Playground Safety Club

Black text on a yellow background with a black and white interlocking square design in the center

During the American industrial revolution of the late 19th and early 20th century, significant immigration from both foreign countries and rural America into major American cities resulted in high rates of poverty and slum-like living conditions. In many of these impoverished areas, playing in the streets was prohibited and thus led to large groups of impoverished and/or homeless children with no outlets for their energy and creativity. This led to social reformers and charitable groups forming a movement for play and playgrounds to create safe and productive ways for children to spend their free time and expend their often-destructive energies. The first playgrounds were sand gardens, but by the early 1900s play areas began to be built in the style of model playgrounds with equipment like swings, building blocks, may poles, benches, and handball courts. Play on playgrounds was not an unsupervised activity and most playgrounds in the 1920s and 1930s had professional play leaders, but not standardized safety regulations for play equipment. In 1906 the Playground Associated of America (PAA) was founded and, with that, there was a push for more playground safety as many children sustained injuries on the unregulated equipment and hard surfaces that playgrounds were built upon. Playground safety groups began organically in local areas in the early 1900s alongside the emergence of the PAA as the public began to pay more attention to the importance of play in childhood development, as well as the necessity for safety regulations and monitoring by adults or trained teenagers.