Obviously the generations that came after them are soft because they did not needlessly risk injury and death. Crushed skulls and amputated fingers are a rite of passage.
With their mortality becoming more evident as one by one their friends die, boomers have started sharing pictures celebrating how edgy their childhood was as a desperate attempt to convince themselves that it made them special. They seem to take ownership of the lethal deathtraps and forget that they did not build them. These playgrounds were created by the generation that had survived World War II and had faced actual danger, be it from serving in combat zones or trying to stay alive in the face of bombing raids.
Of course the ones who died in accidents on these playgrounds are strangely silent and forgotten. Similarly the ones who suffered life changing injuries keep quiet for fear of being labelled as spoilsports.
During 1974 twenty four children in the USA died as a result of playground equipment, with “falls, hanging, and being struck by a moving part of the equipment” cited on death certificates. Over the same period 118,000 children needed emergency hospital care as a result of playground and play equipment injuries, with over 75% being children under the age of ten.
About half of the injuries were to the head, and about 40% were to the extremities such as fingers and hands. With much of this equipment having unprotected pivot and pinch points, the occurrence of injuries requiring amputation of fingers is not surprising. The equipment responsible for most injuries were swings which caused about two-thirds of injuries.
The situation was very similar in the UK which was highlighted by a report by Cynthia Illingworth published in the British Medical Journal. Over a similar time frame to the US study she collected information about 200 hospital visits involving children who had received injuries from play grounds. About a quarter of the children had fractures. While the swings were the cause of the majority of the injuries, those involving slides and climbing frames were more severe.