Is Playtime Over?

The Age

Thursday May 29, 2008

Katherine Kizilos

When the nanny state takes over the playground, children's fun - and their development - is threatened. Katherine Kizilos reports.

HOPSCOTCH, chasey and hide-and-seek have become the unlikely source of a new moral panic: adults are worrying that children don't play like they used to any more.

The worry has many facets: that children are over-supervised, too sedentary and too fat, that they are over-stimulated but, at the same time, less engaged with the world around them. And the biggest worry of all is that by destroying playtime we have killed childhood.

The panic is deepest in Britain and the US, but is slowly making its way to Australia too. Last month 270 eminent Britons, including author Philip Pullman, child-care expert Penelope Leach and the director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Baroness Susan Greenfield, wrote a letter to London's Daily Telegraph calling for a public debate on the value of play and "how we might ensure its place at the heart of 21st-century childhood". They were particularly concerned about a UNICEF study that found British children to be "among the unhappiest in the developed world".

In the US, some school districts have cancelled recess in order to cram more into the curriculum; an unintended consequence of President George Bush's educational program, No Child Left Behind, that links school funding to test results. A debate has arisen over the underlying assumption behind playtime's banishment - that children don't learning anything valuable while they muck about on the monkey bars.

Closer to home, researchers from the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, Deakin and Curtin universities are visiting 30 primary schools across the country and contacting many more in order to discover whether Australian patterns of play have changed. This will be the first nationwide collection and analysis of Australian "playlore" since a 10-month study undertaken by an American, Dorothy Howard, in 1954-55.

Writer and folklorist June Factor, a senior research fellow at the Australian Centre, says while recess hasn't been made redundant in this country "we are increasingly finding that schools are engaging in forbiddings". "They are forbidding this and forbidding that, placing restrictions and strictures on what children may do in play," she says. "Here, it appears to be much more associated with a fear of litigation. There's a real panic about free play which will result in a child breaking a leg or hurting a foot ...

"There are schools where they can't play ball-throwing games because they might hit someone with a ball, they are not allowed to play running games because they might fall over. I've heard of schools where they are not allowed to play marbles because that starts arguments. The whole thing is extraordinary."

But although it is becoming more difficult for children to play, Factor doesn't believe that children will stop playing - in Australia, or anywhere. She argues many species of mammals play and that play serves an evolutionary purpose.

"From an evolutionary perspective, you have to ask the question, when so much is discarded in human cycles of life, how is it that play appears to be universal and forever present? I think it is because it is the culture of childhood, that it is at the core of what it means to be a child. It is where a child experiments, tests, imagines, invents, adapts. Where they are the master of the world they are creating."

Factor argues that the urge to play is so strong that it will continue "in the crevices of the daily routine" despite the advent of computer games, a swollen after-school itinerary, and the shrinking of the backyard.

But she does believe there has been a lack of appreciation of the importance of play among some educators and parents, maybe even a fear of play.

The fear involves not only fear of litigation but can also spill over to weekend and after-school play. In many suburbs, the incidence of street play has lessened mainly because of traffic but also because of exaggerated worries about "stranger danger". Factor suggests that another reason might be the decline of the neighbourhood school in some middle-class areas. Once, all the school-age children in a street naturally knew each other because they met in the school playground; this is no longer the case.

"The great period of play, the great flowering of play coincides with the ages of primary school children," says Factor. "The hidey games, the chasey games, the clapping games, the rude rhymes - all of that stuff is at its height in the pre-adolescent, early adolescent period." These days, this style of play is most likely to take place in school playgrounds. "I have long thought all school playgrounds should be declared national treasures and be preserved and protected for the purposes of children's own play," she says.

The study of Australian playgrounds that she has helped devise will also look at the emphasis placed on play in contemporary teacher training.

Annette Smith, the principal of Harcourt Valley Primary School, says she can't remember being taught about the significance of play as a student teacher, but she is convinced that the time her students spend outside playing with one another is as important as the time they spend in the classroom.

"I am not in favour of kids being inside all the time, the fresh air is good and it forces them to be social," she says. "Back to what we did as kids, we had so much fun outside. It makes kids use their brains and be resourceful."

The latest scientific research appears to back Smith's instinctive appreciation of play. In February, The New York Times reported on the research of Melbourne-born neuroscientist Sergio Pellis, now at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Pellis examined the brains of caged rats that were deprived of opportunities to play. He and his collaborators discovered the first direct evidence that a lack of play influences brain development. The neuronal connections in the medial prefrontal cortex of the play-deprived rats was more immature than in those rats that were allowed to play. What this means for children is yet to be determined; what Pellis has demonstrated is which area of the brain is influenced by play.

Play happens everywhere. It flourishes wherever children are left free to play, with minimum adult supervision and free of adult direction. A playground is a place where children rule. The fears that have restricted play opportunities for children in Australia and elsewhere - fears of injury or of time-wasting - might, at bottom, be a fear of what will happen if we let children loose to do what they want.

Perhaps it is no accident that playtime is being squeezed during an era when parents are busier than ever, juggling jobs and housework and child care with less and less time left to hang out with no particular agenda in mind. Which suggests that the moral panic about play might be connected to grown-up grief: not over the death of childhood, but the death of that aimless goofing off which is the heart and soul of play.

Anyone wishing to contribute material to the current study can email

child-playlore@unimelb.edu.au

LINKS

www.australian.unimelb.edu.au/ctc