Here's an idea: How about instead of spreading yourselves, your lawns, and your swing sets all over the landscape, why don't you live someplace where your kids can play in a public park or playground? I'll bet that "develops agility and confidence" too, and it doesn't require half an acre of land and a lot of lawn maintenance.

Lawns that large aren't even needed for "developing agility and confidence" - lots in German suburbs tend to be much smaller because of less available space, but thanks to more efficient building and land development, children still have more than enough opportunities to develop these skills. In fact, on average they seem to end up healthier than their American counterparts.

But that would probably require too much "thinking outside the box" for American suburban developers and their apologists...

The sad fact is, many of the people live in areas where there are public alternatives, but prefer not to use them. It's just another example of the wasteful culture. Everybody buys their own personal play sets, rather than use the public playgrounds.

By definition public spaces get recycled as generations grow and new children replace them. But these personal replacements get thrown out once the owners children out grow them. Such a waste.

I kind of live both of these lives at once, and don't see one as dramatically superior to the other.

We have two houses that we do a lot of living in, one at the beach and our standard home (I know, we're really, really wasteful and evil and all that).

In our regular home, there are several town l parks, one of which is about 2 miles away. Its a short drive to the park, and we go there often because its nice to have some place to go. But many times, my wife is dealing with the baby, and just wants to send the other two kids out the door to play. They are too young to go by themselves, but they can handle themselves in the backyard quite well. It just works for us.

Why not have a playground in the backyard? Because of its appearance? I'm far more about living to have fun than looking good.

At the beach, where the kids spend the majority of their weekends and vacation in the warmer outdoor oriented months, we don't have a yard, but we can walk to about a half dozen public playgrounds nearby. We love walking to the parks. The kids have named each of them based on some feature or experience (the dinosaur park, the pug park (they met a pug there), etc.). It's great to have a public park to walk to, but they don't have the same unsupervised outdoor play opportunities there because there's no yard. We're not comfortable sending a four year old out to play on the sidewalk by herself.

Still, I don't really miss the backyard playground at the beach -- there's enough to do -- but we'd really miss it in our standard suburban home.

Do you frequent public parks? They replace worn out play equipment every few years. And they are switching to the same plastic stuff because it doesn't rust or splinter, and because the treated wood versions are toxic.

Simply untrue. I live in San Francisco, and the playground closest to me is falling apart. It's the Crocker-Amazon playground.