What Ever Happened To Play?

by: Author Unknown,

22nd April 2001
Time magazine, online.

Theresa Collins lives next to a park, but her kids don't play there all that often. For one thing, all three of her children lead busy lives, what with school, piano lessons, soccer practice and the constant distraction of the home computer. What's more, she fears that the park is dangerous. "I've heard of people exposing themselves there," says Theresa, a 42-year-old special-education teacher in Sarasota, Fla. And while she's not sure if the scary stories are true, she would rather be safe than sorry, like so many other contemporary parents. Her daughter Erica, 9, isn't allowed to visit the park without her brother Christopher, 11, who wasn't permitted to play alone there until about a month ago. As for Matthew, 16, who might have supervised Christopher, he avoids the park by choice. He favors video games. "It's a shame," says Theresa. So why doesn't she take the kids to the park? "It's boring. And I don't have time," she says. "When I'm home, I have a lot to do here."
No wonder America's swing sets are feeling lonely. With so many roving flashers to elude, so many high-tech skills to master, so many crucial tests to pass and so many anxious parents to reassure, children seem to be playing less and less these days. Even hassled grownups are starting to notice. "We're taking away childhood," says Dorothy Sluss, a professor of early-childhood education at East Tennessee State University. "We don't value play in our society. It has become a four-letter word."
Statistics back her up. In 1981, according to University of Michigan researchers, the average school-age child had 40% of the day for free time - meaning hours left over after sleeping, eating, studying and engaging in organized activities. By 1997, the figure was down to 25%.
The very existence of research studies on play suggests that ours is a serious society that can take the fun out of almost anything, including the issue of fun itself. That's why any list of the enemies of play must begin with adults, who make the rules. If play is endangered, it's parents who have endangered it, particularly those who feel that less goofing off in the name of youthful achievement is a good thing. See Dick run. Well, that's fine for little Dick, but wouldn't most parents rather raise a Jane who sits still, studies and gets into Harvard?
If so, they're shortsighted, say the experts on play. Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author of _The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap_, holds an old-fashioned view of play: it's joyful and emotionally nourishing. Stuart Brown, a retired psychiatrist and founder of the Institute for Play in Carmel Valley, Calif., believes that too little play may have a dark side. What Brown calls "play deprivation" can lead, he says, to depression, hostility and the loss of "the things that make us human beings." Play doesn't just make kids happy, healthy and human. It may also make them smarter, says Rosenfeld. Today's mania for raising young Einsteins, he observes, might have destroyed the real Einstein - a notorious dreamer who earned poor grades in school but somewhere in his frolics divined the formula for the relationship between matter and energy. Play refreshes and stimulates the mind, it seems. And "frequent breaks may actually make kids more interested in learning," according to Rhonda Clements, a Hofstra University professor of physical education.
The case for play is simple and intuitive, which is what makes the decline of play a mystery. If Dick can run wild and get into Princeton too, then why isn't he out there running his little head off? That play has real value won't surprise most parents. That their kid horses around less than they did when they were young probably doesn't shock them either. The puzzle is, where did all the playtime go? Millie Wilcox, 60, thinks she knows. The retired nurse and mother of two grown boys (one of them being this writer) doesn't have a Ph.D. in child psychology, just a memory of her own Ohio childhood picking elderberries in the alley and once - imagine doing this today - playing house inside a cardboard box set smack dab in the middle of the street. "There wasn't so much traffic back then," says Wilcox, "and it seems like every neighborhood had a vacant lot. Vacant lots were important. Plus, our mothers were around during the day, and they knew everyone on the block, so they weren't scared for us."
There's common sense behind Wilcox's nostalgia for her old stamping grounds. After all, play needs to happen somewhere - preferably somewhere safe and open and not entirely dominated by grownups - but those idyllic somewheres are growing scarce. "In the huge rush to build shopping malls and banks," says Clements, "no one is thinking about where kids can play. That doesn't generate tax revenue."
