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.

“The Search for Unexpected Harmonies”

Yesterday, at the age of 100, Claude Levi-Strauss died.

He has been called the ‘father of modern anthropology’ and, in a way, I think that’s absolutely fitting.  He was undoubtedly a giant in a field that he helped to create, and his ideas about how to conduct anthropological research and examine findings remains central to the discipline, as well as the academic value he placed upon myth in human understanding.  He was one of the first academics to suggest that Westerners and so-called ‘primitives’ shared fundamental commonalities, that our human similarities remain the basis of our cultural differences.  His work, particularly the landmark texts The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked are must-reads for any anthropology student and inspired Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Barthes among many others.  A fairly thorough obituary can be found here.

However, I have to admit that as much as I respected his work, much of it never spoke to me.  What follows is obviously a simplification of his theories as I understood them, and regardless or perhaps because of my reservations I recommend you read his work yourself.  That caveat in place, his primary point and the basis of the Structuralism that followed him was that all cultural work can be divided along binary lines of contradiction.  Life/Death, Right/Wrong, Male/Female and so on, creating possibilities and tensions that define our lives.  He believed that this was innate, essential and inevitable – and that this process of human understanding of the world was what we all shared.

That’s where I fundamentally disagree.  I don’t think that this binary approach to the world, which seeks out twins in order to separate them, is universal.  I think it is specific and potentially very damaging because it privileges certain kinds of cross-pair associations which them lump together sets of ideas which do not, in and of themselves, belong together.  If we look at the list above, a family of Life, Right and Male becomes formed and defined by its opposite of Death, Wrong and Female.  This kind of binary opposition is a particularly modern, Western way of understanding the world – as is the urge to explain those understandings as natural, inevitable and empirically true.  Of course, he also argued that kinship systems had developed as a method of ‘gift exchange’ of women between tribes, so it is perhaps inevitable that we would disagree.

Ultimately, I think that human experience is richer than binary systems allow, more nuanced and more alive to the complexities of human emotions, senses and relationships.  I think that the human mind is capable of processing multiple, diverse and seemingly contradictory experiences at once, and that the worlds imprints itself upon us in overlapping layers.  More than one thing can be true at any given time.

Of course, I came to these theories by passing through the Foucaultian Post-Structuralist woodlands of Vassar, where Butler and Barthes were rarely read, perhaps, but very often quoted.  Academia would have been infinitely poorer without his work, and I think that this is the dilemma that all academics face.  Not to sound overly Oedipal (as he would argue it), but we need to challenge our fathers.

I like to think Levi-Strauss appreciated critique – even if he did vote against including women in the Académie Française!

More links:

BBC CNN Wikipedia

 

Parents and Provision

Watford Council and local parents have got into a flap.  Much as I hate to link to the Daily Mail, here is a recent article discussing a ban two Adventure Playgrounds in Watford have placed on parents on site, claiming the presence of adults without CRB (Criminal Record Bureau) checks is simply too dangerous and contravenes Government regulations.  To balance that, here another link from the Guardian making the point that no such regulations prevent parents from watching their children in a public park.

There are a couple of problems with this.  The first is that Adventure Playgrounds operate as open access play provision and as such might be considered public parks – except that the ‘public’ they cater to is exclusively under-15 (except when Youth Club is on).  Adventure Playgrounds are not ‘family’ provision, but places where children can be away from their families entirely.  Both of these articles are written by adults outside of the play profession (as evidenced by the determined placing of quotation marks around the phrase “Play Ranger”, as if this was only allegedly their job title) and are entirely caught up in the rights of the parents to do as they please, when keeping their children safe.  To me, this argument is closest to one advocating allowing parents to follow their children to school and sit at the back of the class.  This point is made here, as Watford Council compares Adventure Playgrounds to nurseries and playgroups – other places parents are accustomed to leaving their children.

It’s so easy for children’s places for play to be dominated by adult concerns, for their parents to use Adventure Playgrounds as places to socialize or volunteer, and for site workers to respond by altering provision to suit the preferences expressed by parents rather than children.  The sites I have seen which welcome parents on site tend, though not exclusively, to be more ‘polite’, less messy, less risky or exciting and ultimately less playful places than those where children can test the boundaries of workers and their environment without fear of getting an earful from their Mums.  It’s so rare for children to find places to be away from their parents, to meet social and physical challenges out of their sight.  Do you remember the difference in how you felt and behaved when your parents were watching?  Or the humiliation of getting told off or cleaned up in front of your friends?

There are also very real concerns for workers when parents are on site, as they may have different ideas about appropriate risk, dirt and so on and will often curtail the activities of their child and others.  The parents who want to follow their children everywhere are generally ones unused to being told ‘no’ and, almost by definition, are more likely to dominate their child’s play.  Sometimes parents will shout or swear at their children, or publicly demean or shame them.  Once they are used to being there, it is extremely difficult to get such parents to leave, even though their children are the ones who need a place to be away from them so desperately.  Kind or not, domineering or just overprotective, parents can dramatically alter the culture of the site and limit opportunities for all the children there, not just their own.

That said, I think it’s a terrible idea to ban parents from Adventure Playgrounds on the basis of CRB checks.  It only increases their terrible fear of the unknown, and does nothing to address it in a productive way.  For parents who find Adventure Playgrounds too ‘scary’ to let their children attend on their own, this ban will mean they don’t let the children attend at all, and some parents questioned are already speaking of a boycott.  In this boycott, it is only the children who will suffer.

There is an alternative.  Parents need to understand what an Adventure Playground is, what the core beliefs and ethics are.  They need to see how children who attend are able to develop skills of independence, of problem-solving, how they thrive when NOT given constant one-to-one attention but instead are trusted to make their own way and to ask for help when they need it.  This process takes time, and may require a (limited) number of visits while parents and children adjust.  Both groups need to be supported in this by site staff, not banned on the basis of paperwork.

Adventure Playground workers need to understand that parents are not the enemy, and should not be removed from the site by any means necessary because, while a site without parents is generally more playful and more adventurous, banning parents means that large numbers of children will be excluded.  Number 4 of the Playwork Principles reminds us to advocate for play “when engaging with adult-led agendas”, and playground workers need to remember and explain that their first priority is children’s play.  What’s more, when site workers know more about the family situations their children go home to they are better placed to support the children should things get difficult – much more effective in safeguarding the children’s welfare than any number of CRB checks.