surrounded by fields, farms or in the wild nature at its edges. By the late twentieth century, many children’s environments had become urbanized (Chawla 1994). But even then, as recently as 1970, children had access to nature and the world at large. They spent the bulk of their recreation time outdoors, using the sidewalks, streets, playgrounds, parks, greenways, vacant lots and other spaces “left over” during the urbanization process or the fields, forests, streams and yards of suburbia (Moore 2004, White & Stoecklin 1998). Children had the freedom to play, explore and interact with the natural world with little or no restriction or supervision.