Swings aren’t just child’s play. From building resilience to sparking joy across generations, playgrounds remind us why movement, connection, and a little risk are essential to thriving in a digital age

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt describes the sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and fragility among youth worldwide. He draws on neuroscience, psychology, and cross-cultural data to show that unstructured play, face-to-face socializing, and manageable risk-taking are essential to healthy emotional and social development. Reclaiming playgrounds is part of his solution. Playgrounds support not only childhood development but also contribute to public health, social connectedness, and the resilience of entire communities.

The Power of Child-Led Play

Haidt champions playground environments that encourage child-led, child-structured, mixed-age exploration, which he believes foster self-confidence, empathy, and resilience. He maintains playgrounds that “bruise but not scar” contribute to youngsters developing more self-confidence.

Like Haidt, Joe Frost, in The Developmental Benefits of Playgrounds, stresses that play should be fun and self-directed. Adult-managed environments can significantly diminish the cognitive, physical, and emotional development that happens when kids play freely at a playground. Frost’s pioneering research highlights the value of well-designed playgrounds that give children the freedom to move, test boundaries, and self-regulate – key foundations for developing physical competence, discovering intrinsic motivation, and building lifelong resilience.

Designing for Joy, Strength, and Memories

Well-designed playgrounds can support key aspects of motor planning (praxis), referring to the brain’s ability to ideate, sequence, and execute physical movements. Climbing structures and overhead equipment, for example, can foster risk assessment, physical strength, hand-eye coordination, problem-solving skills, and overall cognitive growth.

But for Frost and other play scholars, few elements rival the swing in developmental richness, emotional appeal, and historical longevity. Even for the most serious-minded among us, the swing evokes nostalgia as we feel and remember swinging in our bodies as much as our minds. The physical thrill and emotional lift of swinging – often and best alongside others – creates moments of joy that stick with us for life. 

The Enduring Benefits of the Swing

Swings offer deep sensory and emotional benefits. Swinging stimulates the inner ear and cerebellum, improving coordination and sensory integration. Swinging fosters balance, rhythm, and spatial orientation. Barbara Hendricks, author of Designing for Play, adds “The rhythmic, repetitive motion of swinging can be both soothing and thrilling—it offers a rare opportunity…to feel both weightless and in control of… movement through space.” And from an emotional standpoint, repetitive swinging can have a calming, regulating effect, particularly beneficial for those with sensory processing challenges. Hendricks maintains swinging is appropriate for all ages, not just for children. 

Swings designed to encourage eye contact while in motion have gained recognition for sparking shared joy and emotional connection. They can promote attunement – a deep, nonverbal bond that begins when a parent/caregiver and child mirror each other’s expressions and rhythms. Dr. Stuart Brown has long emphasized early attunement as a foundation for play, trust, and emotional safety. These swings offer not just movement, but meaningful connection in motion.

Public Play, Public Good: The Community Power of Playgrounds

Another benefit to playgrounds is the vital community infrastructure they provide. Frost maintains that inclusive playgrounds help build social capital by bringing together children and families from diverse backgrounds. Particularly in urban environments where public gathering spaces are scarce, playgrounds can serve as crucial hubs of community life. “Playgrounds,” he wrote, “can level the developmental playing field by giving all children access to the same learning-rich environments.” He advocated for playgrounds designed to welcome caregivers, siblings, and grandparents, not just children, believing these intergenerational spaces foster shared experiences and stronger familial and community bonds, also helping to combat loneliness. In addition, Frost called for stimulating playground environments with diverse equipment for varied ages and abilities, ideally natural elements like sand and water, and spaces that encourage imaginative and cooperative play.

At the National Institute for Play, we support the science behind playgrounds, applaud playgrounds at traditional venues like schoolyards and community parks, and are encouraged to see them emerging within nontraditional spaces like shopping centers, airports, office parks, and college campuses. In a world where kids’ lack of free play time severely limits face-to-face interaction and embodied experiences, playgrounds are more essential than ever, offering children and adults opportunities for real-world exploration, physical competence, social connection, and yes, the enduring joy of swinging.

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This understanding of swings as a uniquely rich element of play is also reflected in our recent creative initiatives, such as our PAPAYA’s Swing campaign, which explores the physical thrill, playful challenge, and enduring appeal of swinging across ages. By spotlighting this deceptively simple activity, the campaign underscores how well-designed play environments can encourage movement, risk-taking, and joyful connection - essential experiences in an increasingly screen-focused world.

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