Modern Childhood > Articles
Out To Play
Full text of article in the Daily Telegraph, 4/10/08
Well, it’s a start. David Cameron’s noticed that health and safety regulations stop schools taking children out on field trips, outdoor activities or just collecting autumn leaves down the local park. And the Department for Children, Schools and Families is to issue guidelines about extra-curricular activities, aiming to get pupils out of classrooms and back into the real world. I suppose school-organised, adult-supervised activities are better than nothing.
But they’re really not good enough. Indeed, excessive health and safety measures at school are just the tip of the risk aversion iceberg leaving increasing numbers of young people without the emotional resilience, social competence and personal confidence to thrive in our society. A couple of years ago IPPR found British youngsters at or near the top of the European charts for almost every type of teenage misconduct and malaise. Not just knife-crime and antisocial behaviour in the inner cities, but underage drinking, sexual activity and drug abuse across the social spectrum. And then there’s anorexia, depression and self-harm.
Something’s mightily wrong with childhood in Britain, and after thirty years working with children and teachers (the last eight years of which were spent researching ‘toxic childhood’) I reckon our risk aversion – not just in schools but in every area of life – is a major part of the problem.
Think back to your own childhood. What and where did you play when you were six, seven, eight years old? Most adults remember building and making (dens, mudpies, forts, go-karts), make-believe and role-play. They remember running, jumping, climbing, and playing outside (the garden, the park, local 'wild' places), kickarounds on the playing field or disappearing for hours on their bikes. There were no grown-ups to supervise this play – children organised it themselves, and by playing together, often in mixed age groups, they learned to get along, to deal with squabbles, to collaborate, negotiate and problem-solve.
Now think about children you know today. How often do they go 'out to play'? Over the last twenty-five years there's been an enormous change in young children's leisure time experiences. When asked recently by the Good Childhood Enquiry what age children should be allowed out alone, many adults suggested fourteen. And even if they’d like to give their children more freedom parents are prevented by public opinion – any child seen out unaccompanied these days is considered at risk or a possible threat to public safety.
So for most twenty-first century children, the word 'play' doesn’t mean outdoor, physical pursuits or indoor creativity: it means sitting down at a 'play station', mindlessly gazing at TV, or communicating virtually with friends via Bebo or MSN. Instead of first-hand experiences and real interaction with real people, they have ersatz experiences on screens; instead of genuine creative play, they have 'toy consumption'.
Just as health and safety regulations have stifled the excitement of learning at school, preoccupation with public safety, endless regulation and adults’ desire for tidy, orderly communities have helped stifle children’s leisure-time play – and a high-tech, consumer culture has provided an indoor sedentary substitute. Children in the UK today spend an average of five hours twenty minutes a day on screen-based activities.
Now think what’s been lost. All the most essential lessons of life – the personal, social and emotional lessons that make us fully-functioning human beings – are caught rather than taught. Social competence, self-confidence and resilience, commonsense understanding of the world – not to mention physical health and fitness – all come from being out there in the real world interacting with real people. If children don’t get these vital first hand experiences, without intrusive adult intervention, we can’t be surprised that many end up as fragile or anti-social teenagers, either risk-averse themselves, or ready to take excessive risks, because they’re unable to make sensible judgements.
A combination of parental anxiety, community intolerance and all-pervasive risk aversion now threatens the mental and physical health of the next generation. It’s becoming a matter of urgency that we reclaim public space for our children and relearn skills of parenting that came naturally to our ancestors. Instead of wrapping our children in cotton wool, we have to do what parents in the past (and today in other parts of the world) have always done.
First, parents themselves must take personal responsibility for making the local environment as safe as possible for children to play. This means working together with other parents, neighbours and shop-keepers, as well as obvious agencies like the police and housing authorities. When parents know where their children are playing, they can set safe boundaries and ensure friendly adults are on hand when needed.
Second, adults must skill children up to deal with any dangers they might meet. This means getting out into the local area with them, teaching road safety skills through example, talking about safety issues and dangers. If the real-life loving adults in children’s lives take control of the situation, they – and the children – can feel confident that today’s kids are as all right as it’s possible to be.
But if we leave it to the heath and safety authorities, they’ll strangle us all in red tape.