by Libby Brooks
Confinement isn’t only a result of parental – or children’s – fear. Under-investment in outdoor play facilities means there are fewer open spaces for children to inhabit. There is a vast disparity in access to green areas between urban and rural children. In the seventeenth century, even children living in towns had fields close by. Now, Britain is the most urbanised country in Europe. It’s hardly surprising that levels of childhood obesity are rising.
Lifestyle changes also impact on children’s freedom. As a result of longer working hours, more mothers in employment, smaller families and community fragmentation, there’s not always a friendly adult around to mind out for roaming youngsters – and, as the Green Alliance study shows, non-familial adults are nowadays more likely to be considered a threat than a help. Parents who do let their children wander free are considered irresponsible.
Frank Furedi has described this as an ‘erosion of adult solidarity’ in the rearing of children. ‘The relation of trust between parents, teachers, nursery workers and carers has become highly ambiguous,’ he wrote in an essay on risk and play. ‘Instead of regarding other adults as a potential source of assistance in the task of child-rearing, parents regard them with a degree of suspicion. In particular, adults who are “strangers” are treated with apprehension. Since most adults are by definition “strangers”, concern for children can often acquire a pathological character.’
The norm of the indoor child has led not only to fear for children who do venture outside, but fear of them. Teenagers who congregate on street corners are seen a priori as a nuisance and a threat. It is then worth asking whether confinement may also be seen as an adult convenience. If children no longer regard the streets as their territory, their elders won’t be disturbed by games or gangs. Nor do car drivers have to think about lowering their speed. And it’s also a commercial convenience. If children are spending more time indoors, they and their parents are likely to spend more money on expensive electronic entertainments.
Operating in tandem with child-panic is Western culture’s profound risk aversion. The second largest teaching union, the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers, now advises its members to avoid taking part in school trips because ‘society no longer appears to accept the concept of a genuine accident’. It has been estimated that school insurance premiums are increasing by up to 20 per cent a year to indemnify against compensation claims.
Although statistically pupils are safer on a supervised trip than participating in almost any other activity, absurdities accrue. A school in Devon cancels its Shrove Tuesday pancake race after its bill for public liability insurance for the event quadruples. A local council advises teachers against making trips on sunny days because of the possible risk of skin cancer. And once again, children’s experience of the outside environment is curtailed.
This risk hysteria also has implications for playground provision. As Tim Gill noted in a paper for the Play Safety Forum: ‘Fear of litigation is leading many play providers to focus on minimising the risk of injury at the expense of other more fundamental objectives.’ It’s an approach that ignores clear evidence that playgrounds pose a comparatively low risk to children. Of the two million or so childhood accident cases treated by hospitals each year, less than 2 per cent involve playground equipment, while fatalities are very rare – about one every three or four years – compared with about 500 child deaths per annum from accidents overall.
Gill argues that risk assessment should involve a trade-off between safety and other goals: ‘Given children’s appetite for risk-taking, one of the factors that should be considered is the likelihood that children will seek out risks elsewhere, in environments that are not controlled or designed for them, if play provision is not challenging enough. Another factor is the learning that can take place when children are exposed to, and have to learn to deal with, environmental hazards.’
In their book From Children’s Services to Children’s Spaces, Peter Moss and Pat Petrie of the Thomas Coram Research Unit at London’s Institute of Education argue that the distinction between ‘risk’ and ‘hazard’ is not sufficiently understood when considering children’s activities. ‘Risk is inherent in human endeavour,’ they write, ‘and for children not to engage with it is for them to be cut off from an important part of human life in the interests of “child protection”. People learn to assess and manage risk by encountering it.’
A few weeks further into the holidays, Rosie is digging around in a blue plastic stacking box of toys, her whole head disappearing from sight as she reaches into the depths. Downstairs her father is beginning to pack away kitchen utensils for the move. She is wearing multicoloured tinsel deely-boppers – decorated springs on a hairband – which she never takes off and which, marvellously, never get in her way. At the bottom of the stacking box she finds two small balls from a game she has thrown away.
