String Theory

I’ve been working lately on a resource document about Nicholson’s theory of loose parts, but thought I’d jump the gun a bit and share some images from a recent play session in which I introduced some brightly coloured yarn.

It’s such a simple thing but this one repurposed object creates new opportunities for children to experience their familiar environment in different ways, to create webs to trap their friends in and make new playful connections between the separate elements of their world.

Plus, it looks cool, even after the fact.

Discrimination and Youth

There was an article in yesterdays Observer discussing youth-based discrimination and Harman’s forthcoming equality bill.  The bill will protect children and young people who are being discriminated against because of their disability, race, religion, gender and sexual orientation – but not those who are denied access to services because of their age.  As it happened, I was working at a Children and Young People’s Cafe yesterday, and was in an excellent position to ask some young people what they thought.

“It’s really annoying,” one teenage girl said.  “You can’t go into shops in more than a group of two, so someone’s always got to wait outside.  And then when you do go in they’re often really rude to you.  And in clothes shops they follow you around because they expect that you’ll steal something.”

I remember this happening to me when I was young, and being infuriated by it.  Wasn’t my money as good as anyone else’s?  Why should I be assumed to be a thief?  On more than on occasion I set out to buy something particularly nice, such as for my Mother’s birthday, and ended up asking another adult like my father to come along just so that I would be taken seriously.

Youth-based discrimination based on a set of assumptions: that children and young people will take advantage of any opportunity to steal, damage or misuse adult property (including public property, which is coded as adult) or waste adult time.  That children or young people might have genuine need of services in a way similar to adults is not recognized.  As with any form of prejudice, the problem that children and young people face is that in the eyes of adults they are, regardless of all other signs such as politeness or willingness to pay, at all times reducible and dismissible simply by virtue of being young.

This kind of day-to-day discrimination is annoying, and contributory to an atmosphere in which young people feel unwelcome in their own communities and adults feel able to belittle them without consequences.

I once spoke to an teenaged boy in a idyllic-looking village in Lincolnshire where nearly everyone we spoke with had been born at the local hospital.

“People used to be nice enough,” he said, “but then a couple of the teenagers went a bit mad with drugs and now they hate all of us, even though the rest of us don’t do that stuff.  It really feels like the grown-ups against the kids here.  I’ve been spat on in the street, and I’ve known these people all my life.  But they don’t see me anymore, just another hoodie.  It’s ridiculous.  These people have kids of their own – what do they think their kids are going to be in a few years?”

When children and young people are made to feel unwelcome in the public sphere, moved along by police and harassed by local residents, what reasons do they have to feel invested in that public realm?  What regard could they develop for a sense of community?

There are more dangerous instances cited in the article as well, such as the calls to emergency services that were disregarded because they were placed by a child or young person, and the dramatically reduced access to public services such as health care that many teenagers face.  Additionally, there are many children and young people who are the primary carers in their family, with responsibilities to siblings and adults in the house that require them to fulfill many of the duties that would otherwise fall to adults.  When these children are discriminated against, we are collectively making a very difficult job even harder.

The same goes for the very difficult job of growing up.

Pictures of Play

I’ve written before about the aesthetics of play, and about how images of children at play have a particular character and charm.  Children at play are at their most child-like, their most human, and I think it’s this that we respond to.  It is their vitality and clarity of self that draws us, partly because it’s something we have largely forgotten.

I started taking images of playgrounds about 2 years ago, when working on my dissertation at University College London.  I was taking an MA in Anthropology and needed to document changes in the site over time.  I was studying children’s dens and forts, their place-making in play, and for ethics reasons I couldn’t use – or take – any images of children.

Pictures of play after the fact have a peculiar archeological quality.  They’re like photographs of knocked-over wine glasses and stained tablecloths that tell you you’ve just missed a tremendous party.  They remind us that children are different, that their behaviours are unique to their stages in development, and that even while we can watch them, study them, involve ourselves with their play and advocate for it daily, we will never entirely understand the way we did when we were young.

So here are some of my images of places-within-places, made by children at one London Adventure Playground.

Spiderman to the Rescue

This is a lovely story from yesterday’s BBC News.

An eight year old boy on the autistic spectrum had crept out onto a third floor window ledge, his first day at a special needs school.  Apparently the teachers and firefighters had tried to coax him out to no avail, but his mother mentioned his love of superheroes to one fireman who happened to have a Spiderman costume in his locker.  On seeing those blue and red arms outstretched the boy smiled and came out.

It just proves how important it is to try and meet children on their own terms, even if this requires some quick thinking on our parts and a costume closet that’s ready for any eventuality.

Tree Houses in the Daily Mail

This hilarious little article in yesterday’s Daily Mail was even better to read than their usual pieces – because one of my organisations is in it!

Islington Play Assocation got money from Big Lottery’s Playful Ideas fund to pay for a Tree House building playworker who will help children to build their own tree houses on a number of sites across the borough.  Some of these tree houses will be on Adventure Playgrounds and some in schools or other facilities, but all of them will be designed, built, used and adapted by the children.  We’re trying to reinvigorate a children’s culture of constructive play in a borough which struggles with a matrix of difficulties and deprivations.

The Mail it seems doesn’t know quite what to think about money for playworkers to encourage children to play out.  They seem caught between a “money being WASTED” approach, and one that bemoans the poor state of the world today.  I get the impression that they want children’s lives to match those in their nostalgic recollections, but are annoyed that the process of helping is so expensive.

