Do as I say, not as I do

There’s been so many articles on children and video games over the past few years it’s difficult to know what to link to.  I’m sure that this summer there will be another spate of op-ed pieces filled with nostalgic yearnings for games of stickball or kickabout in empty residential streets – and that’s great.  Anything that gets people talking about children’s rights to play and to use the outdoor spaces of their neighborhoods, is fine with me.  The thing is though, the evidence coming in has been contradictory.  One study suggests that “video games can stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society” while another blames them for the “one child in six (that) has difficulty learning to talk” – while still managing to point a damning finger at busy parents and high property prices.  Elsewhere, Richard Louv and many others have drawn links between the current (Western) children’s ‘indoor culture’ of childhood and: obesity, ADHD, depression, social disaffection, poor communication, poor creativity, apathy, sociopathy, and spontaneously turning blue.

Okay, so that was just to see if you were paying attention.  The thing is, I want to agree with them.  I have met children who have never felt soil before, who say “don’t sit on the grass, there’s dirt under there”, who have never shelled a pea or seen a piece of fruit still on the tree, and felt my heart break.  It seems logical that such a massive change in children’s lives should have commensurately vast consequences, and I am pessimistic enough to be tempted by the widely popularized notion that everything, everywhere, is getting worse.  It is play that changes my mind.

In playwork, we cultivate a trust in children.  We believe that children know, on a deep level that some call intuitive or instinctive, what kind of play they need.  We believe that it is our job to support it, provide assistance when asked and advocacy all the time, and to bring new opportunities into the space so that children’s choices, and their play, is informed by the great possibilities of their worlds.  For some of the children mentioned above, that involved answering their questions about the tiny park they had just entered, and picking up a caterpillar to demonstrate it was not threatening.  But when those children left, I am certain that they went to play video games.  What does that say about children’s choices, about priorities and play?

Choice is a complex issue, and for all the children not allowed to go outside there are many too who have no desire to, who believe the natural world to be distant, dangerous or unappealing.  Considering where many children grow up, they may be entirely correct.  When you talk to children about video games, or facebook or whatever else they are clicking around online, it’s clear that these are complex worlds, with attendant systems of material and social status, that they are experts at navigating.  They are playing these new technologies with skill and enthusiasm, and in so doing inadvertantly preparing for lives exactly like ours.

I think that’s what’s so scary.  Like many people today, I spend the majority of my waking life on the computer.  I use it to work, relax and socialize.  If it is a drug, I am addicted.  I have bleary eyes, a complaining lower back and a deep sense of annoyance that I’m not hanging upside-down from a tree.  In fact I sometimes pretend to myself that I’ll go outside in a minute, once I’ve sent this email, checked that blog – and then I see that it’s dark.  I agree that too many children today are living unhealthy lives spent indoors eating junk food and worrying about worrying, but so are too many of their parents.  I think that’s why we’re so worried about them, we want better for them than we are willing to accept for ourselves.

Each child contains a wilderness that needs time and space to flourish – but do does every adult, even if it is buried somewhere deep.  Time among the trees, under the stars and around a campfire sustains a deep and vital part of our humanity, and when we have time to explore the wildernesses inside and outside of ourselves we have resources we can draw upon for the rest of our lives.  So when we’re making our litanies of complaints, saying that indoors and online is no way to spend precious days, we should seriously consider taking our own advice and kicking the kids, and ourselves, out until dark.

Gender and Play Clothes

The last time I ventured into the baby section of a clothing store I was looking for something for a friend’s new baby.  Something plain, I thought, maybe a 3-pack of onesies that I could stencil something onto.  Apparently those don’t exist anymore.  Instead, I found a shop divided decisively into a pink side and a blue side, into tiaras and t-shirts, tutus and tractors.  Boys got pictures of dinosaurs and builders, girls got bedazzled shoulders and cutesy slogans.  When it comes to children, their clothes are gendered, as are their toys, as are expectations of who they will be and become.

The toy industry magazine Play Things poses an interesting question: If underwear sections in a Chinese department store aren’t gender-specific, why are our toy stores?  The thing is, we don’t have to travel very far to be reminded that there’s a different way of doing things.

Below is a print ad run by Lego, taken from Sociological Images.  It’s not just the burnt orange and brown colour palette that makes me nostalgic for my own days of lego – it’s the denim dungarees,  practical braids and turn-ups.  It’s the idea of PLAY CLOTHES.

Where did that idea go?  That children need a wardrobe of clothes that it’s okay to get messy, outfits that say “what I am about to do is more important than looking cute”.

