How Playgrounds Are Designed To Teach Cooperation Or Competition

Adults underestimate what children are learning on a playground. Not because adults are stupid — because playgrounds feel like background. They're the thing kids do while adults are doing something else. But from the child's perspective, the playground is foreground. It's where they practice being a person among other persons. It's where they figure out authority, peers, risk, fairness, desire, conflict, and repair.

Every piece of equipment on a playground teaches something. A few examples.

The slide. Teaches: I take my turn. I experience a brief solo thrill. I get out of the way for the next person. It is fundamentally an individualist device. The experience is not shared. It is consumed.

The swing set. Teaches: I can get high on my own power. If someone pushes me, I go higher, but I don't have to reciprocate. Swings invite parallel play — kids swinging next to each other, not really together. They also invite a specific kind of risk-taking: how high can I go, can I jump off, can I twist the chains.

The seesaw (or teeter-totter). Teaches: I cannot do this alone. I need a partner of roughly my weight. We have to negotiate rhythm. If one of us stops cooperating, the other crashes. This is a cooperation device.

The merry-go-round. Teaches: Collective effort produces a collective ride. Two kids pushing gets a slow spin. Four kids pushing gets a thrilling one. Also teaches: the consequences of someone getting off mid-ride. Now outlawed in most American playgrounds because of injury risk.

The monkey bars. Teaches: progression, persistence, upper-body strength, and the fear-mastery cycle. Individualist, but with an audience. Other kids watching is part of the learning.

The sandbox. Teaches: shared material is negotiated. There's one bucket and three kids. Work it out. This is where a lot of social-emotional learning happens, and a lot of adult intervention ruins it.

Loose parts (planks, tires, crates, rope). Teaches: the environment is not given. You can make things. Your ideas can be tested against physics. Other kids can help or refuse to help. Negotiation is constant. Authorship is collective.

The big fixed plastic structure. Teaches: the environment is given. You use it as designed. You do not alter it. Your imagination is optional.

Put differently: the equipment is a pedagogy. You can read the values of a society in its playground equipment the same way you can read its values in its architecture. A society that builds plastic fortresses with foam flooring is preparing its children for a specific kind of adulthood — one where the world is pre-built, safety is pre-calculated, and their job is to consume the experience rather than build it.

Carl Theodor Sørensen was a Danish landscape architect who spent the 1930s designing traditional parks and became increasingly frustrated. He noticed that the children ignored his beautiful, expensive designs and played in the rubble behind the buildings.

In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, he got permission to try something different. At Emdrup, a housing estate outside Copenhagen, he designated a fenced-in plot of land, filled it with construction materials and tools, hired a "play leader" named John Bertelsen, and let kids do what they wanted.

What they did was extraordinary. They built forts. They dug tunnels. They constructed small villages. They formed governments. They fought, made up, stole from each other, and eventually developed elaborate systems for sharing tools. They lit fires and cooked food. They played with real danger and, remarkably, rarely got seriously hurt. Bertelsen's role was not to supervise. It was to be a resource — to help with projects that were beyond the children's skill, to mediate disputes that turned genuinely ugly, and to provide materials.

After the war, Lady Marjorie Allen of Hurtwood, a British landscape architect and child advocate, visited Emdrup and became an evangelist. She introduced the model to Britain as "adventure playgrounds." By the 1960s there were dozens in London. Continental Europe — Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland — followed.

The research on adventure playgrounds is consistent. Kids who play on them show higher levels of self-confidence, physical competence, creativity, and social skills than matched controls on traditional playgrounds. Injuries are not meaningfully higher, and when they happen, they tend to be minor — scrapes, bruises, the occasional broken wrist. The catastrophic injuries that safety standards are designed to prevent are rare on adventure playgrounds and common on traditional ones, mostly because traditional playgrounds invite falls from height with no developed physical competence to manage them.

The adventure playground movement peaked in the 1970s and 80s. Then it collapsed, at least in North America.

The collapse was specific and traceable. A few inflection points.

