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The Paradox of PlayAre kids today having enough fun?

By Ann Hulbert
Posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007, at 5:12 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

As a new play—and playground—renaissance now gets under way, adults have become ever more self-consciously solicitous about not being excessively heavy-handed play arbiters. Yet the effects haven't been unequivocally liberating by any means. Arguably, today's subtler play engineers encroach even further than their predecessors on middle-class kids' freedom to pursue the kind of unstructured peer-group improvising (and bullying and boisterous risk-taking) that can lead who knows where. Susan Gregory Thomas' Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds joins a chorus of books lamenting a blurring of boundaries between child and adult that have turned playtime into a less innocent and more instrumental interlude.

It's not just that kids are enrolled earlier and earlier in adult-organized (potentially college-application-enhancing) sports and extracurricular activities. Indoors, even more than out, they're deemed in need of stimuli from the very start. Marketers, invoking child-development science, employ a pincer approach. With ads endowing toys and videos with an educational "aura," they abet parental eagerness to push cognitive precocity on babies and toddlers. At the same time, they're doing their best to bypass parents and appeal directly to shifting 'tween and teen tastes—well aware of the sway that kids have over family purchases. Priding themselves on keeping up with quirky youth interests and desires, marketers can now count on ever younger consumers chasing after brands and fads. Yet notice who's not complaining. It's rare to hear kids these days gripe that the adult-mediated play regime gets on their nerves. That very lack of resistance from video-savvy, sports-crazy kids is currently inspiring yet more adult concern about youthful stress, even as the engineering of play becomes ever more ambitious.

Consider the schemes for a "next-generation playground" to be built at New York's South Street Seaport, designed by David Rockwell, who has created adult recreation spaces such as Nobu restaurant and Café Grey. Working in consultation with a variety of child-development experts, he exemplifies the cutting-edge interest in ensuring more than mere physical safety. Where the playground upgrades of more than a decade ago took the "jungle" out of gym, with the spread of spongy surfaces and tamer "climbing structures," the new focus is more finely tuned. Promoting group synergy and innovation is the goal, echoing the corporate culture of places like, say, Google. ''Play is not optional for kids," Rockwell told the New York Times, in an article (subscription required) announcing plans for the more free-form play area with movable parts, to be staffed by "play workers" trained to facilitate the best use of them; "play is how children learn to build community, how they learn to work with other people, it's how they learn to kind of engage their sense of creativity … to understand that they can control their own environment.'' The target audience was a little young to offer much in the way of comment, but follow-up articles (subscription required) indicated wariness among adults: Of course it's great to get kids outdoors, but shouldn't they be left more to their own devices?

Nostalgia for free-range childhood has inspired a new wave of concern about children's alienation from nature—intensified by alarm that kids themselves rarely express much sense of loss: That's perhaps the most disturbing symptom of how high-tech and indoor-oriented their notions of play have lately become. (According to one study, only 8 percent of 9- to 12-year-olds spent time in outside activities other than organized sports in 2003, a 50 percent decline since 1997.) To flip though Conn and Hal Iggulden's The Dangerous Book for Boys, an unexpected best seller (article purchase required) first in England and now here, is to see the latest neoromantic tensions at work. Officially addressed mainly to 'tween and teen male readers in need of a compendium of information about old-fashioned, mostly fresh-air boyish passions—from making bows and arrows to learning about constellations and heroic battle stories—the book is in fact packaged for a different clientele. Its retro style is aimed at wistful parental buyers. Extrapolating from themselves, the thirtysomething authors are counting on a particular audience: fathers eager to embrace a rustic vision of self-reliant and resourceful childhood that few of them actually experienced—and even more eager to believe that such a vision still holds an appeal for children, too.

And maybe it can, though that is only likely to happen with some help from Dad. (No boy I know would delve into this book of his own accord.) But this isn't necessarily the contradiction it might seem. After all, the modern father's ineptitude when it comes to building a treehouse or a go-cart, not to mention playing marbles, could prove a godsend. Instead of a fussy facilitator, he can be a fellow bumbler, feeling his way and having fun. As he may well have forgotten by now, that's part of what is called playing.

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Remarks from the Fray:

You want to really increase "play"? Here are some concrete tips:

Make parks accessible to local pedestrians. My local parks are all at least a mile away (I live in a residential suburban neighborhood). Two require walking down a street where cars regularly go 55-70 mph (posted speed limit is 45). There is no median separating cars from peds - and the cars regularly go over the curb. The other park doesn't have a restroom. That's just unrealistic for anyone with young kids.

Slow down! People regularly drive 35mph past my house. They don't look both ways when they take turns. I saw a guy almost hit a delivery truck the size of a one-car garage because he didn't look where he was going. It'd be suicide to send a kid out there on a bike.

Ah,but these things cost money and inconvenience people. It's so much easier to Yak yak yak yak yak

--noisette

(To reply, click here.)

(6/20)

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