What about those inviting vacant lots? "There's practically no such thing anymore," laments urban planner Robin Moore, a former president of the International Association for the Child's Right to Play. Thanks to sidewalk-free subdivisions, congested roads and ubiquitous commercial developments, "all the free space has been spoken for," says Moore. Roger Hart, an environmental psychologist at the City University of New York, cites a general "disinvestment in public space" as one reason children are playing less outdoors. Even public sandboxes are vanishing. Says Hart: "People have become paranoid about animal waste." What's more, as the average family size gets smaller and suburban houses are built farther apart, "kids have a harder time simply finding each other than they used to," Moore says.
Parental fear is also a factor. Fear of molesters, bacteria, zooming SUVs. Neighbors who own guns. Neighbors who let their kids eat refined sugar. The list is as lengthy as last Sunday's newspaper, and it grows longer with every new edition. "It used to be," Hart says, "that in the presence of one another, kids formed a critical mass to keep each other safe. Gone are the days when children make any of their own plans." Their fearful, ambitious parents made plans for them, but these plans don't always mesh, unfortunately. A suburban Chicago mom who wishes to remain anonymous called up a school friend of her daughter's to arrange a play date. The kindergartner was booked solid. "It seems like kids today are always on the way to somewhere," complains the disillusioned mom.
One place kids keep rushing to is Chuck E. Cheese, the chain of video game crammed pizzerias where families can frolic in air-conditioned safety, separated by turnstiles from the Big Bad Wolf. Such enterprises fill the play vacuum with something far more modern and secure "edutainment." It's a growing industry. Randy White is ceo of White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group in Kansas City, Mo. His company develops cavernous play facilities, up to 30,000 sq. ft. in area, that are Xanadus of prefabricated diversion, offering art projects, costumes, blocks and even simulated fishing. "We're reintroducing free play to families," says White. Free play at a price, that is. His facilities charge up to $10 a head. "Parents feel that if they're not paying much for an experience, it's not worth it educationally," he says.
When young fun has to prove itself in educational terms when it's not sufficient that play be just playful the world has reached a dreary spot. Yet here we are. Consider this: since the 1980s, with the rise of the academic-standards movement, hundreds of American elementary schools have eliminated recess. The Atlanta schools have dropped recess system-wide, and other districts are thinking of following suit. Does a no-recess day raise test scores or aid kids' mental performance? There's no evidence for it. There is plenty of evidence, however, that unbroken classwork drives children slightly batty, as Atlanta teachers are starting to note. Multiple studies show that when recess time is delayed, elementary-school kids grow increasingly inattentive. Goodbye recess, hello Ritalin.
Rebecca Lamphere, 25, of Virginia Beach, Va., is a play activist, to coin an awkward phrase. Her mission began three years ago after she noticed that the school playground adjacent to her house was always empty. School officials later instituted a "recess substitute" program called Walk 'n Talk that involved having children circle four orange cones set up on the grounds after lunchtime. "It was considered social time," Lamphere says, "but they all had to go in one direction and keep their voices down." Lamphere wasn't pleased her daughter Charleen was about to start kindergarten so she launched a protest. She circulated a petition, sought out experts in child development and ultimately attracted statewide attention. Last April, Virginia Beach mandated daily recess, and the state followed five months later.
Is that what we've come to obligatory play?
The defenders of unfettered recreation have a way of making it sound like broccoli, wholesome and vitamin packed but unenticing. "Kids need to learn how to navigate themselves and keep their bodies safe," says Richard Cohen, a child-development expert and play-programs manager at Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago. What fun! At their grimmest, the play scholars sound like Stuart Brown recounting a study of Texas prison inmates that found a common element in their childhoods. "They didn't engage in rough-and-tumble play," he says, offering anxious parents yet one more reason to live in mortal fear of almost everything.
Fear the natural enemy of play.
The fear that a French lesson missed is a Yale acceptance letter lost. The fear that sending junior outside to roam will end in reporting him missing to the police. Do we now have to add to these fears some of them neurotic, others real the fear that "play deprivation" will stunt kids' spirits, shrink their brains and even land them in jail? Such protective obsessing seems to be the problem, and doing more of it offers no solution. Parents should probably just tell kids that fooling around is bad for them, open the door and follow them outside. All work and no play can make adults dull too sometimes even a little paranoid.

