A mall in British Columbia, Canada recently took flak for its newly-renovated playground for kids. The Guildford Town Centre, located in Surrey, B.C., reportedly spent $280 million on the renovation, scrapping the existing playground equipment—ladders, slides, swings, and all—and retrofitting everything with iPads instead.

The result is an interactive play space, which the mall’s spokeperson is proud to say is “new and unique.”

The Guildford Town Centre play area before the renovation
(Image from huffingtonpost.ca)

At first glance, it seems a smart move to acquaint kids with technology (aren’t they already?).  Many parents however are just not happy with the new changes.

Screen Time for Kids

The big deal with that techified playground is that kids are much too exposed to various electronic screens already—from TVs to tablets, smartphones to gaming consoles.

Nowadays, even children as young as three or four are already being allowed to play with them. Some parents have come to depend on the pacifying capabilities of those glowing screens, especially as a growing number of kid-friendly games and apps have sprouted with a mission to educate, entertain, and preoccupy young minds (supposedly even babies’).

Want proof of how widespread it has become? Just look at those kid-proof cases for available iPads and other gadgets.

Screen exposure for kids can be all right, but only if it’s carefully supervised. Even Steve Jobs isn’t a big fan of allowing his own children some screen time with the iPad.

When other life-enriching activities—for instance reading a real paper book, creatively playing outdoors and interacting with the other kids, or enjoying Nature—are inadvertently put aside, those glowing screens become a problem. The Mayo Clinic lists several effects of too much screen exposure such as:

obesity
irregular sleep
behavioral problems
poor academic performance
violence

Offline Fun

Despite all these, we as a society have become more open to the possibilities of technology, and more lenient in allowing those possibilities influence our lives. Our children’s lives included. If in the past, psychologists had always warned against the ill effects of video games on children, nowadays sentiments have more or less relaxed. A recent study has even pointed out that gaming can also be beneficial and even healthy.

For fuss-free falls, rubber mat make for safer playgrounds.

Today’s generation of kids might be lucky and privileged as technology becomes more and more casually and seamlessly built into their lives. Yet these same kids can never experience what life was like before the Internet arrived, something that people born before 1985—the last of a dying breed—were lucky to know all too well.

Without romanticizing “life before the Internet” too much, let’s just say us adults, more or less, have a richer and more nuanced appreciation of things in life. That commercial for Internet Explorer, Child of the 90s, pretty much sums it. (A troll was still a friend,… lunch was a puzzle, not a picture….). Who knew being offline could be so fun?

With the way we’re starting our kids early on gadgets, they’ll never have a chance to figure out the difference.

Last Few Places

Which brings us back to that mall playground. Some had argued it’s the mall’s way of bringing down cost of premium, especially as there are no more unsafe seesaws and dangerous monkey bars to worry about. In some ways, that play-it-safe move is understandable, given our society’s increasing tendency to sue for just about anything.

All sharp corners and boxy surfaces: the Elysium Playground in Queensland, Australia isn’t exactly kid-safe, but it’s a start.

True, malls aren’t doing pure public service when they install play spaces indoors. At best, playgrounds are just amenities originally designed to draw in a subset of customers who shop with their kids. Playgrounds do quite a good job of gathering kids in one area where they can make noise and run around, out of the way of shoppers.

But it’s also quite a big leap to take the physical aspect of fun out of playgrounds just for the sake of safety. We have such nice childhood memories of playgrounds, let’s not turn them into a digital mockery.

In this increasingly wired and connected world, playgrounds are one of the last few places in which our kids can have pure, original, offline fun.