What we choose to care about

There is a process we hope government goes through when making policy about really important things. Let’s say, for example, that the goal is to eradicate some disease. To do this, you have to learn more about it and build a develop of experts, by paying for educations, labs, research grants, experiments, etc. Once you have your experts, you have to set up a governmental body that cares enough to consult them. Then, the results of that discussion have to be filtered through politics and distilled down into actionable laws or regulations so that, at last, the policy has some benefits for the population.

This process is chaotic, inefficient, unpredictable, and requires a great deal of trust and good faith, as there’s no guarantee that the outcome will be what the people getting it started would like it to be. There are all sorts of areas that frankly aren’t important enough for this, where there are justifiable arguments that a decision made with limited information is good enough, and so the payoff wouldn’t be worth the expense. You’d only do it if you cared, a lot.

This is a ponderous and expansive introduction to what is actually a small, sweet, and joyful example of something in Norway that makes me happy. That is to say, this post is actually about: playgrounds. The playgrounds in Trondheim are noticeably more creative, diverse, and fun than the playgrounds of the US, to the point that there had to be some systemic reason.

Like all political decisions, the story of the Trondheim playgrounds must be viewed through the culture of the place. In Norway, there’s general agreement that a happy person is active, capable, and, most importantly, outside. You simply cannot be a happy Norwegian without time on a trail, a field, or a coastline. The public interest is in raising children to be capable and interested in achieving that particular form of happiness.

Queen Maud University College (Dronning Mauds Minne Høgskole or DMMH) is an institution of higher education in Trondheim that offers bachelors and masters degrees in early childhood education. In a bachelors program, a student can specialize in, for example: Child Culture, Art, and Creativity; Special Education and Early Intervention; Multicultural Childhood and Diversity; or, of course, Outdoor Play and Nature Activities. This bachelors degree (not necessarily from DMMH, though the institution does produce 17% of all day care teachers in Norway) is required to hold a leadership position in any daycare in Norway.

The instructors at DMMH evidently also engage in research, which is where it intersects with the playgrounds of Trondheim. Professor Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter studies “risky play,” or exciting play that includes uncertainty, challenge, and an appropriate risk of physical injury. After studying children’s play in Trondheim, she broke risky play down into six categories:

• Play at heights: play such as balancing or climbing at a height sufficient to cause fear of falling.
• Play at speed: rapid, uncontrolled movement such as sliding, swinging, or ziplining, requiring physical control to avoid scary collisions.
• Play with dangerous tools: includes stick play but also things like hammers and axes, which require coordination and focus.
• Play near dangerous elements: for example, open bodies of water, steep drop-offs, or controlled fire pits.
• Roughhousing: wrestling, play fighting, or chasing, introducing bodily limits and social complexity.
• Play where children can “disappear” or explore alone: exploration of obscured or wild areas where children cannot be seen by supervisory adults.

Sandseter’s work suggests that risky play has an “anti-phobic” effect on children. Through self-initiated, scary play, children subject themselves to doses of fear, desensitizing themselves to anxieties. When protected from risky play, they undergo “risk deprivation,” do not learn to master fear, and exhibit higher levels of anxiety or phobias later in life. They also become less active, less healthy, and less likely to stay fit later in life.

I certainly believe that children enjoy those kinds of play, and have independently noticed Annalise exploring (and greatly enjoying) bite-sized exposure to these fears, gradually pushing her limit further and further. I’m not enough of an expert to really analyze the “risk deprivation” outcomes later in life. But, Sandseter’s theory of risky play has been heavily influential in Norwegian theories of childhood development (Google Translate will help you with this link).

American playground design is based around safety. With this as the primary focus, playgrounds are built around purchasable elements, where the design company has understood and met all the safety requirements, taking the load off the purchaser. This also makes playgrounds more predictable, as the elements that make up each playground are understood and mastered by children so as to make them safe: a ladder, a slide, a swing.

Trondheim has instead integrated a need for risky play into their playground design. Other elements of their regulatory landscape include a size and proximity requirement as part of all housing construction, snow-plowable access usable by those with disabilities, seating protected from weather, handicapped-accessible seating and play, and a ban on rubber surfacing and other microplastic-creating materials. More to the point of risky play, these playgrounds also have a “preservation of challenge” requirement – playgrounds are to be designed such that they use the natural topography of the ground, interact with the surrounding environment, and invite risky play. The result is a step away from default playgrounds, and into much more diverse playgrounds that each have different things to do and ways to play. Here’s a tour of some of our favorites!

Tempeparken is the newest playground in Trondheim, a great exhibition of what they’re trying to do, and an immediate favorite of Annalise’s. Plenty of places to fall short distances, and play with some novel things. Join Annalise on a tour of the things to do!

In these last ones, these little posts can be slid from one side to the other. Annalise and these two other kids figured out that to get to the top ones, you have to set up steps based on the lower one.

The “Jingle Bells playground,” due to proximity, is our most frequent stop (the playground is near the cathedral, which has bells, so, “jingle bells”). The Jingle Bells playground has a long, steep slide built into the hill, a “spider web” of ropes for climbing around on, a merry-go-round, a river at the boundary, a pretty high structure to rock climb, and a bodyweight gym that is just as frequently used by children as adults.

Strandveiparken is totally different — rather than risky play, it’s built around pretend play. A bunch of Norwegian-style child-sized buildings are arranged around gardens and water features, with water play available pretty far into the cold weather. There’s a fire house, a store, a latrine (?), a bus, etc.

Ladeparken really shows the attempts to fit a playground around a landscape. It has a rope structure to climb high on (I don’t have a picture of that one, but it is like the one pictured from a nearby elementary school), and a “floor is lava” type course built of stones in a pond (in our picture, the pond was dry, but it’s often filled).

Ilaparken, aka “the zip line playground,” pretty much only has one feature, but it’s a good one.

It’s worth a look again at her barnehage playground, too, which has its own creative features, including a playset you can only reach via rock climbing wall.

They’re all interesting, and they’re all different, and they’re all creative. We don’t just go “to the playground,” we have a circuit and a choice to make each day about how Annalise wants to play. We love it. I’ve said before in this blog that all I really want is for people to be nice to my kid, and that one of our main reasons for moving to Norway was that the whole country is devoted to childhood. Is there any greater illustration than this much attention being paid to playgrounds?