Parks, Playtime and Playing Safe

This is a collaborative post.

We have a few parks in my hometown that we love to go to. Parks are a great way for E to burn off some steam after school and because we don’t have access to a garden at home they are the go to place for some outdoor play which is so important for little ones. I have to admit as I’ve grown up park play area surfaces are one thing I look at a lot to make sure my daughter is playing safety. I want my daughter to have fun whilst she’s playing and safety isn’t really her area of concern, it’s mine. These days you see a lot of parks and playgrounds with wetpoor rubber safety flooring. It’s kind of got that soft, springy feel to it which I like. It’s almost bouncy.

I really like how a lot of playground surface area is brightly coloured and some even feature games to play. Long gone are the hard, concrete surfaces where you could mark a game of hopscotch with chalk. I remember so many different playground surfaces when I was young from hard concrete, woodships and sand. Looking back none of these were particularly safe really! I remember having so many accidents thanks to the harder surfaces and heard quite a few horror stories from what other children found in sand pits at playgrounds. I don’t have these worries today because its less common to see sandpits and woodchips around. The rubber surfaces you see today are also so much better for all weather conditions to help prevent slips, trips and falls. As a nation we are becoming so much more health and safety concious but if it reduces accidents then I’m all for it.

These days there are a variety of playground surfaces such as wet pour, rubber mulch, artificial grass and needlepunch. Each type of surface has qualities to help make the playground or park a safe area to play in and run around. These surfaces can be multilayered too to around higher playground equipment to prevent or lessen damage from critical fall heights. Kids move fast, they like to jump, hop, skip and run around a playground so it’s really good there are a lot of choices these days. Safety is now a really important part of putting a playground together for recreational parks, nursuries, schools and other public places. A lot of these are now impact resistant which really helps when you have super fast children speeding around the park and jumping off every surface they want. E has fallen over in the park quite a few times but she’s not had a serious accident and I think this is largely because of the playground floor surface.