1972: The CPSC forms. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission was established in 1972, and in 1981 it published the first Handbook for Public Playground Safety. The handbook was not law, but it became a de facto standard that courts used to assess negligence.

1970s–80s: Lawsuits. A series of high-profile playground injury lawsuits established that municipalities, schools, and equipment manufacturers could be held liable for serious injuries. Plaintiffs won settlements in the millions.

1980s: Insurance. Municipal liability insurance premiums rose sharply. Cities and schools began removing equipment that was deemed high-risk — merry-go-rounds, tall slides, seesaws, any piece with a fall height greater than six feet.

1990s: ASTM standards. The American Society for Testing and Materials published a playground equipment standard (F1487) that became the industry reference. Equipment that didn't meet it was essentially uninsurable. Manufacturers designed to the standard. The standard drove the industry toward low, enclosed, separate structures on soft surfacing.

2000s: The hegemony of the post-and-platform structure. The typical modern American playground — bolted-together colored plastic, a central platform connecting to slides and climbing features, rubber or poured-in-place safety surfacing underneath — became the default. Loose parts disappeared. Adventure playgrounds closed.

2010s: A small countermovement. Writers like Hanna Rosin ("The Overprotected Kid," The Atlantic, 2014) and Lenore Skenazy (Free-Range Kids) started pushing back. A handful of adventure playgrounds reopened — The Land in North Wales, play:groundNYC on Governors Island, a few experiments in California and Texas. But the default remained the plastic structure.

The liability logic is not wrong, exactly. Kids do get hurt on playgrounds. Municipalities do face real financial risk. The problem is that the logic optimizes for a single variable — reducing the worst-case injury — while ignoring everything else the playground is doing. If the playground is a curriculum, you can't evaluate it only on how safe it is any more than you can evaluate a school only on how quiet it is. Safety is a constraint. It is not the purpose.

A partial inventory of what disappeared when American playgrounds homogenized.

Risk as pedagogy. Ellen Sandseter, a Norwegian researcher, has cataloged six categories of "risky play" that children spontaneously seek: heights, speed, dangerous tools, dangerous elements (fire, water), rough-and-tumble, and getting lost. Each category, she argues, has evolutionary and developmental purpose. Kids practice risky play to learn how to manage fear, assess capability, and recover from mistakes. When you remove risk from the playground, you don't remove the developmental need. You just remove the venue for meeting it.

Unsupervised peer governance. On a traditional playground, adults intervene constantly — in disputes, in inclusion, in turn-taking. On an adventure playground or a loose-parts playground, adults mostly stay out. This means kids have to work things out with each other. They develop negotiation skills, leadership, followership, and the capacity to repair ruptures. When adults are always present as arbiters, kids outsource conflict management and never build the muscle.

Physical competence. Kids on adventure playgrounds climb higher, carry heavier things, use more tools, and develop more motor control than kids on standardized playgrounds. This competence transfers. Adults who grew up with physical risk in childhood have better body awareness, take more calculated risks as adults, and report higher confidence.

Authorship. On a loose-parts playground, the environment is made. On a fixed playground, the environment is given. A child who learns "I can change the world I'm in" grows up differently from a child who learns "the world is given, use it as designed." This is arguably the deepest lesson and the one most completely erased by the shift.

Cooperation as structural requirement. The seesaw, the merry-go-round, the rope bridge, the fort-build — all required cooperation. The plastic structure doesn't. You can play on it alone, and many kids do. They learn that play is a solo activity with other kids as scenery.

In the last fifteen years, researchers have started making the connections explicit.

Peter Gray's 2013 book Free to Learn argues that the decline of free play is one of the main drivers of rising rates of anxiety and depression in American children. His data: across the twentieth century, unstructured outdoor play time declined by more than half, while rates of childhood anxiety and depression climbed through the ceiling. Correlation is not causation, but the mechanism is plausible and the trend is long.

Jonathan Haidt's 2024 book The Anxious Generation extends this argument and adds the rise of smartphones as a second load. He argues that we have conducted a vast unplanned experiment: we removed free play and then replaced it with screen time, and the result is visible in the mental health data of everyone born after 1995.

