Swings in the Living Room: Volume 2
Practical suggestions for how to design kid-friendly spaces within the home.
Before we jump in, here's a quick reminder of what inspired this piece:
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.
Okay, now you're caught up.
If you have children living in your home (or children who visit), there's a lot you can do to make the spaces more inviting and comfortable for them. This is more than just babyproofing - this is taking into account children's various physical and emotional needs and adjusting the space to accommodate them as well as adults. Doing so is highly rewarding - children will notice the effort you put into it. Whether or not they have the capacity or inclination to acknowledge that explicitly, you'll see the difference in how comfortable they are inhabiting the space. Now let's get started! 🤸🛝
Table of Contents
Most of this discussion will be centered around play for young children, because children play a lot, and they play in many different ways. Many adult-designed spaces are not set up well for play - this has downstream effects. Imagine:
- A child enters a space that is not designed to accommodate their needs.
- They spend the entire time getting their hands on one delicate, precious, irreplaceable thing after another. Maybe they break some of them. Or they scruff the nice floors. Or they keep hurting themselves on sharp corners. Or they try to eat the cat food. Even if they're older and know how to keep to themselves, they're acutely aware that the space is not for them.
- Adults spend the entire time reprimanding them for misbehaving. More of the adults' behavior towards the children is characterized by irritation, frustration, or anger than connection, understanding, or enjoyment. The child's parents also have to spend a lot of extra energy micromanaging the child's behavior, since they'll be held responsible when anything goes wrong.
- The child feels like everything they do is wrong. Responses from here vary: frustration-induced tantrums, emotional withdrawal, repeated requests to leave.
- The visit ends with the child feeling overly confined or unwanted and the adults feeling like the child is badly behaved, insensitive, rowdy, etc.
I've been in countless situations like this - both as the child and as the parent. It's an incredibly draining and unpleasant experience. Regardless of whether you're designing a space for a child who lives at the home or is visiting, putting a little thought and effort into this process results in much less frustration for everyone when the children are present. It also helps facilitate more positive, connected relationships between the children and the adults. Setting up spaces for play takes some upfront work (and mental simulations of all the things that could go wrong), but it pays off.
Setting Up Spaces for Play
A lot of people think play means toys, and that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Toys are fine - I just think there's too much of an emphasis on them for how much value they offer. Things that make a much bigger impact are:
- Space to run around, spread out with an activity, show off their latest gymnastics tricks, etc.
- It doesn't necessarily have to be a lot of space, nor does it have to be a completely separate room. In fact, it helps if it is in the same room, since kids love to show off their projects at every opportunity.
- To reduce frustration on all sides, make sure their space doesn't intersect with the lines drawn between adults having a conversation.
- It doesn't necessarily have to be a lot of space, nor does it have to be a completely separate room. In fact, it helps if it is in the same room, since kids love to show off their projects at every opportunity.
- Large furniture that lets children climb, hang upside down, spin around, etc.
- Think of all of that great vestibular and proprioceptive input!
- Open-ended toys/literal junk that they can use for creative play
- By open-ended toys, I don't just mean the $100 Montessori ball tracks. (Those will only hold their attention for so long. Save your money.) I mean drawing supplies, musical instruments, clay, Lego-esque blocks, Arduino kits, dolls, wacky dress-up outfits from the thrift store.
- Other options for endless fun:
- Cardboard boxes
- Kitchen utensils
- Bowls with water/dry beans/etc and a measuring cup to transfer them back and forth
- Bubble wrap
- Empty plastic water bottles
- Yarn
- Like, they really don't need anything fancy to have fun. You just have to be prepared for the eventuality of a mess.
- Cardboard boxes
- Other options for endless fun:
- By open-ended toys, I don't just mean the $100 Montessori ball tracks. (Those will only hold their attention for so long. Save your money.) I mean drawing supplies, musical instruments, clay, Lego-esque blocks, Arduino kits, dolls, wacky dress-up outfits from the thrift store.