You can read the article for yourself here.

Below is a photo from our recent party to launch the tree house project and to promote the Initial Findings from my own Play Improvement Project.  This project works with all 12 Adventure Playgrounds in Islington to improve access and inclusion so that more children can get onto the playgrounds, and enjoy a more diverse and challenging play environment once they’re there.

Me, speaking about the Play Improvement Project.

Me with IPA Staff Suzanne, Anita and Tammy, clustered around lifelong Islington resident and Guest Speaker Joe Swash.  Oh!  The glamour!

Education of the Playworker

Playwork can be humbling.

At my longest-running session, keyworking children with special needs in a public park, one of oldest girls led me around the site she’s been coming to for years. In so doing she reminded me of two things: how much I love playwork, and how much better children are at this than adults.

I have previously been wary of working with her. She is taller and stronger than me, prone to running at full tilt across the site and grabbing food from people outside the café. She eats everything – everything! – including paint, sand, small plastic toys and, on one memorable day, an AA battery followed by a whole rubber glove. She is a true force of nature and even though her play is dynamic, exploratory, rebellious, even though it is in short everything I believe play ought to be, sometimes I confess to feeling tired. We worked together recently and she showed me how enormously I had been missing the point.

First we sat by the rack of books. She likes to pull them out one by one and drop them onto the floor, the pages flying open like swooping birds. She first selected a story book, dense with writing on Tigger’s most recent adventures. I read it out and she was interested at first. I varied my tone and made up voices. She smiled and settled down on her heels, but after a few minutes became bored. I kept reading anyway, enjoying the story and waiting for a cue of what she would like to do next, but she just watched me as I read, putting her face closer and closer to mine. She finally lifted the book out of my hands and, with an implacable expression, put one finger horizontally to her lips and made a loud burbling sound at me. Well, I thought, so much for reading.

She decided to give me another chance, lifting out a picture book and putting it into my hands. She pointed to a series of images, and I responded with the words, speaking loud and clearly. She is limited in her words, but never seems to have too much trouble getting her point across.

“Boat,” I said. Then “cat”, “duck”, “bucket” and “seaside” as she pointed repeatedly at different spots on the page, getting increasingly exasperated with my performance. She just shook her head from side to side, looking so disappointed in me. She replied loudly and slowly.

“Book,” she said.

Then she took me to stand directly in front of the café service hatch until they gave her some chips to go away. She was kind enough, though, to share them with half and half with me.

Third Point of the Triangle

Why is it so important that children play out near their homes?

Why do we live so much of our lives indoors, not knowing the people who live closest to us?

How are these connected and what can we do to change?

I’ve been thinking about all of these lately, especially during the twice-weekly sessions we run in the courtyard-like green and tarmac space on a local housing estate.

I took some notes during Thursday’s session, with the intention of creating a snapshot of play.

They are arriving now, eager and out of breath, in twos and threes and fours. They are climbing up brick walls to reach the green and sighing, throwing their shoulders in frustration if they can’t make the climb and are forced to walk around. Once there the older boys rig up a rope swing, stuffing the wet tire with bright wads of tissue paper, while two girls spread out the tarpaulin and begin making paper flowers. One small boy, seen for once without his older sister, flits between them and the swing. Other small boys arrive, aged 5 or 6, and converge from different corners around a small red ball.

The amazing thing for me is how few of them knew one another before we started coming.

We bring very little with us but by being there we change the dynamic of the place. On more than one occasion we have arrived to see little faces pressed up against kitchen windows, the children waiting for us to arrive before they are allowed out. The children we have met (and their friends whom we haven’t) are kept indoors for a variety of reasons – extra studies, fear of strangers, dogs or traffic, even something as common as the rain.  Some are still not allowed out, but wave to us through the glass.

Children’s social links have dissolved dramatically over recent years. If children don’t play out they rarely meet – even if they were all born on a small estate, lived there all their lives and attend local schools. If a child has few friends nearby, they are even less likely to be allowed out to play, and less likely to want to. The thing is, their parents are in the same position.

Part of the reason why children used to be allowed out to play is that their parents led more public lives than their contemporary counterparts, chatting over fences and keeping an eye on children collectively, rather than individually. Just as a person with a number of friends is more likely to go out, more likely to make new social connections through old ones, so the reverse is true. Isolation breeds isolation, in children and adults. Parents who tell children not to talk to strangers find themselves stuck, now that everyone is a stranger.

I wonder sometimes how we function within the public space of the estate, coming onto each quiet-seeming site with our bags of kit and bright yellow jackets. Sometimes they have used us as a handy excuse to be a little sillier in their play than they might otherwise be, to test themselves physically and know that they are being overseen, to perhaps open themselves up to physical and social unknowns a little more than they otherwise might. I have watched children meet one another at our session and begin the complex process of making friends. We are useful outsiders in this process, demonstrating that sometimes the shortest distance between two points is via a third. Even so, it saddens me that it takes strangers to help people use the grass in front of their homes, as happy as I am to be able to do it.

That said, I am acutely aware of my own hypocrisy. I live in East London too, and don’t know the name of a single one of my neighbors. I don’t have children of my own, but if I did would almost certainly battle the same neuroses and terrors that any parent might. The temptation to keep your children safe at any cost must be enormous – even if you know how very high that cost is, to the child’s physical, social and mental health, to their future development and current happiness.

I don’t have the answers on how the direction of this spiral might be altered, but I believe that these play sessions could be a start.