Swings in the Living Room: Volume 1

We have swings in the living room. My partner got them for free while curbside shopping before bulk trash day in our neighborhood. They were perfectly functional, and after cleaning them up, they hung them from a beam in our living room.

Safety note: we used eye screws rated up to 300 lbs each, off-center widthwise so they actually screwed into the wood and not the gaps between the planks. Make sure to mount everything securely!

We also have a huge, garishly bright playset made of molded plastic. Our daycare provider gifted it to us when she moved out of the state. It's got two levels with a ladder on one side and a slide on the other. I think it was probably designed to be kept outside, but it sits in our living room by the window, allowing the kids a nice view out into our yard.

Between these pieces, a homemade Pikler triangle, a rocking horse, open shelving for toys, a piano, and a kid-size table, most of our living room is designed around the kids. To some people (certainly to many of the adults I grew up around), it might seem like an overindulgence. But consciously designing our living spaces to accommodate the kids' needs has made a huge positive difference in our whole family's day-to-day lives. Today I want to talk about child-centered design both inside and outside the home: what benefits it has for kids and adults, and why public life isn't designed to be accessible to kids.

Obviously, the people who benefit most from child-centered design are children themselves. Here are the major advantages:

• Enabling children's autonomy
• Promoting reintegration of children into public spaces
• Helping temper energy and promoting self-regulation
• Cultivating a sense of social responsibility (for others, by children)

Enabling Children's Autonomy

How often do we blame children (or their parents) for their struggle to navigate spaces that were not designed with their needs in mind? Very, very often. Think of how most bathrooms are designed: adult-sized toilets large enough to fall into, high sinks without any step stools or other accessibility aids, hand dryers and paper towel dispensers mounted four feet high on the wall. Many children as young as 2 years old are capable of using the bathroom themselves when the space is designed to accommodate them. But when it isn't, they need to interrupt an adult to help them, costing time and the opportunity to build independence.

Now extend that logic to, well, everything. Stores with high cashier counters that young children can't reach to put their purchases on the conveyor belt, much less pay for the items themselves. Car-centric neighborhoods with no public transit and parks few and far between, making them dangerous to navigate without the help of a caregiver. Restaurants where they're expected to sit still for long periods of time in uncomfortable seating not designed for their height. Airports where all the adults are irritated, in a hurry, and unwilling to slow down to accommodate children on the long, exhausting walks between security and the departure gates.

Children could do so much more if we would stop making so many spatial design decisions that are actively hostile to them. So much of their dependence on adults is the result of choices adults make. We need to make different and better decisions about spatial design - ones that incorporate feedback from children themselves about their own needs and preferences.

Promoting Inclusion

Many of the only spaces accessible to children are the ones designed exclusively for children: schools, sections of libraries, childcare centers, etc. While it's a great thing that child-forward spaces exist, children are effectively separated (segregated) into these spaces and excluded from participating in public life.

When public spaces are designed with kids in mind, it affirms their right to exist as autonomous beings and not just as extensions of their caregivers. It offers them the opportunity to interact with and learn from a larger variety of people. It helps build communication, navigation, and problem-solving skills from an early age.

Promoting Self-Regulation

When my kids are having a hard time handling their emotions, I often tell them to go play on the swing for a few minutes before trying again to communicate what they're upset about. It works like magic: the rhythmic motion and physical exertion help them ground themselves, often within seconds. I can't count how many full-on tantrums we've stopped in their tracks this way.

As far as I've observed as a parent, the most common factors that set off major tantrums are exhaustion, hunger, overstimulation, or frustration with an inability to communicate effectively. Child-centered design can help with all of these by identifying and implementing potential solutions to these issues that children can access by themselves.

Having these tools at hand helps build a sense of introspection within children: the ability to look within themselves and identify their own needs. They can practice fulfilling some of their own needs as well, instead of always relying on adults to do everything for them.

Social Responsibility

All in all, it's easier for children to develop a sense of social responsibility when they feel like society cares about their needs. In activist spaces, we talk a lot about charity vs. mutual aid:

• Charity keeps people dependent on help. Governments, rich people, and other powerful individuals and groups decide what help to offer, who gets help, and how long the programs last. Charity isn't meant to tackle to root causes of social issues, and it often comes with a long list of requirements for the people that receive it.
• Mutual aid, on the other hand, is a system of care designed by the people who need that care. Instead of establishing hierarchies based on who gives help and who receives it, everybody both contributes to the system of care and benefits from it. Mutual aid efforts are meant to tackle the root causes of social issues and build a common understanding of what causes structural oppression.

When I talk about helping children through child-centered design of public spaces, I'm talking about taking a mutual aid approach, not a charity one. Children themselves should be the primary people communicating what their needs and preferences are for spatial design. And once society reorganizes itself around their actual needs, they're in a much better position to contribute to helping others.