- Soft lighting and soft surfaces
- Nobody likes being uncomfortable. But young kids, discomfort can lead to sensory overload, making tantrums more likely.
Modeling
Kids love copying adults, and in their younger years especially, they love getting involved in chores. Designing spaces to make vacuuming, dusting, wiping, and other cleaning tasks accessible to them helps them feel capable and helpful. Same goes for preparing food. When it comes to social reproductive labor, instead of trying to distract kids so they don't get in the way, give them something to do. It might slow down your task, but that's part of the learning process. It also sets the expectation from an early age that everyone should be contributing to household upkeep to the best of their ability - so it's especially good to establish this practice the same way regardless of assigned gender.
chorui halim
Accommodations for Rowdy and Risky Play
The eight types of risky play are:
- Play with heights
- Play with speed
- Play with dangerous tools and materials
- Play near dangerous elements
- Rough and tumble play
- Play away from the immediate supervision of adults
- Play with impact
- Vicarious play
This type of play is important for developing problem-solving skills, fine and gross motor skills, muscle strength, balance, coordination, and resilience. However, adults often discourage or prevent children from engaging in this type of play because it might result in children getting hurt or damaging property.
Being proactive about providing opportunities for risky play helps reduce the potential damage to themselves and to the people/things around them. Ways that we incorporate risky play in our home are by letting our kids:
- Go headfirst (or do somersaults) down the slide
- Play on the carpeted stairs and hang from the cutouts in the wall
- Lie belly-down on the swings, twist them until they're wound up tight, then let go so they spin around really fast
- Play with fire in a controlled way outdoors
- Toasting marshmallows
- Lighting dry leaves and stomping out the embers
- Climb high up on playsets basically as soon as they can crawl
- Play unsupervised together in their rooms
- Wrestle us and chase us/each other around
Well-designed risky play helps kids figure out their boundaries in a controlled setting. In my experience, having designated places where risky play is encouraged and readily accessible makes it much easier to redirect their behavior in spaces that aren't well set up for it. Kids need an outlet for this type of energy - having appropriate opportunities/spaces for risky play ready to go helps them, especially when they're being rowdy in spaces that can't accommodate it.
Limitations
Designing spaces for children doesn't have to mean anything goes. There are obviously many scenarios where it's necessary to restrict children's access to toxic, delicate, or otherwise dangerous materials. Even in this case, there's ways you can design restrictions that work with children instead of working against them.
For toxic or dangerous items (cleaning chemicals, guns, etc.) make sure to normally store them securely and out of sight. If you're planning for children who are visiting for a short time, that should be enough.
But if you're spending a lot of time with/around children, it's crucial to go through the materials with them in a safe and controlled way. Explain exactly why each item is dangerous and off-limits - with visual aids if possible - and exactly what they should do if they find these items unsecured. Don't just lecture them about it because they will zone out; keep your explanations clear and concise, use mnemonics to make the important takeaways as easy to remember as possible, and have them repeat the phrases back to you until you're confident they can remember. Then store the items securely and out of sight to minimize temptations.
For less dangerous items that still need to be kept away from kids (in our home, litter boxes), fences/gates are great tools. They draw clear visual separations between what is allowed and restricted. You might still need to give verbal reminders, but not nearly as often as you would if there weren't physical barriers. These items can be found cheaply in secondhand markets such as Facebook marketplace and thrift stores - it's better for the environment, and you don't need to pay full retail price for them. And again, take the time to explain to the children why the items are being restricted.
In any case, the important things to consider when incorporating any restrictions are 1) whether they're truly necessary or being placed for adult convenience, and 2) how they can be implemented to minimize friction in the interactions between adults and children. Restrictions that are not well designed or thought out carefully can make children feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in the space. And whenever possible, get feedback from the children themselves (especially older children), and work to design a system that everyone agrees to and feels comfortable with. Here's an quick example of what the thought process looks like in our house:
Case Study
Even though baby gates for stairs are incredibly common, my partner and I discovered that they weren't really necessary with our first child. When they started crawling at 9 months old, instead of putting a baby gate up, we simply showed him how to go up and down the (carpeted) stairs safely and sat with him while he practiced. After just a month or so, he had enough coordination and experience to go up and down the stairs unsupervised - and never got hurt.
