The previous blog mentioned in passing the recent UNICEF report which placed the UK as the worst developed country for children. Time to expand on that a little.
The reasons for our failure, it goes without saying, are many and varied, but I want to shine a little light on a couple of them which interlink with each other.
The first is the car culture which has taken away the streets as potential play areas. When I was growing up, and even more so when my parents were, children spent a fair proportion of their time outside, playing in the street, learning to interact with each other, getting exercise and using up some of that energy which children have in such abundant supply. They don't now. When did you last see a group of children kicking a ball about, or with cricket stumps chalked on a convenient door?
Partly of course that is due to the rise of computer games, TV and other indoor attractions, but partly also it is because the streets are no longer either convenient (too many parked cars) or safe (too many moving cars) to play in. As a result children stay indoors playing alone or with siblings, meeting others of their age only in school or - in later years - in gangs roaming the streets at night, bored and restless.
That question of safety brings us to the other issue: the nannying of children by parents and other adults. If children have less contact with other children than they used to, the same is true of contact with adults from outside the family. Strangers are now seen as dangerous potential perverts rather than as helpful extensions of parental control. Then there's travel: harking back again to my own youth, children were expected to make their own way to school from a fairly early age, walking, cycling or taking the bus as necessary. Parental involvement was limited to providing the busfare. In my own case, I travelled a dozen miles by foot, train and bus and nobody thought it unusual. Now a substantial proportion are ferried to school in the car, no matter how short the journry, and after school ferried again to sports, music lessons or whatever social activities they indulge in.
Children are growing up isolated, unused to normal social interactions, overweight and under-exercised, more at home at a computer keyboard than in a conversation. It's a culture that has to change.
The argument is put much more cogently than I can manage, and at considerably greater length, in an article by Mayer Hillman: childrens_geographies_childrens_rights_article.pdf
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