The Importance of Free Play in Aquatic Environments

Childhood is a time of limitless imagination, boundless creativity, and wild invention. It’s the one time in life when exploration is encouraged freely without the weight of daily responsibilities other than formal learning and helping with chores. The freedom of being young displays itself in many ways, one of which is free play. 

Free play is critical to a child’s development. It enables them to problem solve, think critically, develop stories, and innovate. It can be seen in activities such as building Lego sets, playing house, creating structures and gaining achievements in video games like Minecraft, strategy forming in board games, and simply running through backyards envisioning new worlds. One method of free play continues to evolve as children explore aquatic environments, such as splash pads. 

Children play at Lopesan’s Costa Bavaro Resort, Dominican Republic.

An octopus tentacle leads guests through a spray feature at Westfield Memorial Pool, NJ.

Historically, splash pads have included spray features that inspire thoughts of running under mountainous waterfalls, becoming pirates on a treasure-hunting adventure, or riding gigantic animals through vast seas. Far too often, these features have laid upon a blank canvas of abrasive concrete beckoning for inspiration. Covering this blank canvas with a specific flooring design is one way to further encourage free play. For example, a pirate-themed splash pad could round out the experience for children with an “x marks the spot,” different clues on the island to give more context, and a beach theme with blues symbolizing the water, tans symbolizing the shore, and aquatic creatures sprinkled throughout. It could even include hopscotch inlays to encourage children to jump from shape to shape to get across a certain section of the surface. This concept of adding theming to the flooring design can also help with zoning. For instance, a facility could denote a more adventurous zone with darker blues creating the “high seas” or a calmer zone with tans to portray a peaceful sand-colored beach. 

Before: Disintegrating Pour-In-Place at Wyndham Bonnet Creek, FL

After: Life Floor’s Pirate Theme at Wyndham Bonnet Creek, FL

Alternatively, surfaces can display a more simplistic, geometric pattern to encourage a different kind of free play. For example, “the floor is lava” is a common game for children to play by jumping from color to color or chasing each other around by only touching certain patterns. These activities could augment the free play made available by the water features they encounter as they run around. 

Children play on the hexagon surface at Parr Park, Grapevine, TX.

It should be noted that free play is only as free as children feel while engaging with the aquatic environment. Do they feel like they can tumble to the ground without fear of a bruised knee? Do they think they can jump around without losing their footing and slipping? Are they certain in their games that the only thrill is that of excitement and not of fear of injury? 

Life Floor strongly believes that aquatic surfaces should lessen and, if possible, eliminate fear of major injury. It’s natural to get a couple bruises playing; however, if injuries halt play then something needs to change. Our company was founded on the idea that play shouldn’t be painful. Scrapes, cuts, and concussions shouldn’t be a common occurrence on splash pads and pool decks, especially when young children could be getting their initial introductions to aquatic free play. That’s why a central tenet of our brand is safety. Our product provides safer surfaces with cushioning, impact absorption, and slip resistance, allowing kids to play freely as they were meant to play: without fear. 

For more information on the benefits of free play, please visit https://wetheparents.org/importance-of-free-play

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If you would like to discover ways you can transform the flooring at your aquatic facility, please send us a message at solutions@lifefloor.com.

National Water Safety Month: Getting Traction on a Slippery Issue

Welcome to week two of our National Water Safety Month series on issues and topics prominent in the aquatics industry! If you missed last week’s post on safety messaging, be sure to check it out. This week we’ll be talking about how important it is to reduce slip and fall injuries within aquatic environments. 

As parents and guardians, the one thing we never want to see is our children getting injured by things that could have been prevented. It’s why new parents child-proof their homes and make sure sharp edges are covered, stairs are barricaded, and cabinets that contain potentially dangerous items like cleaning supplies are locked. Children are learning, growing, and developing natural responses to environmental stimuli. Our duty as adults is to protect them from threats that they aren’t yet able to recognize as dangerous. Child-proofing isn’t meant to completely bubble-wrap kids and shield them from everything; instead, it enables them to explore and be themselves without developing fears of things that have injured them. This is largely why the playground industry transitioned away from concrete and asphalt surfacing to safety surfacing in the 1980s. 

