When children outgrow playgrounds, where can they go?

Lianhe Zaobao, 袁桂萍、杨鑫：公共空间设计应兼顾青少年女性

Imagine a 13-year-old girl in Punggol on a Saturday afternoon. There is a badminton racquet in her bag and three friends who said ‘yes’. The nearest playground is calibrated for children under 12: low climbing frames, bright slides, rubberised safety matting. She outgrew it a year ago. The fitness corner is meant for adults. The hardcourt is taken by a group of older boys, and she will not ask for a turn, not because they would say no, but because asking means being looked at. So she and her friends drop the idea of playing badminton and walk to the shopping mall. At least there, no one asks them to move along.

Many parents will recognise her story. Ask a teenager where they go after school or on weekends, and the answer is often the mall, a fast-food outlet — or nowhere at all, just their phone. It is easy to conclude that this generation simply prefers screens. But when we sat down with over 100 teenagers in Punggol and Sengkang, two of our youngest towns, we heard something else. Most of them want to be outdoors. They have simply run out of places made for them.

Those of us who grew up in HDB estates remember playing with friends at the void deck or kicking a football on an open field until we were called home for dinner. Today, as parents, we worry instead about how much time our children spend on their phones. National guidance on children’s screen use, introduced under Grow Well SG, urges families to cut back and make more time for play. It is therefore worth asking a simpler question: once our children have outgrown the playground, where do we expect them to go?

The in-between age group
Take a walk around any HDB estate and the gap is plain to see. There are playgrounds for children under 12, fitness corners for adults, and senior fitness corners and active ageing centres for older residents. Teenagers fall somewhere in between and are easily overlooked. Punggol and Sengkang alone have some 290 playgrounds, and every one of them is designed for children under 12. Not one is built with a teenager in mind.

This is not because teenagers shun the outdoors. Most head to a favourite spot every week and stay for more than an hour, mostly to play with friends. Ask them what they want most near home, and the answer is not a theme park but a football pitch, a basketball court or a badminton court. Hardly a big ask. Yet it is precisely the lack of such places that keeps many of them indoors.

The other obstacles are practical and fixable. Play equipment is too small and too childish. Void decks are bare and uninviting. Dim lighting along walkways and in parks makes some places feel unsafe after dark. Shared paths have no clear markings to separate cyclists from pedestrians. These are design and upkeep choices, and they can be made differently.

The girl at the hardcourt is not a coincidence. Some of the girls we asked named an extra hurdle that we seldom talk about. The usual neighbourhood facilities such as multi-use hardcourts, basketball courts and open football fields, tend to be taken over by boys, leaving teenage girls with few appealing choices. The court is open to everyone, but not everyone feels comfortable stepping onto it. A girl who does not feel welcome somewhere is, in effect, shut out. Making outdoor spaces work for young people means making them work for girls too.

What teenagers wants
Give teenagers a blank sheet and ask them to draw their dream outdoor space, as we did with 25 teenagers, and their wishes turn out to be modest: football fields, basketball and badminton courts, a swimming pool, a nature garden, places to sit and chat, and swings big enough for older children. These things already exist elsewhere in Singapore, just not close to where many young people live.

Other cities have tackled this head-on. In Brisbane, Frew Park was designed for 10- to 15-year-olds, with concrete climbing walls, raised decks for hanging out and a series of slides, a mix of challenge and social space not unlike what our young people drew. A little risk was welcomed as part of the fun, and the aim was simple: create a place that older children and teenagers, boys and girls alike, would find cool and good for spending time with friends.

In Vienna, after noticing that girls above the age of 10 often felt pushed out of parks, the city redesigned several public spaces with wider footpaths, better lighting, separate sports areas and quiet corners to relax and socialise. Neither idea was radical. Both started by treating this age group as users in their own right.

Where to start
There are real constraints. Land in our estates is limited. Ball games at night can lead to noise complaints from neighbours. Upkeep costs money. And residents of all ages have their own needs for shared spaces. These concerns are fair. But they call for small, sensible first steps, not for waiting. Turning an underused void deck or corner into a place for teenagers to gather should cost far less than building a new park. Adding shade, seating and better lighting makes existing spaces more pleasant for young and old alike.

Nor is this a job for planners alone. Town councils, grassroots groups, schools and parents can all play a part: by making better use of school sports facilities after hours, organising neighbourhood games, or simply asking teenagers what they need before plans are finalised, not after.

We studied only Punggol and Sengkang, but we suspect the pattern will be familiar to many families across Singapore: neighbourhoods planned for the very young and the old, with little in between. As we work to make Singapore a city for all ages, we should not stop the provision of children’s outdoor play spaces at age 12. If we want our teenagers to spend more time outdoors and less time on screens, we need to give them good reasons, and good places, to be outside.

The question, then, is not whether our teenagers deserve better outdoor spaces. Most of us would agree that they do. The question is whether we are willing to listen to what they want, and then build it.

Adolescence lasts only a few years. The neighbourhoods we build last far longer.