Hash Tag Children at Play
I know I may sound like a cliche. When I went to school as a kid I had to walk through knee deep snow up hill for three miles in both directions. I have a sense that since I was that kid, walking my meandering route to Prince Phillip Public School, in St Catharines, with my friends, things have changed.
We would wander through orchards and vineyards, talk, joke play tag and eventually reach the school yard where we would meet up with more friends and join in with a group game of marbles. It was all about social interaction, games and having fun with friends.
With my own kids I deposited them at a bus stop and watched as a big yellow school bus would whisk them away to their school. Today, as a grandfather I stand on a corner with the neighborhood parents as they drink their morning coffee and gather their children on and off the bus morning and afternoon. Making sure the bus driver sees them and notes that parent and child have connected and all is safe before driving on. On occasion a children gets dropped off at the wrong spot and it becomes a national scandal, parents demand drivers be fired and school boards be more accountable.
School yards have become safer and perhaps sterile and less fun. Not all bad. I think of some of the things we did as kids, the trees we climbed, the holes we dug, the games we played and I often wonder how I physically survived my childhood. We swam in the Welland Canal. We built rafts for Lake travel. We did 20 mile bike trips all with no parental knowledge or input.
Times have changed and we have become more protective and I think to a fault.
When a drive through any neighborhood in any town large or small in southern Ontario and likely if I had that same drive in any hamlet, village, town or city anywhere in Canada, I do not, or very rarely, do I see kids outside at physical play individually or in groups. Perhaps the only exception to my observations is iconic road hockey, which I hope never disappears from the urban landscape. It gives me hope for the future.
I believe children have lost their ability to organize themselves to play in groups outside of a school yard and without adult supervision. If I took a random sample of kids, or kids that were friends and gave them baseball equipment or a soccer ball and placed it and them in a field, my guess is that they would not know what to do. They could not make teams, select captains, show leadership, designate positions, calculate the division of labour, mediate disputes, or most importantly have fun outside participating in a physical activity. Children of today’s generation would be in a social void without direction and unless they could google a solution to their dilemma they would remain at a loss. Their thumbs would be twitching until some one rescued them, or threw them an i-pad.
I am 70 and grew up before computers and the internet. My TV world had 12 channels with little violence. My TV time was regulated and generally was a family activity including Ed Sullivan and on Saturday Mr Green Jeans and Captain Kangaroo. I walked to school and played hard outside at recess and lunch. When I got home from school I put on my “play cloths” and met with my friends and was gone until dinner. My parents may have had a vague notion of where I was and with whom I was playing.
We build forts, played hide and go seek, organized baseball and football games, made hockey rinks without adults in the winter and played all the seasonal sports, we camped out in the back yard and explored the neighborhood on our bikes, reenacted cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and pagans and missionaries when our sisters played with us, all without the intervention of a single adult. Life was good. I had a wonderful childhood.
As night fell mothers in the neighborhood would call out for their kids for dinner. We would in turn yell back, “five more minutes,” anything to buy more time. Once in we would eat as a family with no TV on in the back ground. After dinner was homework, more unsupervised indoor play time, building plastic models of cars and trunks, using my mechano set, or mini bricks or more likely pieces of scrap wood from my Dad’s basement wood working shop. I read Hardy Boy books and then off to bed to repeat the process the next day.
I can’t help but contrast what I experienced in my childhood growing up with what I observe today and can’t help thinking that i pads, cable, net flix, video games, internet, cell phones and the like have been more curse than blessing. Children and young adults are losing connections with each other, the family fabric is suffering and dialogue is being muted with the pause button of the electronic age.
I also recognize that society is not the safe haven it was when I grew up. It is a darker environment now and children do need protection. But when I see children hustled off to gymnastic lesson, swimming and music lessons, then soccer and everything else I think we have also gone too far in another direction. Too much of a busy schedule and too much organization I think may also stifle an element of individual and group play. We have come so far that we have organized, protected, and structured our children to the point where I think, in many cases, kids need more breathing space to play with other kids in the absence of electronics and adults.
Give them a ball, a bat a skipping rope, a football, a doll and let them play and see what they do. They may surprise us!