Rosie’s front teeth are growing now, lessening the slight lisp she had developed in their absence. She is keeping a holiday diary: ‘28th July Today I went to London. We took the train from Bedford. We went on the underground train to the Natural History Museum and we saw dinosaurs. Then we went outside and had lunch. We had Scotch eggs and some cheese and some crisps and some ham rolls and some chocolate and two bottles of apple and blackcurrant. Then we went back into the museum because me, Mummy and Livvy needed the toilet and then we went on the double decker bus and I went on the London Eye and I saw Big Ben and I felt very big.’
By the London Eye there were people bouncing up and down on strings and underneath them were trampolines. ‘It looked like really good fun but Mummy said I was too young to do it so next year we’re going back and I’m going to do bouncing.’ It’s as though the trampolines, and London, only breathe into life when Rosie visits, and will await her return, spellbound, stoically, these twelve months.
Livvy brings in her Pinocchio doll. ‘I’m a real boy. I’m not a real boy,’ she chants as she makes his lying nose extend and retract. Rosie begins to build a house with the Ello bricks. ‘That’s the girls’ room and now I’m going to make a boys’ room,’ she confirms to herself. ‘That’s the alarm that lets the girls know if a boy comes into their room. They get punishments if they go in there.’
Livvy is still singing: ‘I’m a real boy! I’m not a real boy! I’m a real boy and I’ve got a handbag!’ She manoeuvres closer and closer to the Ello construction. Pre-emptively, Rosie suggests that her sister play with the doll’s house instead. Livvy spots a sticker on the Ello. ‘That’s my sticker!’ she cries. ‘That’s my sticker!’ insists Rosie. Livvy invades further, claiming some of the Ello as hers.
‘You can have it!’ Rosie spits, finally disengaging the offending block.
‘Can I play with your doll’s house?’ asks Livvy slyly.
‘No!’ says Rosie, before she remembers her promise from earlier. ‘I mean yes.’ She puts on a large pout, but Livvy is content to leave her alone, massaging her victory.
Rosie resumes her narrative: ‘Well, that’s the girls’ room and that’s the boys.’ There are two boys in there and two girls in there.’ She arranges four wooden-headed cloth dolls into sitting position, though they are too large for the rooms she has built and lean uncomfortably out of the house.
Although no alarm sounds, and the narrative skips the offence itself, it is soon apparent that the boys are going to be punished. Rosie shivers with excitement: ‘I know what’s going to be their punishment! Can wood go on water? Can cotton?’ She grabs the boy dolls and runs into bathroom. She places an old beaker from the shelf in the sink and proceeds to fill it with water. She dunks the first doll head-first. ‘That’s your punish-ment,’ she decrees. ‘All boys that go into the girls’ room get soaked.’
She runs back to her room and hangs the first doll on the washing line, which is still tied between the bunk and the bureau from my last visit. ‘They have to hang upside down as part of the punishment.’ She runs back into the bathroom to attend to the second b
oy. Livvy barrels after her. She really wants to soak a doll too and begs to be allowed if another one misbehaves. Rosie is talking to the second doll directly as she hangs him up: ‘You know you’re not allowed in the girls’ room. But why did you go in there? “Because we wanted to see what the punishments were like.” Well you got that right haven’t you? You have seen what the punishment are like.’
The other part of the punishment, Rosie appends, is that once they’ve hung for a few weeks the boy dolls will be treated like babies: ‘You nappy change them and they sleep in cots and they have bottles of milk, all the things that babies do. It shows them how wrong it is to go into the girls’ room.’