Now, I love dinosaurs, tutus, tractors and tiaras but I think they ought to be voluntary and open to all genders to pick them up, wear them in odd combinations or ignore them as desired.  Instead, the situation we are now putting children into is one in which everything is thoroughly and aggressively gendered.  The professions they are offered for imaginative play are a) less inventive than those they would come up with on their own and b) strictly limited by gender.  Every object is placed along a binary line from girlness to boyness – and increasingly the argument is being made for those distinctions as natural, innate and inescapable.

The gendering and segregation of merchandise is complicated and adaptive, and requires us to educate ourselves about our purchasing habits.  It may seem bad business to separate off half of the population from half of the merchandise, but one of the consequences of being told “all of these things are for boys” can make a boy, or the person shopping for him, think that all “these things” are necessary.  Think about how this plays out with adults – the aggressive distinctions in how skin care products are marketed to men and women encourages both groups to buy it, and to buy lots of it.  By being told “it’s okay for you to have this” marketers are telling you that a) your gender presentation requires constant work to maintain and b) the products you purchase and display can perform or destroy the maintenance work you do.

But because we know this on some level, and because many of us shopping for toys have been frustrated at the selection, accommodations are made.  A girl can aspire to be a doctor, so long as she wants to look hot while she’s doing it.  Toy microscopes are available in black and in pink, but the pink one is less powerful.  Now, I’ve taken these links from the website Sociological Images, but have found the same thing in any toy shop or catalogue I have dared peek into.  I’m going to reference Images again here, for a great post on the fractal nature of the binary, which explains how you can have things which appear to subvert this gender policing, but actually don’t.  I can’t help the linking love – it’s so rare to find a website I believe is a genuine resource to humanity!

The thing is most children are, at some point, already preoccupied by gender.  It’s wildly important to them at different stages, as they work out how they fit into the world and how to define themselves within and against it.  All of the elements of their lives, what they wear and what they play with, now combine to give them a very specific sense of who they are and what they can be – while telling them that it’s more important how they look than what they’re doing.

Children’s Play Area – No Dog Fouling

Over the holidays I was visiting my parents in North Yorkshire.  They live in a beautiful small village, from which my Mum has recently started blogging about their business making clocks, furniture and other items from local reclaimed wood.

While I was there I took some photographs of the local play area, which is a beautiful example of less being more when it comes to public play provision.  The space is part of the old village green, made a perfect island by the canal on one side and the river on the other.

To reach the play area, you follow the steps seen behind this sign and cross a stream – a nicely evocative ‘threshold’ moment, even when it’s not covered in ice.

The space itself is still mostly flat, with a few trees and no equipment whatsoever.  With snow on the ground however, there’s always lots to play with.  Big lumpy snow people and broken snowballs covered the ground, which was stamped flat in places with both big and little bootprints.

Even without the snow, though, there’s ducks to watch and feed:

Berries to collect and grind to juice, perfume or poisonous concoctions:

And places for your parent/carer/exasperated older sibling to sit in warmer weather:

It’s most importantly a place of remarkable beauty, that offers children the chance to engage with the landscape in a number of different ways.  There’s a spot on the riverbank well-stirred up with little sticks, and a path that go back along its length, towards the bridge beyond.

Finally, for those feeling properly adventurous, there’s a ford of stone paths across the river and back into the village itself.  It’s something that locals might easily take for granted, but which tends to inspire visitors with fears of getting washed away and into the freezing waters.

But my Dad said not to worry.

That hardly ever happens.

New York Playgrounds

There’s an interesting set of data maps on Sociological Images, correlating the locations of playgrounds in New York with the local average earnings.  It depicts a play landscape that the writer found surprising – one where the poorest neighborhoods were also those wealthiest in playgrounds.

It’s not really that surprising.  Areas with greater numbers of poorer people also have a higher proportion of public housing (in which those poorer people are living) and public housing projects are obligated to provide play areas.  Areas with wealthy residents, where land value is high and new builds are led by private companies, don’t tend to ‘waste’ money on places that won’t make any.  There have been some exceptions, and on-going battles in gentrifying neighborhoods to save existing playgrounds.  Over time, however, awareness of children’s need for doorstep play might change, leading more mobile and wealthier parents to perhaps seek out homes with doorstep play offers.  This could perhaps leading to family-oriented new-build communities that offer space at a premium cost – but then, don’t they call those the suburbs?

Still, it’s very interesting to see how wealth and access to services can alter over a person’s lifetime.  When young, they might live walking distance from a number of places set aside for play, then grow up to find legal aid or healthcare offers thin on the ground.  It’s also easy to assume that a playground is all it takes for children to be happy, that the space itself is the provision, but anyone who’s seen an inner-city playground knows that they are often not for kids.  Their use by gangs as recruiting stations and offices, the training of fighting dogs on rubber-seated equipment, and rampant neglect for years on end mean that playgrounds can actually become among the most dangerous places for children to be.  Public playgrounds shouldn’t have to be staffed, but they do need to be looked after, and in places where local residents are unable, unwilling, or just rightly afraid, to take on that responsibility, many children start looking elsewhere to play.

