Where have all the children gone? When I was growing up, and for some time after that, you could walk through any North American neighborhood--after school, or on weekends, or any time in the summer--and find children playing (see July 22, 2009, post). They would be playing freely, often in age-mixed groups, without adult supervision. Such play was great fun, and it served important developmental functions. It provided physical exercise; it allowed practice in a wide range of mental and physical skills; and, perhaps most important, it provided the context in which children learned how to solve problems without their parents and to get along with peers. As I have described in many previous posts (see the list), such play was the primary vehicle for children’s education throughout most of human history.
Now such play is vanishing, and as it is vanishing the rates of childhood obesity, depression, and suicide are rising. It is not natural, not healthy, for children to grow up without being able to go outdoors, on their own, and play freely with other children. Adult-organized activities--such as soccer leagues, or karate lessons, or music lessons--are fun and educational for some, but they are no substitute for free play.
As regular readers of this blog know, I have been voicing such concerns for some time. But just four days ago a colleague—a prominent researcher who is also the co-director of a foundation aimed at solving social problems—presented me with a challenge. Do I want just to write about these problems, or do I want also to try to do something about them? He invited me to work with him to help develop, as a pilot project, a neighborhood play and learning center that could serve as a model that communities everywhere might emulate.
I have been thinking of little else since then, and so I decided to turn my thoughts into this week’s post. The foundation--which I have been invited to join--could fund the project if my colleague and I can come up with a convincing proposal. And so, I am in the process of developing a proposal, and I am asking you, the readers of this blog, to help me. I don’t want to name the colleague, or the foundation, or the community where we would develop the pilot project until we are a little further along. But I will outline in general terms my thoughts so far for the project. I hope that you will read this critically and make suggestions, in the comments section at the end, based on your own experiences and knowledge.
Solving the problem at the level of the neighborhood
Surveys, in North America and in the UK, show that many parents today regret the fact that their own children are less free to play on their own, away from their own homes, than they themselves were when they were growing up.[1] When asked why they don’t let their children play freely in the neighborhood, most point to safety concerns. The biggest fear seems to be of strangers--unknown people who might kill, molest, or in some other way seriously hurt their child.
This fear arises, at least in part, because people don’t know their neighbors as well as they did in times past. People tend to lead private lives, largely indoors, and adults center their social lives more around their work companions than around their neighbors. Neighbors who are unknown are strangers, and strangers are perceived as potentially dangerous.
When fear leads a significant number of parents to confine their children to the indoors or to adult-directed activities, the neighborhood becomes even less inviting. Children are drawn to other children, so the fewer children there are outdoors the less incentive there is for any given child to go outdoors to play. Also, as the number of children playing outdoors decreases, the perceived danger--and possibly the real danger--of the neighborhood increases. There is safety in numbers; children who know one another protect one another and would quickly report any misbehavior or suspicious person they see. The result of all this is a vicious cycle: Perceived danger --> fewer children playing outdoors --> still greater perceived danger --> still fewer playing outdoors --> etc., until neighborhood play is lost completely.
To increase play in any given neighborhood, we must break this cycle that is driven by distrust and fear. Here is a sketch of my proposal:
Empower a neighborhood to design, create, and manage a safe haven for play and learning for people of all ages
The project would begin in a particular ethnically mixed, working class neighborhood in a particular city. A vacant lot, already existing in that neighborhood, would be donated by the city to the neighborhood as communal property for development of a play and learning center. Everyone in the neighborhood, an area consisting of several city blocks, would be invited by the researchers to an organizational meeting, at which they would hear a preliminary proposal for possible use of that vacant lot. This meeting, in itself, would be a first step through which neighbors would get to know one another.
At this and follow-up meetings, the researchers would present a proposal, which I will simply outline here as a series of principles:
1. Start-up grant. The city would donate the vacant lot to the neighborhood for the purpose of building a play and learning center. The donation would be reversible, however. If the area is not used in the general ways intended, over a certain period of time, it would be turned back to the city. Funding for creating the center would come from the research foundation. The center could include a building, suitable for year-around use, as well as an outdoor play area.
2. Design to attract people of all ages. The center must be designed in such a way as to meet needs and desires of people of all ages in the community, so adults and teenagers are attracted to it as well as younger children. For example, it might include playground equipment and toys (most attractive to young children); a small gymnasium with basketball hoops (useable by all ages); an indoor computer and video-game room (for all ages); an area where tables could be set up for cards or board games (which might be attractive to adults and whole families, in the evening); and a large-screen TV (attractive to all ages). This is just a sample list; the actual list would come from the community. One hope is that people would come to the center even for activities that they could do at home (such as watching a sporting event on TV or playing video games), thereby turning a private activity into a social activity and, in the process, generating age-mixed play and a sense of community.
3. Adaptability for future purposes. The center should be designed with flexibility in mind. As interests change over time, it should be possible to modify the physical structures to meet those interests.
4. Neighborhood control of design. The specific design for the center--within the constraints just listed--would come from the neighborhood. Through a democratic process, the people in the neighborhood would choose a design committee, which would include children and adolescents as well as adults. That committee would develop proposals to present to the whole neighborhood. A final proposal would be approved at a meeting at which everyone in the neighborhood above (let us say) 6 years old has a vote.
5. Neighborhood building of the center. Once the design is set, people in the neighborhood would volunteer to help with the physical construction of the center. This would reduce initial cost, increase the sense of neighborhood ownership of the center, and cement friendships among the volunteers.
