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The first years of life, spanning up to age five, are critical for development. During this time, known as early childhood, children’s brains develop at an astonishing pace to form more than a million neural connections each second. It is a crucial time and play is a major way that kids learn and develop physically, socially, cognitively, and linguistically, which means that the way that playgrounds for little ones are designed matters — a lot.

That’s why KABOOM!, a national nonprofit working to address playspace inequity, along with an expert-informed advisory council, developed its Early Childhood Playspace Design Toolkit. “The importance of making sure that playspaces are really developmentally rich and supportive of growth across the developmental domains is critical for the early childhood age range to ensure that they’re set up for success in the long run,” explains Alyssa Young, KABOOM!’s programs and partnership manager, who led the development of the toolkit.

From offering design principles to transform a physical playspace and playspace design and worksheets to support implementation, the toolkit translates expertise into accessible support and direction for creating developmentally rich playspaces. KABOOM! and its partners are also using the toolkit to address playspace inequity. They are applying these principles in targeted ways to ensure all kids get access to these rich spaces as a necessity, not a luxury.

While KABOOM! was working to create tot lots — recreational spaces for toddlers — in recent years, they naturally began to assess how to best create play areas for younger kids.. “Through experimenting with educators and partners on the design of those spaces, we had this opportunity to dive into what the research says and what the experts in the field of early childhood development say,” Young says.

Young began to gather an expert advisory council, which was pivotal in creating the toolkit and ensuring that it’s rooted in rigorous research. “There’s a large group of folks who are deeply embedded in the research world, from inclusive design experts to those who specialize in physical play,” she says. “First and foremost, our advisors are kid advocates and play advocates. Then they all have their interesting sub-niche of expertise.” One of those experts is Janet Loebach, a professor of childhood development at Cornell University’s Department of Human-Centered Design. She specializes in inclusive playspaces, the impact of play and nature on learning and development, and co-designed tools for planning and assessing playspaces.

“I’ve been trying to help build up the evidence base for what works in playspace design that supports children’s actual development and positive interactions, but also preferences, not just needs,” she says. “We often design playspaces according to what adults think kids want versus what kids actually want.” Loebach and her research assistants have spent “tons and tons of hours” watching kids play. She brought insights from that observation to the advisory council and, thus, to the toolkit. Loebach says that most playspaces are designed with physical play in mind, but that leaves out the problem-solving challenges that come with spaces that kids can manipulate themselves or natural playspaces that can keep kids playing longer.

Rebecca Parlakian, senior programs director at ZERO TO THREE, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to empowering early childhood development, also served on the council. “The goal of including me in particular was really to lift up the voices of infants and toddlers as we developed the toolkit,” Parlakian says. “I’ve developed a range of resources and curricula about how we can support their learning and the way that they learn through play and relationships. Another focus of my training was on how we support young children with developmental delay or disability in their families.”

The result is a design toolkit filled with tangible and actionable advice spanning a variety of play types — physical, exploratory, imaginative, rule-based, expressive, nature-based, restorative, and even digital — all with equity, inclusivity and accessibility in mind.

Some of the overarching design advice includes developing different spaces for different early childhood age ranges and ensuring that there’s a full pathway through all spaces for easy use by children and caregivers, where they’re using tricycles, wheelchairs, or strollers, to move throughout the space. The toolkit also touches on the role of cultural perspectives in play, making local community engagement essential for developing culturally specific and appropriate play spaces. One example the toolkit points to is a playground in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood that features decorative elements that reference papel picado, a traditional Mexican art form created by cutting elaborate designs into tissue paper.

Another cultural trend it tackles is safety. “Cultural trends surrounding safety can also limit children’s play opportunities. This includes shifts among parents and educators toward structured and supervised activities over free and risky play where children test their physical and cognitive boundaries,” the toolkit reads. “While safety is essential, research supports the benefits of managed risk in play, showing that children who engage in challenging physical activities develop better problem-solving skills, resilience, and independence.” The toolkit encourages the design of playspaces characterized by high-quality environments that embrace nature and allow for manageable risk to best support early childhood development.

In addition to the hope that the toolkit will make developmentally supportive designs easier and more accessible for those interested in developing, creating, updating, or expanding playspaces, Young says that there are even higher aims for what the toolkit could achieve. “I’d love for folks to be able to take this and run with it to use this toolkit to bring their dreams for their space to fruition,” she says. “But pie in the sky is some systems-level change happening, making sure that public spaces are designed to support our littlest citizens.”

This post was originally published on Next City.