In wealthier neighborhoods I would assume that a higher proportion of children are ferried to activities, rather than playing out, or perhaps being taken to places such as Central Park that are farther away, but much lovelier.  I don’t know as much about the play habits of children in wealthier families, though anecdotally I would assume that they have a much larger expectation of homework and academic achievement, that they spend more time indoors and in front of screens than those in poorer families.

The interesting thing though, is how different publicly expressed concerns are for these two groups of kids.  The chorus of television, newspaper and blog posts on these subjects seem to boil down to two key concerns:  that wealthier children spend too much time indoors and may be growing up to be dull, uninquisitive and apathetic to natural environments, and that poorer children are spending too much time unsupervised and may be growing up to be drug-addicted criminals who will break into the homes of journalists or start dating their daughters.  Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think that much of the support for playgrounds and youth clubs in poorer neighborhoods stems from fear of these children, rather than concern for their welfare.

Because surely, if public playgrounds were designed to help children play, to explore their worlds and build new ones, to express themselves and experiment with new ways of being, to make and lose friends, to take risks and get hurt and heal stronger than before, they would look very different to the tarmac paving and metal rings that we so often take for granted.  If they were not designed for containment and ‘blowing off steam’, these playgrounds would look less like the exercise equipment in prison yards.  If they were really designed for children, rather than adults, they would look (as the saying goes) more like parks than parking lots.

“Fire don’t leave me now…

… not when I’ve loved you so much!”

In honour of the cold and overcast post-holiday greys, here’s a post on playing in the dark.

We often complain about early nightfall, the reduced numbers of children playing out and the problems associated with playwork in the darkness, and in doing so we miss the enormous possibilities.  With fewer children you can try offers that might be difficult otherwise, taking different risks.  For opening my eyes to the possibilities of darkness as a ‘loose part’ and the opportunities for winter play magic, I have to thank Penny Wilson and Kelda from PATH. 

For many people, sand pits and fires are impossible to offer for play, a state of affairs which is incredibly sad.  Children are perfectly capable of enjoying and exploring fire without setting themselves alight, and sand pits do not deserve their position as the latest health and safety nightmare.  Still, I know I was lucky to have the chance to lead on this session, in which we lit tiny fires in a sand pit (that we cleared out by daylight the following morning).  The children involved were roughly six to eleven, weighted to the younger end.

Because of the wind and the children’s lack of experience with fire, I decided to bring squares of firestarter bricks, rather than candles which would have gone out.  We put these in shallow holes in the sand, so it looked like this:

We then found that you could lean wax crayons over the flames, melting the wax without burning up the paper.

The wax could then be poured out onto a piece of paper, or flicked across it.

The greatest moments came after this, when it was too dark for artwork and the children lit fires  in curving pathways and fairy circles, which they then jumped in and out of.  Of course, there was a giant bucket of water nearby and the flames were a few inches high at most, but there was something profound for them in crossing a perforated burning line.  One older boy took great care in feeding cardboard scraps to a fire, lit off to one side, until it was quite large.  He laid sheets of paper on top, then watched the fire split them one by one into segments that peeled back from the flames.  When the paper was gone and the fire started to burn down, he was begging it to stay.

Warning: Reduction of Expanded Play Opportunities

Through the excellent Sociological Images blog came word of these fantastic alternative warning labels, made by Gever Tulley for Make Magazine.  The magazine itself is a wonderful source for super-crafty people, backed by some witty contributers who are as sharp as their X-acto knives.

I would love to print these out and sticker them all over some of the toys being offered as ‘must haves’ for the holidays.  I remember getting some of them when I was small and the disappointment of realizing that owning the thing wasn’t nearly as fun as the moment of receiving it.  We’re getting close to that classic ‘£49.95 on the toy and she just played with the box’ time of year, so support the people you know in making solid choices when it comes to their child’s play opportunities.

“They knocked it down…”

There was an excellent quote in the most recent episode of 30 Rock.  Jack is reminiscing with an old high school flame and they have the following heartfelt conversation.

Jack: “What was the name of that old warehouse where we used to shoot bb guns at rats?”

Nancy: “Wolfer Cap and Gown.”

Jack: “Of course!  Is that still there?”

Nancy: “Nah, they tore it down and put up a big playground.”

Jack: “Oh, what a shame.”

Nancy: “Yeah.”

Although Jack could hardly be considered the moral centre of the show, or even a consistent voice of reason, he does have his moments.  This is a nice nod to how the best play memories can sometimes be formed in places not designed for it by adults, but instead in places appropriated by children.

