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This section pointedly exemplifies a reactionary society I've considered generalizing for the sake of discussion, and often avoid those comments for lack of non-reactive and logical audience: but "...cost twice as much and be half as fun..." as opposed to cultivating healthy training for youth alongside their caregivers (parents or otherwise who literally may have so little time and resources to teach a kid anything helpful with their growing bodies beyond "don't touch the hot stove" ) and this can look like the school playground having a dedicated supervisor AND assistant who teaches bodily autonomy basics the way kids would get in intros to martial arts, gymnastics, etc.
Public parks could have a similar paid pair of attendees and from my limited research into job costs perspective: these teams would cost so much less to employ (like sanitation workers and groundskeepers are ever going away, c'mon) than the millions poured into more boring playsets. I HAVE done assembly work in various places and worked with kids from infants to preteens for years, so some of these ideas come from personal observation and hearing complaints.
Would you rather have awesome climbing/playset gear in rubber coated steel (not super modern, by the way) with fluffy mulch to run around on, or smaller, easy-grip plastic covered "little kid" gear that limits SOME risk by making most of the place more age appropriate for the toddler range than anyone? Yikes. This principle of "train them up" versus "child-proof everything" could apply so much further in our world... Thoughts?
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"Sixth, might we have changed our level of risk tolerance? That is, might increased caution be due not purely to lawsuitphobia, but to really caring more about whether or not people are protected? I read stuff every so often about how playgrounds are becoming obsolete because nobody wants to let kids run around unsupervised on something with sharp edges. Suppose that one in 10,000 kids get a horrible playground-related injury. Is it worth making playgrounds cost twice as much and be half as fun in order to decrease that number to one in 100,000? This isn’t a rhetorical question; I think different people can have legitimately different opinions here (though there are probably some utilitarian things we can do to improve them)."