Playground Etiquette

Today I took the kids to a local park; the kind that looks like a wooden castle with all sorts of stairs, and nooks and crannies to climb through. This particular park has 3 slides, one of which is a wide, medium height, metal slide. On a previous trip to this park, I wasn't expecting the speed of this slide and Samantha came whizzing down only to fly right off the slide onto her rear. Now that we know this, she tends to turn around at the top of the slide and come down feet first on her belly. This tends to slow her down quite a bit so that she can easily climb down from the end of the slide instead of going shooting off.

Today at this playground, Samantha and another girl who I would estimate to be around the same age, maybe a little bit older, were climbing on the castle and got to the slide. The other child's mother and I were standing at the bottom of the slide as Samantha turned around to go down on her belly. The other mother let out a horrified/shocked gasp of air, and as her child went to do the same thing as Samantha, she quickly said, "sit down so that you can see where you are going". I turned to Samantha and told her what a good job she did on the slide. Both children continued to slide multiple times, each time the other child wanted to go down like Samantha, and her mother gave me a look that shot daggers, always telling her daughter not to go down the slide that way. I continued to praise Samantha for going down the slide safely, and slowly.

This incident had me thinking about playground etiquette. I think that it is pretty well known that there is a universal slide rule about going up the stairs and down the slide, but I will be the first to admit that if there are no other children around and I can be sure that she is doing it safely, I do let Samantha climb up the slides. She is capable of knowing when she can and can not climb the slides because we talk about it. I had my reasons for letting Samantha slide down on her belly, and I am sure the other mother had her reasons for not wanting her daughter to slide that way. Apparently she didn't think that I had too good of reasons, but I refrained myself for giving her an explanation because I didn't think I had to justify our actions.

Meanwhile, Jake was trying to climb over the balance beam logs, and instead of climbing over, he sort of did a flip/roll over that resulted in him being completely covered in wood chips. I am sure at that point this other mother was thinking "what are these people doing??"