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.

“Can I help?”

The weather here has been changeable lately, offering up bright days that seem far too warm for November and then suddenly lashing down with rain that pours out of apocalyptic skies.  We’ve been lighting lots of fires lately, and I dragged the sticks for kindling and fat logs from one site to another first thing this morning.  The tire popped on the wheelbarrow almost immediately, and I had to push the thing like a plough along the roads and over the busy London crosswalks towards the play garden.

I lifted the lid off the fire pit and wadded up yesterday’s newspapers into balls.  A little rain was dripping, but if you let that put you off in London you’d never get anything done.  A couple boys came out to see what I was doing, broke some sticks for me and then wandered off.  One boy of about twelve stayed, poking the dirt with a branch and watching me.

“Why are you doing that?” He asked, and I explained the idea of kindling, of laying a fire so it had the chance to grow.

“Can I help?”  I gave him the matches to keep in his pockets while we piled up the sticks against one another.  We lit it, pointing out to one another where the flames had caught and where needed another match, then falling into the quiet staring that often happens fireside.  The rain began in earnest and, hoods up, we discussed whether the wood would get too damp to burn.  We fanned with a newspaper which quickly soaked through and collapsed into flakes which he threw on top.  He practiced lighting matches, which he was still mastering, and found that the breeze and the rain put out the few he got to spark.  The rain got heavier and the clouds boiled grey above us.  I heard later that severe weather warnings had been issued because of the gale force winds, and the flooding.  Behind us the shed roof creaked and tugged up at its screws.  It was bitter, biting cold.  My jeans were wet through and I wondered how many more matches he would want to light.  He picked up some leaves to burn over the persistent lumps of firestarter block that still flamed, and the firepit and my boots slowly filled up with water.

“This is brilliant,” he said.  I realized suddenly that I had only ever heard him speak enthusiastically about celebrities and television before.  “I feel like Ray Mears*,” he continued, smiling at me through the tiny gap in his cinched-up hood.  We stood out there until the rough sides of the matchbox peeled off in wet lumps and the tiny fire drowned.  Back inside, he suggested that next time we try making fires on rocks and wondered if he’d have more luck lighting moss with flints, rather than those damp wooden matches.  He was, with excitement and imagination, talking about becoming a person he’d admired.

Many people would not immediately think of this as play.  There was no dressing up, no games of pretend.  It was serious, with a goal clearly in mind.  The whole thing was thrilling for him, and frustrating.  It was done for its own sake, experienced fully and explored according to his own interests and desires.  The best support that I could give him as a playworker was the space to do this, the opportunity and the permission.

Fire is a difficult thing for many people to support in play. Parents, practitioners and governing bodies are afraid it is dangerous, difficult to manage.  They are afraid what children might do with it, to themselves or one another.  But fire demands our respect, it makes you work to be a part of it.  It is exciting and primal, encouraging both thoughts of survival against the odds and of camaraderie.  Just because you have to take it seriously doesn’t mean it can’t be playful.

For playworkers who are interested in bringing fire onto their sites but nervous, I recommend starting with tea light candles.  They’re familiar as birthday cakes, but children rarely get the chance to ‘own’ a fire, to start and guard and feed it.  Tea lights are very difficult to knock over, and tend to go out if you drop them.  You can also make tiny fires, out of starter cubes, bits of string or paper, in tin foil muffin cups.

Building up towards bigger fires is worth it though.  We like to build them up to a medium size and let the kids jump them.  You can’t beat it for the atmosphere, or the marshmallows.

 

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*For those outside the UK Ray Mears is a bushcraft and survival expert, and presenter of TV shows World of Survival and Extreme Survival.

“Nice and cute”

Right now, we’re really worried about pictures of children.  We’re worried about who’s taking them, where and why.  With digital technology, we worry that these images could wander from cell phone to computer to internet and back again.  We’re worried about keeping control, which is problematic because in anything to do with children (and possibly life in general) control is a demanding and limiting ambition.

One area of contention is over what we might call the right to photograph children in public space – even if the child is one’s own.  In this the photograph and the photographer are seen as dangerous, and fears about their intent limit children’s behaviours when in public, as parents ensure that they are covered up at all times and that strangers are kept at a distance.

Another battle is over what might be called the right to the appearance of the child, how they look, what they’re wearing and what all of these might suggest about the parents.  In spite of all the belts being tightened, there is a massive industry set up around making even the smallest of children look ‘cool’.  You might not be buying Stella McCartney clothes for yourself, but thanks to her partnership with the Gap you can buy them for your toddler.  I can’t tell you how many parents, and thus children, I’ve met on playgrounds who are terrified of clothes getting dirty, even though those clothes will be too small in a couple of months.

A friend just sent me this link, which demonstrates a particularly Brooklyn way of addressing the problem.  It shows how much cooler you can look with money to spend.  I do think that this service, which takes school photos of children with costumes and no formal posing, is a far more entertaining version of the stiff and vacant-eyed process I remember.  But at the same time, the fact that it exists shows how invested parents are in images of their children – even the same parents who may look at their own school photographs and laugh at those hideous haircuts.

A similar impulse can be seen in this row, in which a (different) photography company photoshopped the scar off of a three year-old girl without asking her parents first.  They replied:  “There are a lot of parents who are happy when marks which may have shown up from a scratch that morning are made to disappear, and the same goes for runny noses… We just want things to be nice and cute.”

This desire to show children as cool, or as physically ‘perfect’ is incredibly dangerous, because it perpetuates the idea that a child’s attractiveness is their most important attribute.  I used to think that skinned knees at the end of the day proved I’d been having fun, and that hot pink and bright red went together better than any other two colours in the world. 

When I see portraits that children have taken of one another they are almost always pulling faces, flipping off the camera and grinning.  Candid shots show them doing inexplicable things with paper or mud, digging holes and setting off on expeditions that are mostly conducted in their heads.  They show children with dirty faces, chewing sandwiches with their mouths wide open or demonstrating how they can roll their eyes into the back of their heads.  Compared to the posed, airbrushed images which are produced through official channels they are indeed ‘candid’ – characterized by openness and honesty of expression.  They contain a truth about individual children and childhood in general, it’s messiness and its glory.

Update: There’s an exhibition of photographs taken by children at the Kingsmead School in Hackney, on right now at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood.  The slideshow of images children have taken about their lives, is well worth a look, and below is a self-portrait taken by Sally Hammond.