Can playground design help reduce bullying?

Playgrounds designed with risk-taking in mind may mean more pushing and shoving during recess, but they also might make kids less likely to feel bullied, a small experiment in New Zealand suggests.

For the study, researchers randomly selected eight elementary schools to get modified playgrounds with lots of loose and moving parts, chances to socialize and build things, and opportunities to play with bikes and skateboards. A control group of eight schools kept their traditional playgrounds.

After two years, children at the schools with modified playgrounds were about 33 percent more likely to report pushing and shoving during recess than kids at schools with traditional playgrounds, researchers report in Pediatrics. With modified playgrounds, however, kids were 31 percent less likely to report bullying to teachers.

The main limitation of the study is that bullying is difficult to assess, the authors note. In addition, the study was too small to detect meaningful differences between girls and boys and had too few teachers to draw many conclusions from what educators observed.

Even so, the results suggest it may make sense to move from play areas that are more structured to spaces that offer an element of risk and fewer rules, said Sarah Clark, IHPI member and co-director of the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

“Too often, parents' inclination is to remove anything that could be potentially risky and they push schools to do the same - but that inclination works against kids' developmental need to use play as a way to challenge themselves,” said Clark. “So parents, back off and allow kids a little more freedom in their play space and style.”