Scared Silly

by: Author Unknown,

About Furedi's Book
14th March 2001

In particular, what he noticed was that children were no longer left to their own devices. He describes it as a "colonisation" of the world of children by adults. As a consequence, he says, adults not only inhabit but control the lives of children to an alarming and unhealthy extent. For Furedi, whose 1997 book The Culture of Fear examined the way risk is perceived in society, the most obvious manifestation of this control centres on fears about children's safety. The real risks, he argues, are magnified by irrational fears; and so kids' freedom and creativity are being limited.
Our fears are fed by study after alarm-bell-ringing study alerting us to this or that childhood danger. Furedi disputes the idea that most of these studies originate in universities like his own. In fact, he says, many are market-research reports masquerading as more serious analyses. The result, he says, is a generation of parents who believe that their children are at real risk, and who are overreacting in their efforts to protect them.
"When I ask people why they limit their children's activities in a particular way," says Furedi, "they always say, 'I couldn't live with myself if anything happened.' In other words, they're talking about themselves, not about their children."
Furedi thinks that because we now feel we have to take responsibility for every part of our children's lives, we take every threat to their safety too seriously. "It's not worth altering your behaviour and being on red alert for what are relatively small risks," he maintains. "We've got to accept that life contains risks and it's far better to be aware of them than to let them enslave our lives." He says it is naive to argue that the information we are being fed about, say, health risks in pregnancy is widening our choice or improving our parenting; in fact they often lead to legally enforced conformity. "Take the US, where in some areas pregnant women can be arrested for drinking in public," he says. "What begins as advice ends up as coercion."
Furedi concedes that there may be a positive aspect to parents being more involved in the lives of their children, but adds that: "The danger is, it becomes compulsive. What starts as involvement becomes this infinite process, and you lose the ability to draw a line between what your children should be doing on their own and what adults should be doing."
the bottom line is: if we stopped trying so hard, we would make a better job of bringing up our kids - and if we ignored most of the advice we are bombarded with, we would do a better job still.