The imaginative life of children is full of violence, noted the late psychiatrist Anthony Storr in his monograph, Human Aggression. A child’s consciousness of its weakness compared with adults compels her to seize on every opportunity to prove her strength. He believed that children need all the aggressive potential they can muster in order to assert their burgeoning individuality. ‘One of the unfortunate features of the human condition,’ he wrote, ‘is that the natural exploratory behaviour of human infants has to be curtailed, especially in conditions of civilisation.’ Within all of us, he argued, there must be reserves of repressed aggression that originate from the restrictions of early childhood.
So hostile play offers a fantasy escape in otherwise contained childhoods. ‘I think they really do deserve it.’ Rosie is brisk and delighted. ‘It hasn’t been a very good day for them, has it?’ She has filled a toy cup with water and is holding it beneath the suspended heads in order to soak the boy dolls more. Rosie doesn’t think that she has ever had a punishment. She’s never done anything really naughty: ‘Not really naughty anyway. Sometimes I used to splash in puddles. No one really noticed that but then I started thinking that I should stop doing it. And that was the only time I felt a little bit bad. But I haven’t done anything wrong.’
It’s important not to do something wrong. ‘Sometimes you can get really bad punishments and sometimes you can get really bad thoughts and they can stay with you for ever and you always think about it and you think “I’d better not do that again” and sometimes you have bad dreams about it.’ The boys’ hair needs another soaking. They’re getting very, very wet.
A few weeks after that, Rosie is playing in a new bedroom. Moving-day was the weekend before last. It was really good. She took photographs of their old house and their old rooms, and then of their new house and its wide, sloping garden. For Rosie, the whole exercise really did happen in just one day. She’s like a vigorous sweet-pea shoot, deftly transplanted to a sunnier bed. Now there’s the holiday-camp thrill of sleeping on mattresses with Livvy while her room is being painted. And the joy of a houseful of new furniture arrangements to crouch beneath and hide behind.
Her tour begins in Mum and Dad’s room, with a brief, forbidden bounce across their bed. In their bathroom an unattached uplighter lies by the toilet pedestal. You can press it on then off. Rosie and Livvy’s bathroom is wider. Livvy’s room is messy with torn curls of wallpaper. There’s a shelf in the shape of a green caterpillar. ‘I think we’ll keep the caterpillar,’ says Rosie. ‘I’ll paint it pink.’
She doesn’t know who will stay in the spare room. It’s for when visitors come. ‘And tonight I can’t wait because I’m going to sleep there and I’m going to sleep under the table.’ There is a broad shelf across one wall, with a skirt of floral material pinned round its edges that reaches to the floor. It creates a cloth cavern where a child might lie concealed. ‘I asked Mummy and she said maybe, and then she said maybe again. In the morning Mummy and Daddy will have to open the curtains to wake me up.’
Back in her new room, Rosie presses herself flat into the floor in the gap between the two mattresses. Livvy wants to make herself disappear too. Just the two of them have been together all summer, and their play is becoming fractious now. Rosie straddles her prostrate sister and bounces heavily. ‘Are you OK? My little chair.’
‘No I’m not!’ Livvy shrieks and gurgles, not sure whether to signal pain or pleasure. Their father attends, drawn by the noise. ‘Rose, be careful with that, please.’
He extracts the wriggling younger sister, and tempts her downstairs with the offer of chopping vegetables for dinner. Rosie crawls under the orange chair in the corner. Simon put it in the room for Rosie to sit on. Perhaps her older self will. But for now she’s more interested in investigating the spaces around it. She tips it over, throwing the seat cover down, to make a tent. Pushing it upright again, she tries to make it rock like rocking-chair. Rosie has never been on a real rocking-chair, but she has been on a rocking-horse.
She switches on the night-light. ‘This bulb is really hot.’ She holds a piece of cloth over it. ‘It’s a lamp, isn’t it?’ she continues knowingly. ‘Well maybe if I rub it the genie will come out. It would be pink and I think it should be wearing lovely trousers.’
