"Playborhood:" Parent guide creates community playscapes
(Read article summary)"Playborhood," a new how-to guide for parents gives tips on how to turn empty spaces into the kind of community playscapes that increase the safety of neighborhoods, while encouraging kids to get off the couch and play.
Mill Valley, Calif.
Parent and play advocate Mike Lanza is not one to move into a new neighborhood and hope for the best for his kids.
The author of the new book "Playborhood" describes in great detail his philosophy and the elbow-grease steps he undertook to create a life for his kids, and those who live in proximity, that more closely mirrors the kind of playful, neighborhood-based childhood kids had 30 to 40 years ago than the sedentary, living-room-based one that many have today.
Lanza accomplishes this with great humor and plenty of vivid examples of people reclaiming their community spaces for play and gathering, from inner city Bronx, to an apartment-complex courtyard in California, to a formerly faceless intersection in Portland, Oregon.
As such, his can-do spirit is not only infectious, but is backed up with specific how-to's: informing a reader how to turn a driveway into a giant game board, for example, or a yard into a nature or other playscape where kids will want to come play.
