Pop Up Adventure Playgrounds

I think play is exploring the questions that we have out in the world without someone else telling us what to do. We want to entertain kids a lot and keep them busy instead of getting out of their way and giving them time to be bored, because that's where the creativity starts. Swelling up. So pop-up adventure playgrounds comes out of post-World War II England. The idea is that the more loose parts in someone's environment, it leads to more creativity and imagination. So there are things like tires, cardboard boxes, blocks, there's sheets, there's duct tape, there's rope, lots of different things. And every month I do these pop-ups in our local park, and kids are free to come and just play and do anything with any of the things laying around that they want to. So when I got pregnant, I started kind of looking at where childhood was now from when I was a kid and really noticed that there's, there's a lot of adult-directed activities for kids to take part in now, and there's not as much you just head out the back door and disappear for a few hours playing in the woods or down the street with your friends. So this is, I think, a way of creating that opportunity for our kids in a way that they don't have free access to it anymore, especially when you're in a more urban environment. This kind of child-led play doesn't exist in our kids' lives in the same way anymore, and I think it's really important for development. It gives them a chance to build self-esteem naturally, to recognize where their boundaries are, to have a thought and then try to create something. And I think that those are skills that are really valuable later in life, but they don't have as much access to them in the younger years when they're really developing them. And they can do that in the pop-up playgrounds. They have free rein to do whatever they want. It's been really incredible to see how many parents want this kind of play and these kind of experiences in their kids' lives. And if given the chance, they jump on the opportunity. And I want to see more of these kind of opportunities in their lives.