When was the last time you reveled in the great outdoors? If you’re like me, then some of your best and warmest memories come from not only being outside but also from the unbound, freewheeling kind of play that makes being outside a kid’s paradise. “Just you wait,” I tell my two boys, who are at the stage where they should just go out and make some memories. And in the countdown to the summer, I have begun reimagining for them what playing outside truly means and can mean.
In this post, I’ll take a deep dive into the nature playscapes and adventure playgrounds that I love. I’ll explore what makes them not just spaces where Mother Nature goes to the “Extreme Home Makeover” version of herself, designing much, much better than most human designers could even imagine doing—and what makes them do better than other spaces at giving kids a panoply of payoffs that laudable child-development experts say our kids need. And though the conversation I’ll stitch together in this post might wander a bit, I’ll do my best to keep it illustrated with snazzy pictures and I’ll at least try to make from my-times-have-changed to amazing-what-I-found perspective. So, sit back, get comfortable, and join me for coffee. We’re going way out into the wilds of the domain where kids play in Nature.
The Enchantment of Natural Playgrounds
The first time my daughter came across a nature playscape, she reacted with a kind of joy and astonishment that is hard to overstate. As though happening upon some sort of miracle, she discovered a playground that was elemental and imaginative in a way that she could immediately recognize but that isn’t the stuff of ordinary playgrounds. No shiny metal bars and plastic slide here. Instead, there was a supremely climbable arrangement of boulders and stones that could only be described as “child-size,” a plaza of balancing logs set up in an unfixed antepattern, and a stream yes, a real stream that had the run of a little wetland.
Play areas known as nature playscapes are designed to imitate real wild settings. Instead of using plastic toys, the equipment found in a nature playscape might include sand, water, rocks, or trees—stuff that I would