“No, that’s not ours…”

I have a tendency to get really excited by evidence of play in the public sphere.  When I see glitter embedded in pavement cracks or bits of plastic jewelry in the grass I am so pleased to be reminded that children’s use of public spaces has not entirely gone.

Imagine how excited I was, returning to a place where we had previously run sessions with rope swings from trees, to find this:

Hurray!  The children had found some blue plastic twine and were playing out, making their own equipment!  Brilliant, I thought, feeling so pleased for them and glad that the situation there wasn’t as dire as I had thought.  I went up to the rope, seeing how frayed it was from use and pushed it back and forth.  It seemed a bit damp and smelled odd, but I didn’t think anything of it.  I was just about to climb on and see how it swung when a kid came running up.

“Don’t!” she said.  ”It’s disgusting!”  I couldn’t understand what she meant.

“It’s not ours,” she said.  ”It’s for the dogs.  They come here now in the afternoons.”

Children from all backgrounds cite dogs and dog mess as one of the greatest barriers to their playing out.  In the city space is as a premium, and children directly compete with dogs and dog walkers for parks and green spaces.  While most owners are good about cleaning up afterwards, some are not, and the compound effect of this can be park areas that are horrifying – particularly for people only a few feet from the ground.  In this area as well the majority of children are Bangladeshi and there is a strong cultural association of dogs with filth (we had a dog when I was young and, much as I loved him, they do have a point).  Most seriously, there has been a rising problem in recent years with people keeping ‘dangerous’-breed dogs and raising them to be vicious.  In many outdoor play areas the rubber seats and fixtures are torn and gnawed off by dogs who are being trained to fight.  Fighting dogs, and their owners, are scary enough neighbours for other adults, never mind children.

I helped the children cut the rope down and throw it away, but the fact remains that there are adults ready to take the privileges of public space that are not granted to children.  While the kids have been told repeatedly that they can’t put up a rope swing of their own, that the ‘no ball games’ signs will be enforced, one caretaker working alone is unlikely to approach a group of men training their dogs to kill.  While the children’s rope was cut down immediately, the kids said that the dog’s twine had been there for nearly a week.

I was looking at the website for Pogo Park, having met Toody at the Sarah Lawrence week on play, and it seems that they’ve had similar problems with dogs and play equipment.  If other people out there have dealt with this before and had successes or issues that they want to share, please do.

Bleurg

At session today a boy was playing with a hosepipe.  The chance to play with water is so important for kids, especially for those who don’t get to see streams or the ocean, but a part of me always feels secretly conflicted.  I try to make environmentally conscious choices in my own life, and while I know that play is no ‘waste’ of water, it does feel a bit extravagant.

He was stopping the end of the pipe with his thumb and painting the wall with big wet patches, then washing out watering cans and bottles from the wet play area.  He was laughing so hard at his ability to turn a little dribble of water into firefighter-pressure, then wiggling the hose so that the stream of water danced.  As he sprayed it again a moment of rare sunshine emerged, and he made his first rainbow.

I was thinking then about a talk I saw David Sobel give at last year’s Spirit of Adventure Play in Cardiff, when he was talking about attachment to nature.  He was saying that all the longitudinal research he’d read suggested that, rather than the educational approach we often expect, chances for free play in nature are most likely to result in adults who work in, value or otherwise advocate for environmental causes.  Their play might be destructive in the short term, but those chances to experience mastery, experimentation, exploration and joy in nature was more conducive to a genuine and profound love for the outdoors than a structured approach of ‘appreciation’.  It seemed then that ‘extravagance’ is a brilliant thing to find in play, that the expansive joy that child experienced in playing with clean water might lead him to understand the value of clean water in the future, to intimately know that is in danger of being lost.

While I was thinking all this, he snuck up behind me and put the hosepipe straight into my ear.

Dirt: It’s Good For You

I love the feeling of vindication by research.

From the Guardian:

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California found that being too clean could impair the skin’s ability to heal. The San Diego-based team discovered that normal bacteria that live on the skin trigger a pathway that helps prevent inflammation when we get hurt…  according to research published in the online edition of Nature Medicine.

 It not only confirms what many people have been saying for years, it gives weight to much older, more laissez-faire methods of parenting which saw cleanliness as an occasional, rather than constant, priority.  As a playworker, this is definitely something that I’ll be using when talking to parents who are deeply concerned about their little darling’s explorations of mud and dirt.

As an American, I’ll admit I’m also pleased that there are concrete suggestions on why we seem to be leading the world in complaing about allergies – I’d rather that be an inheritance of previously leading the world on dirt-based paranoia, rather just than a tendency to whine.