Old-Fashioned Play -- for Pay

By Elizabeth Rudulph

Kids! Come have a ball! Or 60,000 of them! There's a new type of business franchise that is popping up in shopping malls and neighborhoods across America. At least two nationwide companies are offering pay-per-use indoor playgrounds, which feature toys, games, supervised fun and a workout that doesn't break the family bank.

As public playgrounds grow increasingly seedy, the for-profit centers offer * clean, safe, supervised activity as well as a variety of challenging exercises to develop youngsters' physical fitness, usually for a fee of around $5 an hour. "Playgrounds are dirty, not supervised," says Dick Guggenheimer, owner of the two-month-old Discovery Zone in Yonkers, N.Y., part of a Kansas City- based chain. "We're indoors; we're padded; parents can feel their child is safe."

Discovery Zone has sold 120 outlets in the past 14 months, boasting sandboxes full of brightly colored plastic spheres, mazes, mats to bounce on, obstacle courses, moonwalks, slides and mountains to climb. Now mega- franchiser McDonald's is getting into the act. The burger giant is test- marketing a new playground, Leaps & Bounds, in Naperville, Ill. Phys Kids of Wichita has opened one center and has plans to expand.

American parents are rightly worried about their kids' leisure life, built around Saturday-morning cartoons and Nintendo. There are 36 million children in the U.S. ages 2 to 11; they watch an average of 24 hours of TV a week and devote less and less energy to active recreation. Nationwide cutbacks in education budgets are making the problem worse, as gym classes and after-hours sports time get squeezed. Says Discovery Zone president Jack Gunion: "We have raised a couple of generations of pure couch potatoes."

In an attempt to soup up that life-style, the new facilities cater to the concerns of two-earner families, staying open in the evenings, long after traditional public playgrounds have grown dark and unusable. At Naperville's Leaps & Bounds, families can play together for $4.95 per child, parents free. Fresh-faced "counselors," dressed in colorful sport pants and shirts, guide youngsters to appropriate play areas for differing age groups. Three-year-olds and younger can learn spatial concepts -- in and out, over and around -- by crawling in a padded plastic turtle shell or sinking into a quicksand of colorful balls and learning to control the multicolored plastic objects. Kids ages 4 to 6 climb a padded "Swiss-cheese mountain" or creep through a maze of blue, fuchsia and yellow tunnels. Youngsters up to 12 balance on a rope walk or on a webbed "bean field," a bouncy surface with punching bags that hang above it within a child's grasp. A nearby concession offers turkey dogs, pizza, and carrot and celery sticks.

These new playgrounds are not meant to be day-care facilities; parents are expected to stay and play with their kids rather than drop them off. But $ several also provide high-tech baby-sitting services. At some of the Discovery Zones, parents can register their children in special supervised programs, then leave them and slip away for a couple of hours to enjoy a movie or dinner. If there is a problem, Mom and Dad are paged by beeper.

The most fun of all, though, is getting to do what parents used to do in the days before two-career families and two-hour commutes: play with their kids. That, at least, is old-fashioned, even at per-hour rates.

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago