Can Playgrounds Stop Bullying?

Is there a way to build playgrounds, social areas, and internet sites in a way that discourages bullying?

My first thought is that when kids are more engaged, they are less likely to bully, so a space that actively engages students should lead to less bullying.

My next thought is that there are ways to engage children in positive behavior. In fact, in my experience, most kids seem to want to engage in positive behaviors so long as they are perceived as cool. When I was a camp counselor, I used to have older campers befriend younger ones and mentor them. This model worked extremely well with activities like fishing, climbing, and arts and crafts because older students had the opportunity to pass skills down to younger, less skilled students. The younger students felt valued because they were receiving attention. The older ones felt valuable because they were making a positive contribution to their communities.

These are social innovations rather than physical ones, but I think there are some physical spaces that seem to foster these sorts of relationships better than others.

Playgrounds with cooperative features like swings that need to be pushed, see-saws, and other cooperative play elements might limit conflicts. I also, recently, found a video on youtube in which someone placed a megaphone on a street corner in New York with the instructions to say something nice on a placard under it. I was thinking that a bull horn mounted somewhere with similar instructions might be effective.

Areas of a playground with directed activities might be more engaging than simple open space models as well. Most schools have such spaces with lines painted on the ground or equipment set into the cement. The key to this model is enforcement. Someone needs to be in charge of making sure that only tether ball is being played on the tether ball courts and only basketball on the basketball courts and so on.

Cyberspace should have similar restrictions. Areas that can only be used in certain ways. These spaces should be set up to foster positive behavior and monitored.

This seems to be the key. Spaces for kids should be monitored. There's no getting around it. Kids need guidance. If they didn't, they wouldn't be kids. Furthermore, they need active guidance, adults showing them how to play and modeling good behavior rather than simply watching them play or leaving them to figure out what to do on the internet.

Does this mean that kids can never play alone? Most certainly not. I believe that a certain amount of unstructured outdoor play with other kids is necessary for a child's development, but that should not be the case all the time.

Children are engaged in a process of establishing social hierarchies. They do this by interacting in certain ways with each other. This can mean bullying, or it can mean positive, cooperative relationship building. The difference is a matter of learned behavior.

Our playgrounds are already set up for healthy play, and innovative companies like KaBOOM! Are constantly innovating improvements in play spaces. Social media sites for kids with anti-bullying measures are coming on line soon, too. All they need are some adults who are ready to play.  

That's where Playworks comes in.