Mariana Brussoni and colleagues at the University of British Columbia have published a series of studies on risky play, concluding that outdoor risky play is associated with better physical and mental health outcomes in children, and that the risks of restricting it outweigh the risks of allowing it. Brussoni's "Outdoor Risky Play Statement," endorsed by a range of pediatric and public health organizations, argues for a return to risk-tolerant playground design.

Ellen Sandseter's research, mentioned earlier, has been replicated across multiple countries. The finding is consistent: children seek risky play spontaneously, they are competent at calibrating risk to their ability, and denying them the opportunity has developmental costs.

If you're designing a playground — for your kid's school, your neighborhood, your town — here's a frame. Ask: what kind of citizen does this community want to raise?

If you want consumers, build the plastic structure. It teaches kids the world is given, safe, predictable, and to be used as designed.

If you want cooperators, build seesaws, merry-go-rounds, rope bridges, and shared structures. Make the equipment require partnership. Kids will learn that another person is necessary for some of the best things.

If you want makers, build loose parts. Planks, tires, crates, buckets, rope, sand, water, a shed with tools for the older kids. Hire a play worker if you can. Kids will learn they can build the world they want to live in.

If you want citizens — people who can self-govern, negotiate, take risks, repair conflicts — build an adventure playground. Not because every community can do this, but because the principle it embodies is the principle a functioning democracy needs. Citizens who cannot negotiate with peers outside of adult authority are not citizens. They are subjects.

1. The equipment audit. Go to your nearest playground. Stay for an hour. Count: how many pieces of equipment require cooperation to use? How many can be used alone? What is the ratio?

2. The intervention count. At the same playground, count how many times adults intervene in kids' play in an hour. Note what they intervene for. Ask yourself: if the adults hadn't intervened, what would the kids have learned?

3. The loose-parts experiment. At home, in your yard, or at your kid's school with permission, bring a pile of boxes, planks, tires, rope, and fabric. Step back. Watch what happens. Do not instruct. Do not solve problems. Just watch.

4. The risk inventory. Think about your own childhood. Make a list of the five riskiest things you did as a kid that you would not let your own kids do. Ask yourself what you learned from them, and what you would have been like without them.

5. The community design question. If your neighborhood were rebuilt tomorrow, what would a playground look like that teaches the kind of citizen you want your kids to become? Draw it. Share it. This is a civic act.

We Are Human means we need each other. The playground is the first place a child discovers this, or doesn't. A playground designed for solo consumption teaches that other humans are optional. A playground designed for cooperation teaches that other humans are necessary. A playground designed for co-creation teaches that other humans are collaborators in building the world.

If every community designed its playgrounds for cooperation and co-creation, the kids who grew up on those playgrounds would enter adulthood already competent at the skills peace requires: negotiation, repair, shared risk, shared reward, self-governance without external authority. The premise of this book is that world peace is possible if every person says yes. Saying yes is a skill. The skill is taught or untaught in early childhood. The playground is one of the places it happens.

You cannot design the world your kids will inherit. You can design the playground where they learn who they are.

- Sørensen, Carl Theodor. Open Spaces for Town and Country. 1931. - Allen of Hurtwood, Lady Marjorie. Planning for Play. MIT Press, 1969. - Rosin, Hanna. "The Overprotected Kid." The Atlantic, April 2014. - Gray, Peter. Free to Learn. Basic Books, 2013. - Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation. Penguin Press, 2024. - Sandseter, Ellen Beate Hansen. "Categorising Risky Play — How Can We Identify Risk-Taking in Children's Play?" European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 2007. - Brussoni, Mariana et al. "What is the Relationship between Risky Outdoor Play and Health in Children?" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2015. - Skenazy, Lenore. Free-Range Kids. Jossey-Bass, 2009. - CPSC. Public Playground Safety Handbook. Multiple editions since 1981. - Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods. Algonquin Books, 2005. - Solomon, Susan G. American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space. University Press of New England, 2005.