Taking A Much Closer Look At The Importance Of Play All Throughout the United States
There are many facets to raising healthy children, as any parent here in the United States or beyond can attest to quite easily. From feeding them a healthy diet to providing them with love and affection and acceptance, making your child into a well rounded and happy adult involves many different components. Physical play is just one of them – but it’s most certainly an important one.
After all, the benefits of physical play are many. For one thing, it helps to keep children in shape. With more and more kids becoming overweight and obese these days, fighting back against obesity and the myriad of health problems that it can lead to is a hugely important thing for any parent to do. With 25 minutes of high calorie burning activity recommended at least three times throughout the week, it’s important for kids to stay moving and mobile in various forms of play as often as is possible.
In addition to this, play – particularly physical play – is actually crucial for brain development in very young children. Before children reach the age of six, their fine and gross motor skills are still developing through the direct use of those skills. Physical play and activity is a great way to promote that usage and an important thing to do, as these skills must be fully developed by the time a child reaches the age of six or else they likely won’t finish developing at all, something that can, as one might suspect, have lasting repercussions.
Unfortunately, too few children are getting up and moving in the ways that they should be. The data that has been gathered on this subject is actually quite startling, as it shows that only around one third of all kids are getting that aforementioned weekly amount of recommended exercise. After all, the average child is now spending as many as seven and a half hours on various types of screens, from TVs to tablets to even phones of their very own. And parents are more worried than ever about the lack of physical play that their children are engaging in, with up to two thirds of all parents in this country stating that they feel concern over their child or children potentially using electronics much too frequently.
But giving children a safe and structured place to play can be hugely successful for getting them up and moving, and playgrounds around the country can provide just that place. And playgrounds these days are safer than ever before, in part thanks to the use of pour in place rubber. Pour in place rubber provides an alternative for the ground in any given playground, and this pour in place rubber will typically be found anywhere within the playground border. From playground equipment for schools and beyond, the use of pour in place rubber has kept many a child safe during a fall from a piece of playground equipment, something that will eventually happen no matter what other safety precautions are taken.
If pour in place rubber is not an option to go underneath school playground equipment for sale, wood chips present another popular option. Much like pour in place rubber, wood chips present a safer space to land, a space that will cushion a fall more more adequately and safely than pure cement or asphalt. Simply implementing these materials, this pour in place rubber or wood chips, can ultimately make a big difference in the safety of the children who use the equipment in question, these residential playset parts and the like.
And playgrounds now offer more different things to play on and wish than ever before. The playground swing seat remains, of course, but swing seats for those who are physically disabled have become more and more commonplace, allowing more people – more children – to take advantage of any given playground space. Though a swing for a disabled child can cost a good deal of money, it is an investment that many people feel is more than worth it at the end of the day.