With our second kid, it was a different story. With two kids, we didn't have the capacity to supervise every single time the younger one wanted to go on the stairs. So we did put a baby gate up and kept it closed when we couldn't supervise, but we also made sure to give her as much opportunity as we could to learn to use the stairs. As a result, it took her a little longer to figure out how to do it reliably, but we were able to take the gate back down when she was about 15 months old.
In both cases, we regularly evaluated:
- Is this restriction necessary?
- What are all the impacts that this has on the kids?
- How can we enforce it with the minimum amount of frustration on all sides?
- What is the minimum amount of time that we really need to keep it in place?
For Adults
Restrictions in spatial design don't just apply to kids. As adults in charge of the process, it's just as important to draw hard lines for ourselves when it comes to convenient but harmful behaviors. These include invasions of privacy such as using surveillance technology without explicit and informed consent, or compromising children's data privacy by posting them (especially publicly) on social media. We need to evaluate whether the technologies we're using for safety are actually introducing new, bigger risks. And we need to ask ourselves constantly whether posting a cute clip is worth exposing children's data to systems like Clearview AI.
There are ways to set up surveillance and social media systems on private servers that greatly reduce the chance of data misuse, but most people don't use them. And there aren't any working enforcement mechanisms to make caregivers act more carefully. Individual recommendations will only do so much to improve the current state of things. To make any kind of real progress - on this, and on child-friendly spatial design in general - we need policy-level changes.
What gets in the way?
On an individual level, what usually stops people from intentionally designing spaces for kids is that they don't have the time, energy, money, or all three. Like I said earlier, even though the upfront cost of time and energy might seem like a lot, it works out to roughly the same amount when you consider how much of both it takes to manage children in a space that isn't well-designed. On a societal level, here are some of the things we can do to help people with this process:
- Give them the time and energy they need
- Better time off policies - including family leave!
- Make help available for those who need it
- Give them funding specifically for this type of project
- Grants or credits for taking on this work
- Free educational materials (and even design consultants)
- Exploring lower cost options, especially secondhand items, for both the environmental and financial benefits
- Give children alternative places to be
- Makes sure that they always have access to comfortable spaces even if it's not at home
- Greater accountability since more people are involved with the upkeep of public spaces
chorui halim
Conclusion
Intentionally designing spaces for children in the home can be a lot of work - there's a lot to consider throughout the process. But it's time and effort well spent, and it pays off a lot. Most people don't spend a ton of time considering all the opportunities for risky play or the amount of friction in the restrictions they set for children. However, when possible, putting in the time, energy, and money upfront helps facilitate more positive relationships with the children in your space. Do what you can with the resources you have - some progress on this front is better than none. And when you're working on organizing for a better world, keep in mind what you can do to make the children around you more comfortable!
Most people don't spend a ton of time considering all the opportunities for risky play or the amount of friction in the restrictions they set for children. However, when possible, putting in the time, energy, and money up front helps facilitate more positive relationships with the children in your space. Do what you can with the resources you have - some progress on this front is better than none. And when you're working on organizing for a better world, keep in mind what you can do to make the children around you more comfortable!
Resources
From the Article
https://www.playaustralia.org.au/sites/default/files/PlayTodayFactsheet-%20vestib%2Bpropsystems.pdf
https://kidshealth.org/en/kids/gun-safety.html
Jeannette L. Nolen Jeannette L. Nolen was an editor in social science at Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Tom Koch (Acting DAD, BE Office of Applied Research and Outreach) and Ted Rosenbaum (Acting BE Director)
https://cybernews.com/security/kidsecurity-parental-control-data-leak/
Robert Hart
Read More
https://worldforumfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/5022458.pdf
ALA Magazine
Enrique Peñalosa, Mayor of Bogotà 
