Help kids be themselves

Views from around the world. These opinions are not necessarily shared by Stuff newspapers.

Last week, thebritish Children’s Play Survey, a study of more than 1900 parents, found children had less independent play, and were allowed to play outside an average of two years later than their parents were a generation ago.

Michael Rosen, in his Book of Play, wrote that ‘‘play’’ is an opportunity “to invent, improvise, adapt, be creative with the world around you and with the world inside your own head”. At its centre is pleasure and joy. Play, importantly, does not come with specific learning objectives, but can teach children, incidentally, how to negotiate, lead, be in a team, care for each other, stick up for themselves – to understand fairness and unfairness. It allows children to order their world and to realise that the order they have inherited is open to change.

In a paper published in January, Helen Dodd, from the University of Reading, argued that if children were allowed more autonomy and risk in their play – age-appropriate risk, from climbing trees to being encouraged, as older children, to walk to school alone – they would gradually learn to manage unpredictability, to solve problems, and to make good decisions. This might, in turn, increase their future ability to cope with life.

Children are reliably drawn to the books in which children are most free. Authors know this, and keeping the parents at arm’s length – or getting rid of them altogether – is an archetypal plot device. But perhaps it can also be read as a prescription: for better childhoods, more robust communities, and less anxious and circumscribed adults.