Guardian newspaper highlights 'threat' to children's play
Responding to a sustained campaign by play advocates and a growing weight of evidence culminating in the publication last week of the University of Reading’s British Children’s Play Survey, led by Professor Helen Dodd, the Guardian newspaper has thrown its weight behind calls for action to protect time and space for children to play.
Pointing to the survey’s key finding, that children today are, on average, not allowed to play out unsupervised until they are 11 years old, two years older than when their parents’ generation was afforded the same freedom, and also to the drastic reduction in children’s play and break time at school, the Guardian’s leader column, published online on Sunday, 25th April, said 'Play, importantly, does not come with specific learning objectives, but can teach children, incidentally, how to negotiate, lead, be in a team, care for each other, stick up for themselves – to understand fairness and unfairness’.
The Guardian piece also suggested that time and space for children to play away from adult supervision could ‘be read as a prescription: for better childhoods, more robust communities, and less anxious and circumscribed adults’.
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