Sport in lockdown: taking joy out of the world
Can anyone explain the Government’s decision to ban grass-roots sport during the second lockdown – and in particular, the vast majority of organised sport for children, asked Tom Morgan in The Daily Telegraph. For many, the regulations seem illogical and confusing. Why allow PE lessons to continue, for example, yet prohibit virtually all extracurricular sporting activities? As Alan Watkinson, part of the Active Movement scheme, puts it: “Schools are either safe environments or they are not.”
It’s the poorest children who’ll be most harmed by these bemusing restrictions, said Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield in the same paper. The benefits after-school activities deliver, physical and mental, are needed more than ever in this strange and unfamiliar Covid world. Yet now many children “will be denied the opportunity to let off steam after school or at weekends”.
I too was disappointed by the ban on recreational sport, said Matthew Syed in
The Times. But it puzzles me that the issue is invariably discussed in terms of mental health. It’s surely overdoing it to claim, as many now do, that this will “devastate” young people’s lives, and create a “lost generation”. In truth, a month without playing organised sports isn’t too terrible a thing to bear: it’s hardly surprising that young people should start to feel mentally fragile if we always insist they cannot cope. No, what worries me about this ban isn’t that it will create an “epidemic of mental illness”, but that it will lead to the widespread “attenuation of joy”. The importance of joy routinely gets overlooked – no doubt because it can’t be “encompassed in an epidemiological model”. But it has a value that cannot be overestimated. And it concerns me that millions of gleeful moments up and down the country are now “to be extinguished by decree”.