How playgrounds shape toddlers—and vice versa
Swedish researchers found that toddlers don't just play on playgrounds; they actively reshape physical spaces through their interactions. The discovery has implications for how early childhood educators and facility designers should approach outdoor learning environments, suggesting that treating playgrounds as static backdrops misses how children and environments co-create development.
Originaltitel: Toddlers’ engagements with preschool playgrounds: ethnographic insights from Sweden
<p>This article explores toddler – place relationships outdoors during early childhood education in Sweden. Informed by Tim Ingold’s theorization of movement, we explore toddlers’ embodied engagements with the preschool playground and how the human–non-human environments become entangled. The results show that, just as in the wider world, the processes enabling and limiting toddlers’ engagements in the playground are continuously in motion. Toddler–place relationships are continuously created through a mutual dependence between human and non-human entities. In this sense, toddlers’ engagements with playgrounds are not separate from the place through which they engage, but change place.</p>