Kids And Sexuality

by: Author Unknown,

An immodest proposal
Dec 15th 2000 - I was going to try this as a comic piece. It would be offered as a "modest proposal" -- the violent solution to a terrible problem, much as Jonathan Swift once proposed the raising of children like cattle -- to be killed and sold as food. But his was an absurd treatment, and mine is merely unthinkable in polite circles. So, really, this is an attempt to coax polite people into thinking about hideous or impossible possibilities -- about things too close to us to be uttered. And if there's less humor than there might have been, well, put that down to the intimacy of the subject and the pain of those who suffer from it.
I am thinking about young people (our people, our children) -- I mean those 10 or 11 years old and upward -- and their wish, or call it a need, to have some sort of sexual experience. Why not, when it clamors at them from all the media and advertising they see, and when they feel it in us as one of the things we cherish? Being "grown-up" in their eyes is being able to do it; whereas the rather hunched adults think of having to pay for it all, being responsible. But still, at some point in their curricula, kids come to "reproduction" as the strange chilliness of science tries to deal with the untidy mass of legend, rumor and folklore they have heard and the new anxiety they feel in their bodies.
How was it for you? Didn't you have something like the reproductive system of the rat explained by some bored biology teacher -- with sidelong references to the human example and nothing said one way or the other about the implication: that sex was made for rats? And for reproduction, of course. No one in our biology class dared mention pleasure, though there were boys sitting in the back row masturbating one another -- the risk of which, not to mention the exposure, could only be driven by the need for pleasure, or just from need itself. Think of all the things those biology clerks were praying not to notice; recollect the icy way they admitted arousal. And erection.
For me, that class occurred some 45 years ago, and so much has changed over that time. The steady reference to sex has become more intense in film, on TV and in advertising (it is so naggy now, you have to think that very few are getting satisfaction). The kids can see and hear so much more, and they live on the edge of awkward, adjusting worlds where divorce, abortion, the Pill and being HIV positive are part of the general increase of sexual language in ordinary conversation.
No one's claiming that the inescapable eavesdropping ensures understanding or insight. For all of us, I dare say, sex is still the wildest rumor in life, the issue that leaves us most open to unreasoning. But the storytelling is more blatant now, and so it is more hypocritical than ever to ask growing children to turn a blind eye (or neutered body) to what they have gathered (no matter that, at the same time, for the sake of their education, we are encouraging alertness, ingenuity and the constant need for curiosity).
You hear stories -- if you are a parent in the danger zone -- and the stories are as wild and enticing as novels. Other parents might tell you the "facts" of the case, without always noting how prevented they are, emotionally, from facing all the "facts" with their child. One mother told other mothers that she didn't think necking was appropriate behavior in her 12-year-old.
What a sweet word "necking" is. Doesn't it make you a little fonder of your own youth, and a little more gently disposed toward the lives of your own young? But what is necking, or petting? And does everything of this kind really wait for the big thing, the thing called "penetration"? But consider, there is surely necking where a tongue goes into another's mouth (that is penetration), or petting where hands go into private places and liberate them with a soft touch, sometimes called stroking. If your 12- or 13- or 14-year-old does such things, is that inappropriate? Should the kid "sit on it" or jerk off at home? Is that better, safer, more appropriate?
Consider something further: In many of these moments, a far more significant penetration will have occurred than even the penis knocking on the back wall of the womb. And that is falling in love, the most turbulent penetration. It is having a feeling for another person that alters your sense of self. For it is my own experience, and my hunch, that the young human being has extraordinary difficulty having sex with anyone without being in love. You see, at 12 or 14 or so, life can be so tormenting, so hard, that the need for peace and sharing is as great as the yearning for an orgasm.
And let me add this: At all our levels of involvement with education, I think we would wish as much for success and decency in love as we ever would in sex, making money or whatever. And when I put success and decency together, I am trying to make clear that my aim is not a kind of Don Juanism but a sophisticated, humble sense of love.
My modest proposal is that some part of our kids' curriculum go beyond diagrams of the rat's body to the best portraits of our imagination: talks on human sex and its relationship to love (to be supported by readings from literature, poetry and plays and the viewing of relevant movies -- not just the latest government documentary on venereal disease but, say, Jean Renoir's "Partie de Campagne," Francois Truffaut's "Anne and Muriel," Luis Bunuel's "Belle de Jour," Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris," Jean Eustache's "The Mother and the Whore"; and inevitably, in American situations, there would have to be some talk of 'why no American films') and discussion of the varieties of sex and penetration, like masturbation, oral sex, same sex-ism; the means of birth control and giving birth; the dangers of sexual disease; and the possibility of sex (and love) beyond age 25.
I know that simple paragraphs of such a schedule may raise pandemonium. So let us move on quickly to the real novelty I have in mind. What I have just listed is a menu of topics or skills -- such as English grammar or mathematics present. Those skills need to be "mastered" -- or, if mastery has unfortunate connotations of expertise, another kind of Juanism, let me just speak of competence. And let me propose that as you would not want your son on the road (possibly in your car) until he had achieved competence (a testable performance), so you would not want any young man to be with your daughter unless they both had also given some evidence of practical experience and skill.
There are still marriages made in our society between sexually incompetent or unskilled or frightened people. That can hasten divorce, with all its damage, as easily as, say, promiscuity -- not that promiscuity is ever going to be less than a Ph.D. topic. We have every reason to try to make ourselves a little happier, if only for a little time. Staleness, boredom, disappointment -- those, I fear, will always be life studies, worked out over the long haul.
But we need a laboratory, a way the novice driver can try out a skid pan or a three-point turn. And this is where I come to the brothel in education. We could use other words, I suppose. But, really, mine is an overall approach that seeks an end to euphemism wherever possible. I look upon my son and his schoolmates at their academically demanding, single-sex school and I see a brothel where they could be educated, or finished, by experienced women. This does not by any means imply a kind of older, hardened woman whose attractiveness is long gone. Just as this private school takes pride in the best facilities for science, gym, language labs and so on, why not a corps of women perhaps 10 years older than the boys -- accomplished, tactful, tender, diversely experienced and altogether believers in the whole nature of education. Of course, these women would have to be paid (I would exclude tipping), but we're paying for education already, aren't we?
And yes, to forestall your outrage, your daughter should have the same educational opportunity. Even now, in this next century, some parents may be alarmed or horrified at the thought of their daughter's virginity being traded away. But ask yourself whether you fear the licensed, inspected brothel more or less than, say, the reports that "good" girls at good schools are in some places giving head to a succession of embarrassed amateurs. You see, the things called "sex" and "penetration" are going on, and are starting early. You know there is no stopping them, because somehow you yourself seized some moment. But the practitioners can be helped. And they may be taught that sex and love are not spoiled by skill, by tenderise, by curiosity and by the acquired habit of talking about it before and afterward.
You say this could never happen? Reflect a moment -- it has to. Everything happens eventually. If not, then the sexual life of our young may be as desperate, messy or dismayed as our own. Would we wish that on enemies, let alone our own children?