Kids are unpredictable. Just when you think they’re going to zig, they put your wallet in the toilet and flush. How often do children open their gifts on Christmas and spend less time playing with the toys than the boxes they came in?
Ron King looks at recess in much the same way – there’s no sense spending 200 days in a row climbing up and down a plastic slide when you could be enjoying the box it came in.
The box, of course, being Planet Earth.
King is president of Natural Playgrounds Company, a Concord-based business that designs equipment-free playgrounds that put children back in touch with Mother Nature. Gone are metal monkey bars and standard see-saws, replaced by climbing walls set in natural hillsides and flowing streams that lead to free-form sand areas.
“That’s the beauty, we bring nature back into play areas. we try to make them miniature landscapes,” King said. “We build mountains and make streams, do all those kinds of things that excite kids. It’s a fun place to explore, and every day, it’s something different. That’s what you want them to do, be engaged.”
King first conceived the idea for the company after working with Girls Inc. on a building project in 1999. A long-time architect, King was asked to help the girls build some benches for a backyard setting. At the unveiling, the girls spent about 30 seconds running around the benches before sprinting into the woods in pursuit of a more changeable play area.
Not long after, King ran into a friend who was trying to construct a state-of-the-art childcare center on the NHTI campus. When she asked him if he knew anyone who designed playgrounds, he surprised himself with the answer.
“I said, ‘I do,’” King said. “So I put together a proposal for her and called it a natural playground. And I said, that’s a good name for a company. Through word of mouth, it’s grown tremendously since then.”
Tremendously enough to have earned the distinction of third fastest growing business in New Hampshire from Business NH Magazine. The company has worked extensively in California, Texas and Florida and has produced playgrounds in many other states, picking up steam recently in New York and New Jersey. They’ve also been to Russia and recently received a call from Palestine. China has been very interested, King said, but hasn’t pulled the trigger yet.
The business has grown to include three pisions: the original design pision, a construction arm that began in 2008 and a 7,000-square foot shop in Bow that opened a few years after that. That shop manufactures some of the playground elements, which have been sold in Canada and England, among other locations.
King said the science behind the company’s success is simple: it’s just what kids want. Over time, the company has surveyed more than 6,000 children and countless adults while presenting slide shows at potential sites, and he always asks both groups what their favorite outdoor playtime activities were (excluding organized sports, playing portable computer games outside and using motorized machines).
“The adults always say swimming, climbing trees, making forts, playing in the mud . . . on that list, there’s not a single piece of playground equipment,” King said. “And it’s the same with the kids. So why buy equipment you know kids don’t like? The answer is, because it’s easy. But it’s not discovery-oriented, which kids love; and it doesn’t change from day to day, which kids hate. It’s no wonder kids aren’t inspired.”
Natural Playgrounds is focused on changing that, one babbling stream at a time. King and his son, Ethan, the company’s vice president, are often the first to view a potential site, with Ethan doing the survey work and providing Ron a contour plan so he can “predict where every drop of water is going to go.” They then provide the potential client with a comprehensive questionnaire to determine which elements are most important.
Most of the sites are flat when Natural Playgrounds arrives, though one of the first additions is almost always a mountain, King said, in order to create a three-dimensional landscape. Every site is laid out differently depending on the desires of the client and the space in which it’s being built, and the elements vary widely, as well. They will sometimes build an ice slide into a depression, built a rock-climbing wall into a hillside, add water play areas, free-form sand areas and gardens to plant things and let them grow. The slides and rock walls are always built into the surrounding landscape, which prevents children from having to climb ladders and eliminates the dangers of falling over the side.
In comparing cost between his work and a traditional playground, King admitted it can be difficult to find an apples-to-apples evaluation. But he noted that natural playgrounds require almost no upkeep and never need replacing, whereas traditional playgrounds will often go out of code in less than 20 years. And you can cover hundreds or thousands more square feet for what you would spend filling a smaller space with common equipment.
Perhaps the aspect King is most passionate about, though, is incorporating the children into the planning and upkeep as an educational tool. He recalls building a playground with the help of the students at one school, who helped figure out how to create the perfect 30-degree slope for the slide and where to place other critical elements during a two-week experience.
“I had a teacher there tell me, my kids learned more outside in these two weeks than they did all year inside,” King said.
He also encourages involving the kids in upkeep, like when he told a school to skip a call to the maintenance department to clear up a patch of dead grass.
“I said, have the kids come out and ask them, why does grass die?” King said. “That’s part of it, to get the kids involved. We want them to invest themselves in this garden, this park, to keep it the way they like it. This is their backyard.”
It can also be their classroom. He has encouraged teachers to incorporate the playgrounds into thematic units on rocks and snow and water, and has consulted with teachers about their upcoming lessons while building some sites.
The impact, he said, is obvious, and it’s important – both to the students and the planet – to keep the emphasis on environmental awareness going forward.
“When people are connected to nature, they are sick less often, they are more advanced in motor fitness, they score higher on tests. It has a tremendous positive impact on the child’s well-being,” King said. “If you give them an environment that’s boring and unattractive and not connected to the natural world, when they’re growing up, how do you expect them to be good stewards of the Earth?”
