Busy Getting Dizzy

I’m a BA candidate with a B+ average at Cal State Los Angeles, doing research on playgrounds for a paper in the Child Development Department about playground design. This is Tuesday, March 11, 1975.

This is my twelfth park in four days. I sit and observe children’s patterns of play.

What I notice is that the merry-go-round is used more than any other piece of equipment in the sand box, followed by the swings.

Merry-go-rounds seem to be used a lot - mostly as a transition between slide and swing and back again. Just now a four-year-old jumps off her swing, runs to the M.G.R. and takes a few revolutions around before jumping off and climbing up the slide, sliding down the slide, taking a few more turns ‘round the MGR and finally hopping back on a different swing.

Fast Forward...

May 17, 2012. I’m walking home from the Post Office and wander through the local park. Two BA’s, two daughters and one grand daughter later I observe that this park and, come to think of it, all the parks have done away with merry go rounds. Most of the sand has been replaced by black rubber matting. Jungle gyms have more plastic than metal parts and there are a lot more hover mothers in twenty first century parks. Not much free time for kids simply to play their own way. My friends and I seemed to thrive on benign neglect - imagining all sorts of important events, people, improbable crises and solutions to myriad problems. Spinning around, I think, aided our creativity.

I wonder what happened to take away such a popular piece of equipment. Training the vestibular system through spinning - orienting/disorienting - seems crucial to good brain development. Even the chains on the swings are now rubber or plastic-coated and do not easily lend themselves to spinning the swing seat round and round. 

In the 1950’s we were thrilled to be busy getting dizzy - going around on the twirly bar, the merry go round or spinning on the swings until we were completely dizzy, falling down, laughing. 

My good friend Jacky was a trouper. My dad found a discarded two-seated whirly-gig and brought it home. It had a lever handle - horizontal to the ground in front of each seat . The handles connected to a gear box in the center. You’d sit and push/pull the bar to make the device go round and round - forwards OR backwards. Jacky and I would sit on that contraption and spin around endlessly - until she had to throw-up. Then she’d rest a bit and we’d twirl again! 

I wonder if anyone has done a study to correlate ADHD, ADD or Asbergers with lack of dizzy time. Maybe humans NEED to get dizzy in order to develop our brains for the break-neck speed at which we travel.

Bring back the MGR!

Or maybe we just listen to the political pundits for our dose of dizzy.