She scoots out of the room and, somewhere in the half-unpacked packing, finds her dressing-up outfit. She returns resplendent in fuchsia satin pyjama trousers, a pink cropped top with gold coins hanging to the belly, and purple net wings. She is a tidily proportioned creature, her bare tummy retaining a suggestion of toddler roundness. ‘This is what I want the genie to be wearing.’ She fiddles with her wings. ‘I’ve got some gold curly shoes that go with it.’
And if she had three wishes? ‘To live in a big chocolate house with a nice big garden and a marzipan path. The second is that Livvy would never hurt me again and Daddy would never boss me around and I could go anywhere I liked and my last wish would be that I had lots and lots of art things and lots and lots of money.’
She repairs to the bathroom, and comes back with a white hand-towel which she lays down and climbs aboard. It’s a magic carpet. ‘I can go anywhere I want to because it’s my fantasy world and everyone would live in little flower houses and there would be a really nice queen and princess and they would play croquet a lot and the queen would always win because she was very clever and beautiful and the princess wasn’t.’
Rosie weaves the stories she’s been told into a story to tell: ‘And there would be lots of butterflies and they would be called bread-and-butterflies because they would be made out of bread and butter. And there was a children’s play area in this world with little tunnels for the children to go through and sometimes there would be little doors and if you went through them there would be a really big room with lots children sitting on steps and they were watching television. And that’s where I go on my magic carpet whenever I feel sad.’
Many of the stories that Rosie tells and writes contain a strong element of fantasy. But others, like ‘Jenny and her Wonderful Family’, explore more everyday relationships. The Swedish sociologist Gunilla Halldén argues that all children’s stories are in different ways dealing with the issue of power. In the early 1990s, she collected drawings and stories written on the subject of ‘my future family’ from children in three towns in Sweden over a two-month period. The resulting narratives showed how children explored positions within the family, and how they made meaning of adulthood and parenthood.
Halldén discovered that the girls created the fictitious family as an arena for female power. The theme of relationships was central, and conflict occurred frequently, usually to be resolved by a girl protagonist. Their main characters were adults in whose hands responsibility for the care of the family rested. In contrast, boys often failed to identify any adult, or to give them power. They used the family theme to write stories about a life without constraints, and if conflicts did occur they never explained their resolution, although in most cases everyone got what they wanted.
‘In omitting the controlling position,’ she concluded, ‘the boys’ stories gave a lot of power to the children. In girls’ stories, on the other hand, the mother was the one who kept order and who negotiated and tried to deal with conflicting opinions. In the girls’ stories, the children were cared for, but also control
led, by the mother.’ So boys and girls explored different gender positions, as well as their own dependency.
The holidays are nearly over, and this autumn Rosie will enter Year 2. ‘I have my teacher and she’s really, really nice. And we have this really big classroom and Livvy is going into Reception and when we go out into the playground we have to go past Reception.’ Year 2 is a bigger year and the work will be harder. They’re going to learn about the Great Fire of London.
‘Sometimes it’s nice to have Livvy around the house, so I think sometimes it’s nice to have her around the school and it’s just going to be really, really good now that’s she’s with me all the time.’ Sometimes Rosie talks as though her mind is elsewhere. She’s not exactly distracted, but keeping a foot in Rosie-world. She’s been tying her purple wings round her knees fretfully.
‘Sometimes I wonder if Livvy’s as stressed as me when I’m doing my work because its already really hard and I think it’s going to be even harder in Year 2.’ Rosie finds maths hardest. ‘Some of the sums have really big numbers and it’s really hard because some of the people in my class kept interrupting even though I was trying.’ Rosie has strict views about behaviour, and has been unpleasantly surprised by the antics of some of her peers. She adds further detail lest it be thought that she is feigning the difficulty. ‘Really, really big numbers, like 103 and 105, and I just didn’t find it easy.’
Rosie will be tested nationally for the first time next March. Her father says he’s not particularly troubled at the prospect because, as a teacher, he considers the exams valueless. But Rosie senses something coming. As children are denied the opportunity to learn from their own experiences in the outside world, indoors their education has become further regimented.
