Children’s play
THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY
For children, playing is as natural as breathing, and scarcely less important. It is how they engage with the world and form their identity within it. Playing is how children first communicate, socialise and explore. It is how they encounter and manage risks, develop their emotional awareness, and form attachments to people, places and things.
Play also has a key role in children’s creativity and capacity to learn. And the exuberant physicality of much of children’s play – given enough time and space for it – provides all the exercise they need. Most importantly, playing is simply how children enjoy life.
Yet, in the modern world, time and space to play is routinely constrained for millions of children. Their neighbourhoods are dominated by traffic, commerce and poor planning, their time filled with formal education and structured ‘enrichment activities’. Denied opportunities to play outside in the real world, their leisure time is monopolised by screens.
PART OF A MOVEMENT
Playful Planet exists to make children’s play a greater priority for those who shape the spaces where children live, and make decisions about how they should spend their time. We are proud to be part of the worldwide movement for children’s right to play, as recognised in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and aim to see the implications of this right ‘respected, protected, and fulfilled’, as the UN itself has called for, through public policy, planning and funding.
