When Playgrounds Close, Parents Have to Get Creative

We quickly discovered nine playgrounds within a 10-minute walk of our home, each more amazing than the last. Rain or shine, even with Siberian winds whipping in from the east, my son—now almost 2 years old—spent hours each day testing his physical abilities and exhausting himself on trampolines and slides.

With the coronavirus lockdown, the day cares have closed, and playgrounds have been cordoned off with police tape and metal chains. Now, several times a day, my son runs down his list of his names for the ones he longs for most: “Tunnel Playground, closed,” he says. “Monkey Playground, closed. Dolphin Playground, closed.”

I’m not complaining. Things could be much worse. We still have our health and our jobs, and we thankfully haven’t been mandated to stay indoors just as Berlin’s dismal winter gives way to sunshine and flowering trees. The question is: How do you get work done when your toddler needs constant attention and wants to go outside—and you live in a city where all the playgrounds have been roped off?

Normally, working from home is infinitely more productive for me than going to an office. These days, the only option is to trade work and child-care shifts with my husband and cram in more work during nap times, at night, and on weekends. But how do you feed a toddler’s insatiable curiosity when you have no access to normal life?

Even stacks of books and piles of toys can’t replace playgrounds, so we’ve built forts and pulled mattresses from beds to create makeshift trampolines. We've produced elaborate artworks and obstacle courses, and sometimes we gather all the balls in the house and bounce them around the shower (with the water off!). And we got a child seat for our bikes so we can ride to construction sites—currently of great interest—and more quickly get to public parks, which are thankfully still open.

And then there are the cemeteries. In our immediate neighborhood, the closest thing to nature is a nondenominational graveyard that’s now a park; a somewhat surprising inscription near the front reads: “Make life on Earth good and beautiful. There is no afterlife, no resurrection.” The oldest of the 100 or so graves scattered throughout the property date from the 1840s, while others commemorate Russian and German soldiers from World War II and a few Nazi resistance fighters.

Almost like a secret garden, the graveyard is walled off from the rest of the city and filled with chestnut trees and forsythia. Near the back, there’s a tiny playground that’s closed, but the rest of the property is alive with young families who remain a respectful distance from one another. Parents blow bubbles and teach young kids how to ride bikes. Toddlers often sit near the edges of the now-forbidden playground, digging with brightly colored shovels in sand that’s blown out of the sandbox and through the fence.

There are no slides, swings, or trampolines. But the air is good, and my son seems relieved to be outside running through the grass or searching for firebugs as crows hop about nearby. And he’s clearly grateful to see other kids, even if he can’t play with them.

“Graves!” my son now says whenever he sees a big rock or stone, even if it’s not an actual tombstone. He’s come to rely on the cemetery, and we go there every day. It sounds macabre, and perhaps in the context of the coronavirus it is. But it doesn’t feel that way. For city-dwelling parents, it’s become more obvious than ever how valuable spaces like these are—not to mention all those sorely missed playgrounds. They don’t solve the problem of how to get work done while parenting a toddler, but they sure go a long way toward making life “good and beautiful.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.