Toys in the Playground

Sacred son and Ph.D. candidate Elyon writes: "I was wondering if you have blogged about toys in the playground. One of my neighbors left a bunch of toys in the playground a number of months ago. Most are still there. Some toys have disappeared (or broken?), and some new ones have appeared. It's sort of an unspoken neighborhood co-op. I have heard of at least one other playground where this has happened. Do you know of this behavior?"

I answer: "Actually, no." Elyon is living in Holland in something like a row house in a neighborhood of row house neighborhoods. Each of these neighborhoodlets surrounds a parklet. And each parklet includes a playgroundlet. So the kids who live there rightly regard the playground as theirs - shared, perhaps, but also protected and, to a very real degree, private. So when they leave their toys they have good reason to believe that they will find them again when they come back to play again. My guess is that we'd find similar behavior in any semi-closed community.

But it does remind me of Jay Beckwith's remarkable Finger Parks. Jay's Finger Parks are playground installations, meant for the more public playgrounds that are built by civic parks commissions. Though kids should not be encouraged to leave their toys behind when they're finished playing, Finger Parks are a brilliant acknowledgment of how kids use toys as vehicles for building community