On surfaces traditionally found in aquatic environments, like concrete, ceramic tiles, and pour-in-place aggregates, there are numerous issues that arise. These surfaces are often slippery when wet, abrasive, hot, and/or non-cushioned. Not only are children slipping and falling, but they are also skinning their knees and elbows, getting concussions, burning their feet, and developing fears of community features that were intended to spark joy and inspire play. Water shoes have been developed as a low-cost alternative to help provide more traction and protection; however, this should signal to the industry that end consumers are unhappy with aquatic surfacing and are trying to improve safety within their personal means. Unfortunately, we’ve seen the effects of these types of surfaces far too often — through news articles about splash pads shut down for safety concerns, from first hand stories we hear from family or friends, or from customers looking to solve major pain points at their facilities. 

This is why Life Floor was created. Our co-founders saw a need for safety surfacing on splash pads and at other aquatic facilities, especially when one of them became a new father. He witnessed his young son slip, fall, and hit his head on wet concrete surfacing. When that happened, he saw these facilities in a new light and recognized that changes needed to be made to protect other children like his son. Fast forward nearly a decade and this mission has become a reality. Using safety surfacing standards for dry playgrounds as a historic precedent, NSF International created a new standard within NSF/ANSI 50 recommending safety surfacing for use in all aquatic play areas. In order to be certified to the new standard, surfacing products are required to meet or exceed six criteria, one of which is slip-resistance. Surfaces need to be significantly slip-resistant when wet and maintain slip-resistance even after exposure to harsh UV and pool chemicals. Another one of the six required characteristics of certified products is the need for impact attenuation. Knowing that very small children can stumble and fall regardless of surface type, it is now recommended that splash pad surfaces cushion this fall to a certain extent. These new requirements will add a standard of safety to aquatic play areas that hasn’t been present until now and we’re proud to witness this positive shift in the industry. To learn more about the standard and specifications for certification, download our NSF/ANSI 50 Guide here. 

For facilities that have chosen to install Life Floor, there have been numerous testimonials from directors, supervisors, and operators that speak to the evident improvement. Facilities are saving time, energy, and money by lowering (and in some cases eliminating) incident reports at their splash pads, pool decks, and waterparks due to Life Floor’s innovative product. Overall, liabilities are decreasing, lawsuits around surfacing concerns are diminishing, and guest satisfaction is skyrocketing. Here’s what a few of our customers have said:

“We definitely noticed a major decrease in our reports: we hardly have any slip and falls on the flooring or reports of ice pack usage. All of that drastically went down. Everyone here from the guests to the desk staff have been singing its praises.”

— Shoreview Community Center Shoreview, MN

“We notice it because of the incidence rate. We record every injury we get in the park, the injury rate, and saw a significant decrease in injuries. From a data standpoint it has made a big difference.”

— SeaWorld Aquatica, Orlando, FL

“The color is bright. We had a big fall rate and now we don’t – no injuries since installing.”

— Volcano Island Waterpark, Sterling, VA

“I have had a lot of people ask about the floor since we’ve installed it, and I always say that the upfront cost is a little scary. It tends to scare people away, I get that. But if you can do it then it’s worth it. Before this we had nothing but issues, and now we’ve not had a single thing go wrong. Don’t worry about the cost, in the long run it is worth it.”

— The Steer Barn Clubhouse, Hemlock Farms, PA

This summer will be unique as not all aquatic facilities across the country will be open as usual. We anticipate that, in many communities, splash pads may be the only types of aquatic recreation available this coming season. With limited activities accessible to families, operators are going to be focused on keeping these areas as safe and enjoyable as possible. To learn more about ways that your facility can prevent slip and fall injuries and meet the requirements of the new NSF/ANSI 50 surfacing standard, feel free to contact us - we’re always happy to help.