Bulgarian playgrounds in transition: do children's and parent's perceptions differ?

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ideological dualism of playgrounds and aims to show cross-generational differences between parents’ and children’s perceptions of playgrounds in Bulgaria, where children play on both communistic and western designed playground equipment. Such a political conception of playgrounds evokes and also matches up with Winner’s theory and his work, “Do artifacts have politics?” Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used, and a Mosaic approach was adopted to bring together a range of techniques for listening to young children talk about extant playground models. The findings of this descriptive research provide evidence that both children and their parents welcome the western playground designs in Bulgaria because of their superior functionality. However, children’s and parents’ perceptions differ on functional playground dimensions such as Joy, Safety, Nature, Socialization, and Design. Significantly, the communistic playground designs were praised for their superior affordance of children’s socialization.