We work hard for soft landings

In my previous post in this blog, I mentioned that I was preparing a webinar for our LATAM and Spanish speaking customers, about safety flooring at Playgrounds. You can register on the link below. I also talked about my personal experience with the safety of the playgrounds of my childhood in the early 60s.

I have no reason to complain, if I compare my old playground with the ones available at the beginning of the 20th century.

Luckily I was able to consult two interesting articles in Spanish that my colleague and also presenter on the webinar found:

• VOXPOPULI publication 27/03/2018 (https://www.vozpopuli.com/)
• Post by Ana Maria Parra on a blog: (http://informefinalucp.blogspot.com/)
  

Playgrounds in the early 1900s were huge metal structures, more than 5 m high from the ground, with swings of similar length of chains and metal slides in which you could reach enormous speeds, whose metal plates were so hot under the sun, that you could cook an egg.
There was no safety flooring or at best a few mattresses were improvised in certain areas as you can see in the photo below.

In short, these were areas closer to a circus show than to a playful space for children.
As a consequence of frequent accidents with serious injuries and the resulting lawsuits and legal disputes against municipalities, this type of facility was withdrawn during the 50-60s only a bit before I was born.
Towards the mid-70s, wood began to be used, improving safety and children comfort.
During the 80s, technical standards and safety regulations began to be implemented in all economic activities and therefore also that of manufacturing, installation and maintenance of playgrounds.
Currently the standards and regulations on Playgrounds, provide the necessary safety and protection for children, without forgetting that facing a certain risk is necessary for their learning process and cognitive training, improving balance, capturing spatial limits and expanding their ability to weigh danger as a future adults.
Modern playgrounds are much safer, generally made of plastic, rubber, metals and wood and are governed by widely accepted international regulations. All of them have some sort of safety surfacing. We as parents and grandparents can be much calmer when we take our little ones to play in the current Playgrounds.
As the title of this post indicates, extracted from a phrase from a CONICA promotional video, which you can see below, we all must continue working hard.