Preventing Injuries With Proper Playground Surface Design

When you are designing a playground or setting up a prefab playground in your yard, your most important concern should always be safety. As you well know from your own childhood, children simply like to push the limits and they don't really know where those limits even are, so it's up to you to prepare things ahead of time to minimize injury risks as much as possible. One of the first aspects of your home playground to consider is the ground surface.

Many injuries that happen on a playground or around a playset have to do with the integrity of the surface, as children often fall off of or jump from equipment, fall when running, and most likely roughhouse on the ground. Here are some things you want to keep in mind when designing this surface.

Safe Material

Of course, the first thing you want to do is decide what type of material you want to use, and there really are many to choose from. I have seen modern playgrounds that use concrete as a surface, and you can imagine how it feels to fall onto something like that. It has to be soft in some manner.

Some playgrounds are also simple soil or grass, but this comes with problems as well. Soil becomes hard-packed over time, especially with children running around on it, and in the long run it may even end up as hard as asphalt. Grass is not thick enough to provide the padding needed, and the soil underneath poses just as many problems as raw soil. As the grass wears away where the most running occurs, it might as well be raw dirt anyhow.

Some of the best surfaces are composed of some type of loose material. This may include sawdust, wood chips, gravel, or mulch. Rubber has also become a commonly used material, and it may come in the form of large mats or it may be shredded.

Obstacles

Of course, the surface integrity can be threatened any time foreign objects are accidently mixed in. Before putting in the fill, make sure to properly remove any thick tree roots. Clear away any glass, metal, or stones.

Even as time goes by, you should always check around the playground and clean up a little bit, checking for trash or hard objects that may have been dropped. Even water puddles can be a danger as they may alter the consistency of the surface fill—not to mention harbor bacteria if the water stands too long.

Proper Surface Laying

You also need to make sure the surface fill is laid down right. While this differs depending on what type of fill you are using, you can safely assume that any loose surface fill will need to be about a foot deep. And loose means loose—never pack it down when laying it in.

The surface below the playset needs to maintain a six foot perimeter on all sides to keep the kids safe no matter how far they fall, and you may want to compensate for swingsets, as they have the ability to throw children a little further. You also need to think about how high the equipment is—if the child is standing on top, their body should never be more than twelve feet above the ground. Any higher, and you might as well have laid down concrete.

Those are some basic tips for designing a good surface for your child's playset. Never think you can just buy a new playset and set it up anywhere in the yard without thinking about what a landing will feel like—provide some soft, thick padding and injuries will be greatly reduced. Your children deserve to have fun, but they deserve to have fun injury-free even more.