Guides for parents.
What is worth knowing when you choose a playground, travel with children, or read playground data. No marketing, and no promises the data cannot keep.
Choosing a playground by your child's age
What actually matters at 1-3, 3-6 and 6-12, what to look for before you walk there, and how to filter a playground map so it shows only the ones that fit.
Finding playgrounds when you travel
How to find a playground near your hotel, between two long drives, or in a city you have never walked, and what to check before you go.
Where playground data comes from
OpenStreetMap, municipal registers and families: what each source knows about a playground, why one city has equipment recorded and the next has none, and how to fix what is wrong.
One toddler, one big kid, one playground
How to find a playground that works for a two-year-old and an eight-year-old at the same time, and what to do when no single place fits both.
How these are written.
These guides are written by the people who build KidMap, from what the data shows and what we end up doing ourselves with our own children. Every number in them comes from the KidMap dataset or from the public sources listed on the data sources page.
What you will not find here: a promise that a playground is safe, maintained or right for your particular child. KidMap does not inspect playgrounds and does not rate them. The data helps you decide where to walk; the judgement when you arrive is yours.
If something here is wrong, or a topic is missing, write to us. We correct these pages.