We are in the dregs of the English school summer holidays now. All the organised fun is done and so are the adults who organised it, if memory serves – money, time off and energy all spent. Round me, that seems to mean kids mainly doing their own thing. Tinies confined to gardens are getting creative with toys (or dirt, or the recycling), while the older ones are hanging around, sitting on walls, kicking a ball on the verge or riding bikes along pavements. “Can I swerve around you?” one asked as I walked to the shop, scoring highly on the “making your own fun” scale. Once I agreed, he swerved happily around me several times, then did it again when I was walking back 15 minutes later, which was very bracing. (Is my consent to being swerved around irrevocable? This could get interesting.) There’s some chucking of apples, too, judging from the debris strewn around the street and my own experience (one year I naively put out a bucket of cookers to give away, only to face apple carnage the next morning).
It’s nice – not the apples so much, but the rest. I find it comforting: it’s vaguely reminiscent of my own childhood, which wasn’t exactly “jumpers for goalposts” but was certainly plenty of aimless loitering. I like that about living where I do, how there are kids doing kids’ stuff, but it seems they’re lucky. According to research on street play from Play England published last month: “Opportunities to play outside, which were the near universal right of previous generations, are now available to fewer and fewer children.” The saddest part for me was the percentage of children – significantly more than the previous report in 2013 – who have been asked to stop doing such ordinary things as “making a noise”, “sitting on a neighbour’s wall” and “hanging out in groups”. And what hurt was done to the people who told 25% of kids surveyed to stop “chalking on the pavement”? I suppose it depends what they’re chalking, but wouldn’t you feel like a baddie from the Beano?
Actually, the people who told kids to stop doing stuff most often were parents and carers, worried about what neighbours would think. Stop your kid playing iPad games without headphones on the train by all means – you have my tearful thanks – but hanging out outside? They have more right to be there than I do. I can only hope there’s no overlap between the neighbours generating this parental apprehension and people who complain that kids spend all their time on screens, but I have my suspicions.
How did this climate of anxiety and intolerance emerge? I’m not a playful person, personally: too stiff for physical play (put a ball in my hand and I’ll quietly wait for an opportunity to put it down) and too self-conscious for silliness or pretending. When my sons were small, play with me would degenerate into tidying, the animals taxonomised and the Lego sorted by size and colour. Board games make me aggressive, card games confuse me and I don’t like noise or boisterousness. I’m basically a joyless soul, is what I’m saying, but even I know play is precious. It facilitates independence, confidence and sociability; adventurous play is correlated with better mental health. But it doesn’t need to be any of that to be vital: it’s a portal to joy.
I see and hear that on the streets around me. Even my ancient, arthritic dog feels it. My husband chucked a tennis ball for him recently and just as I started to remonstrate it was cruel, Oscar bounced off, bringing it back expectantly, more animated than I had seen him in months. We threw it again; he did it again. It didn’t last, but it was heartbreakingly lovely to see him momentarily puppyish.
So much of childhood looks un-fun now. That was the conclusion of the Children’s Society 2022 report: happiness levels are declining. Most of us can’t do much about Covid or climate anxiety, rising school refusal, leisure centre closures or the impact of social media on self-image. But surely we can all make our neighbourhoods feel like an OK place to be a child.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
