TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110491/1104140.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 87 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 86

Old-Fashioned Play -- for Pay


As outdoor playgrounds decay, more families are turning to cheery
franchises that offer supervised fun for a fee

By ELIZABETH RUDULPH -- With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/
Chicago


     Kids! Come have a ball! Or 60,000 of them! There's a new
type of business franchise that is popping up in shopping malls
and neighborhoods across America. At least two nationwide
companies are offering pay-per-use indoor playgrounds, which
feature toys, games, supervised fun and a workout that doesn't
break the family bank.

    As public playgrounds grow increasingly seedy, the
for-profit centers offer clean, safe, supervised activity as
well as a variety of challenging exercises to develop
youngsters' physical fitness, usually for a fee of around $5 an
hour. "Playgrounds are dirty, not supervised," says Dick
Guggenheimer, owner of the two-month-old Discovery Zone in
Yonkers, N.Y., part of a Kansas City-based chain. "We're
indoors; we're padded; parents can feel their child is safe."

    Discovery Zone has sold 120 outlets in the past 14 months,
boasting sandboxes full of brightly colored plastic spheres,
mazes, mats to bounce on, obstacle courses, moonwalks, slides
and mountains to climb. Now mega-franchiser McDonald's is
getting into the act. The burger giant is test-marketing a new
playground, Leaps & Bounds, in Naperville, Ill. Phys Kids of
Wichita has opened one center and has plans to expand.

    American parents are rightly worried about their kids'
leisure life, built around Saturday-morning cartoons and
Nintendo. There are 36 million children in the U.S. ages 2 to
11; they watch an average of 24 hours of TV a week and devote
less and less energy to active recreation. Nationwide cutbacks
in education budgets are making the problem worse, as gym
classes and after-hours sports time get squeezed. Says Discovery
Zone president Jack Gunion: "We have raised a couple of
generations of pure couch potatoes."

    In an attempt to soup up that life-style, the new
facilities cater to the concerns of two-earner families, staying
open in the evenings, long after traditional public playgrounds
have grown dark and unusable. At Naperville's Leaps & Bounds,
families can play together for $4.95 per child, parents free.
Fresh-faced "counselors," dressed in colorful sport pants and
shirts, guide youngsters to appropriate play areas for differing
age groups. Three-year-olds and younger can learn spatial
concepts -- in and out, over and around -- by crawling in a
padded plastic turtle shell or sinking into a quicksand of
colorful balls and learning to control the multicolored plastic
objects. Kids ages 4 to 6 climb a padded "Swiss-cheese mountain"
or creep through a maze of blue, fuchsia and yellow tunnels.
Youngsters up to 12 balance on a rope walk or on a webbed "bean
field," a bouncy surface with punching bags that hang above it
within a child's grasp. A nearby concession offers turkey dogs,
pizza, and carrot and celery sticks.

    These new playgrounds are not meant to be day-care
facilities; parents are expected to stay and play with their
kids rather than drop them off. But several also provide
high-tech baby-sitting services. At some of the Discovery Zones,
parents can register their children in special supervised
programs, then leave them and slip away for a couple of hours
to enjoy a movie or dinner. If there is a problem, Mom and Dad
are paged by beeper.

    The most fun of all, though, is getting to do what parents
used to do in the days before two-career families and two-hour
commutes: play with their kids. That, at least, is old-
fashioned, even at per-hour rates.