No Ball Games: Where Are the Kids Supposed to Go?

Children can be found in all sorts of spaces these days, much to the chagrin of some. But when it comes to space for play, changing attitudes, technology & austerity have changed the game.

Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash

I’m just back home from a kids’ Easter Holiday trip to France with three of my girlfriends and six children in total. We’ve been moving around the Dordogne like some kind of communal living matriarchal cult, sharing the intensity and joys of our progeny in equal measure. Let’s make no mistake, it was not easy nor relaxing. But overall, it was the best of times. Children need so little – a bit of old baguette, a gardening hose and a movie night—when they have their friends and the space for unstructured, free-range play.

What the break really got me thinking about was how difficult it can be to access such simple needs and desires. During the summer holidays, the corner of southwest France where my mum has been living for the past twelve years is overrun with British holiday makers. Over those six weeks, the rowdiness of our petit posse would have been easily camouflaged. But during the tourist free Easter break, the decibel level of a pack of seven-year-old school pals drew a lot of attention and not much of it positive —even in public spaces, even in playgrounds. The sound of them playing elicited tuts and dagger looks wherever we went. I absolutely get that the French have a very different attitude to childhood in general, especially in terms of their children’s behaviour. Seen and not heard, well turned out, gastronomes with impeccable manners—the whole French Children Don’t Throw Food schtick. But this isn’t just a case of lost in translation. Finding places where you can let your kids play with each other independently and not inspire adult ire isn’t easy wherever you live.

Eighty years ago, children spent a significant amount of time playing in the streets, which was an important space for adventure, encountering and socialising with other children and gaining the skills of independence. Through the ‘50s, due to the increase in car traffic, designated play spaces were introduced – parks and playgrounds—creating more structure and often supervision to their play. By the 1980s and 90s, due to the lack of playground upkeep and increased parental fears—stranger danger, provoked particularly by the criminality which many parks attracted—children began to move indoors. As the quality of park spaces plummeted over the austerity years, the trend was further accelerated. While my brother and I ‘played out’ a lot on the streets growing up, there was a marked shift in our suburban neighbourhood by our later teens.

Through my experience of motherhood in the 2020s, I can say that nearly all activities related to children take place indoors, or cordoned off from the rest of the community outdoor venues in highly managed environments. It’s all health and safety, organised clubs and learning opportunities, scheduled sporting lessons. Play is controlled and predetermined and there is often a collective fear of what these kids might do if their energy is not funnelled sufficiently, as if their natural state is deviant.