Child-centered design obviously prioritizes children, but it also has so many benefits for everyone else. Think of banks, corporate chain coffee shops, grocery stores: these are not spaces meant for hanging out comfortably. They are meant to extract the maximum possible amount of profit from their consumer base, and it makes them miserable spaces to spend time in. Child-centered design means designing for care and comfort over profit. Here are some of the ways that helps everyone, not just children:

• Bringing back third spaces
• De-policing and de-surveilling public spaces
• Designing dynamically
• Cultivating a sense of social responsibility (for children, by others)

Bringing Back Third Spaces

Third spaces are the spaces where people spend time outside of their homes (first space) and places of work (second space). Third space theory is used a lot to describe how free public spaces (like rec centers and libraries) have been defunded or have disappeared, and how privately-owned spaces (like coffee shops and gyms) have gotten more and more expensive at a much faster rate than the increase of wages.

Child-centered design means letting children exist in public again even if they can't pay to be in a space. And when we design spaces to be accessible to people who don't have a consistent income, they become more accessible for everybody.

Making third spaces accessible to children again also involves ensuring they can access the spaces independently. This means designing outdoor spaces around pedestrians and public transit instead of cars, which get more dangerous for children around them every year.

The disappearance of third spaces in the US has hit children the hardest, but they're not the only ones suffering from the loss. Journalist Derek Thompson wrote about how Americans of all demographics have become more and more isolated starting from the 1950s: this really is the anti-social century. Making third spaces more affordable and accessible is an effective structural solution for widespread social isolation, no matter who's experiencing it.

Addressing Policing and Surveillance

We live in the age of surveillance capitalism. The US police state is rapidly growing. These trends make life unsafe for children and adults alike, especially for Black and disabled people. Making spaces safe for children means getting police away from them.

De-policing (and, by association, de-surveilling) public spaces requires more creative, caring, thoughtful approaches to public safety. These approaches have been covered at length by abolitionist writers such as Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and they're aimed at making public life safer and more connected for everyone.

Dynamic Design

For child-centered design to be truly democratic, it requires a dynamic approach. This means getting input from children themselves (whether literate or pre-literate, abled or disabled, toddler or adolescent, white or nonwhite) using creative approaches to solicit their ideas and feedback. This means that the design process has to be responsive and able to evolve over time.

How does this benefit everyone? Basically, it requires a consistent commitment to funding public infrastructure improvements. For decades, US public infrastructure has been severely neglected, contributing to problems with accessibility and environmental racism. Solving these issues through heavy infrastructure investment while also prioritizing walkability, spaces to rest, and other child-friendly amenities makes spaces more hospitable for everyone.

Social Responsibility

Finally, child-centered design shifts social responsibility for children's well-being from parents and individual families to society as a whole. It also enables children to access public spaces and interact with a greater variety of people. Instead of offsetting the bulk of social reproductive labor onto parents (especially mothers), taking a more collective approach means creating stronger connections between children and their broader community, while decreasing the load of domestic work for mothers.

Children have so much to teach us! For too long, we've ignored their perspectives and increasingly shut them away from public life entirely. Even when they do overcome the odds and work as activists, adults often applaud them on a surface level and then ignore their core concerns. Letting children rejoin society in general by prioritizing child-centered design of public spaces, as well as taking their concerns seriously, gives all of us the opportunity to reevaluate our assumptions about what children are capable of & what they have to offer.

I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I want to be crystal clear about this. The ultimate goal of capitalism is to maximize profit: that means increasing revenue (e.g. by raising prices) and by decreasing expenses. We've been seeing the privatization of US public services at every possible level since the 1980s. The massive increase in lobbying means that capitalist interests are well-represented in public policy (often better-represented than those of the public).

Under capitalism, the people who matter (i.e. have legal, social, and economic power) are those who own capital and those who can pay. In the US, the biggest investment in public infrastructure has happened after periods of crisis where capitalism threatens to collapse on itself. It happens when private companies put their desire for immediate gain aside for long enough to make sure the system can stay intact. But before long, old patterns begin again, and capitalists continue their push to reshape public life and spaces to be as profitable for them as possible.

Children do not have any power in this process because they neither own capital nor have any buying power. It's as simple as that. This will not change for as long as capitalism exists. We might be able to make small advances here and there, especially after major economic crises, but we should expect a strong effort to roll them back starting pretty much immediately after they're implemented.

Child-centered design of public spaces has so many benefits for both kids and adults. It makes spaces more comfortable, accessible, and fun to spend time in, and it can serve as a structural solution to the increase of social isolation that US-Americans are experiencing in general. Unfortunately, implementing this design philosophy can be expensive, and it ultimately undermines the profit motive central to capitalism. In order to put this into action, we as a society have to decide that designing spaces around accessibility and comfort is more important than streamlining them for the maximum possible extraction of profit.