The Director of Play England compliments the Government on addressing the issue of children's quality of life positively through the Children's Plan which focuses on letting children be themselves.
In 1913, the Declaration of Dependence by the Children of America declared as it’s first principle that ‘childhood is endowed with certain inherent and inalienable rights, among which are freedom from toil for daily bread; the right to play and to dream’. This early milestone of the modern children’s rights movement was part of the fight to end child labour in the west. It constructed childhood as a phase of human life protected from care and unburdened by responsibility. In this modern view, playing and dreaming are the main point to the early years of life, set against which putting children to work was deemed to be fundamentally wrong.
Nearly a hundred years later, child labour is a thing of the past, at least in the west. But there are other, more insidious if less obvious pressures on a ‘good childhood’. The Children’s Plan, published this week, is perhaps the first serious policy response, certainly in England, to 21st century threats to children’s ‘right to play and to dream’.
Research and commentary over recent years has repeatedly highlighted children’s declining presence in the outdoor world that was traditionally their playground. Traffic, fear of crime, negative attitudes to children in public and planning policies that take little account of their needs, have all helped to create the phenomenon of the ‘battery-reared’ child. As Demos reported in last month’s ‘Seen and Heard’ pamphlet, children today are largely considered neither welcome nor safe in public space. At best, they are corralled into clearly demarked, denatured and sanitised ‘play areas’, of little value to the limitless imagination of their instinctive playfulness. The commercialisation of childhood ensures that they are rarely bored, but there is a pervasive anxiety that consumerism is eating away at children’s more measured induction to the adult world. Rampant childhood obesity and a generation that knows more about virtual worlds than the real one, adds to a sense that something is going badly wrong.
The Children’s Plan is an attempt to address this most complex of issues. If it is spent wisely – which will mean fully engaging with the play and playwork sectors and building upon local play strategies stimulated by the Big Lottery Fund’s recent initiative – the £225m for playgrounds will help. More encouraging still is the promise of a national play strategy. We need to again open up the outdoor world to children, and we need to again establish the social and cultural space for them to play and to dream. This means bringing policies for planning, transport, health and culture, as well as children’s services to bear on the challenge of creating a world where children can really be children, not just trainee producer-consumers.
Researchers into children’s play see it as an instinctive biological imperative: the way we discover and learn to respond to the world. Nature and evolution demand that the young of species are impelled to seek out experiences they will need to thrive. Children love to play because their future depends upon it. The irony of modern childhood is that an imposed preparation for a future that is governed by laws of economics, not nature, has taken precedence over this much deeper need. The Children’s Plan could prove to be a moment of really enlightened government: when the state recognised that the most crucial ingredient in the mix of interventions for truly positive outcomes for children – and the planet – was to simply make space for them to be themselves.
Adrian Voce is Director -Play England
