To think we have ruined childrens play

[Beepbopblop]

I grew up on a working class estate, in a northern mill town. I am almost 34 and I had the best time with my friends growing up. I am comparing my child DS8, to my child hood and I am feeling a bit sad. Because;

1. From aged 8 I could ride wherever on my bike all over town
2. we had the most imaginative play, we kept up for the whole six weeks holidays that the mills behind us was haunted, I convinced a peer to trap a bee in a jar to save my life - we all knew it wasn’t true but played along as it was all part of the story, and ate a mud pie after sacrificing the bee…
3. I was allowed out to play from when my parents left for work until tea, and then from there until it got dark
4. we had secret woods, haunted woods, various (unsafe) rope swings and biking routes

In comparison DS8 gets to go on “play dates” and prearranged activities..

AIBU to grieve for the good times being a child and wonder why we are so closed off with our children

I’m your age and I don’t recognise your childhood. I could ride my bike within the immediate area or play at friends houses but I absolutely was not free to roam wherever or stay out the amount of time you describe. Nor were the vast majority of my friends. And this is in an old fashioned northern village.

I think you are seeing your childhood through rose tinted glasses. And as previous posters have said, why don’t you do the same for your children?

I agree OP. There is a brilliant book on this subject and the harm it is doing to children: Last Child in the Woods - Louv.

if you want your children to play outside all day and have imaginative adventures in ruined old buildings, woods and beaches etc. take them there, go with them, set out ground rules around safety, boundaries and times for lunch/picnic and keep an ear and eye on them but let them play. Go with friends so you’re not bored and keep an ear out. You’re not 100% helicoptering them but they can come get you if there is any “danger”.

a lot of children though would find this ‘boring’, so it works best to start at a young age and get them used to and longing for long days playing outside.

I mean my kids still ride their bikes around and enjoy imaginative play. They don’t play on ‘unsafe’ rope swings because why would they? There’s no more joy in an unsafe rope swing than in a safe one.

My kids also spend lots of time at the beach etc. My son usually rides up for his friend on weekends and they cycle down to the cinema to spend their pocket money on maccies and a movie.

I think people love looking back at the ‘good old days’ and imagining everything was so fab then and it’s so awful now/kids don’t know how to play now but I think kids now play like kids basically always did. Just a bit safer.

Where I am, kids lay out, but there is grassy square outside the houses. To be honest, it is smaller then some people's back garden, but it has been used by many children over the years.

I feel that my child is fortunate to have the experience.

To be honest, as parents we are responsible for colour children's childhood. So if we value independence, we need to create opportunities for our kids to experience it.

God I hated being chucked out to wander unsupervised. I got punched in the face by an older child. A group of boys who always hung out at the end of our street intimidated us every time we walked past. They tried to set me on fire once, luckily my adult neighbour happened to come past. I would have loved an adult to keep an eye on us. No fucking way will I be tossing my children out unsupervised. They get loads of free play with friends, there is a park with a big field nearby, the difference is they stay in sight. I broke my leg in the same park a few years ago, what would happen if they were kids? How would they let me know?

That is sad. FWIW my adult DD would have loved that because she wasnt big on technology! I would not be inviting them back!

This may not be relevant now, but a lot of my DD's friends came from semi deprived backgrounds and this was back in the early days of Xbox, playstation (and pre tablets, smartphones) etc when they were quite expensive, we didnt have one either because we were not well off ourselves. Her and her friends all made their own fun becuase they were not use to having technology to keep themselves entertained. IF they knocked on each other doors that was to go for a bike ride, hit around at the local park, sometimes they would play board games at else. Sometimes they would come back to our place for Home and Away😂

A good friend of mine's (whose quite wealthy)5 DC turned up for a sleepover in the summer, and she just went straight to the P.C. Then she moaned that DD didnt have many computer games / DVDs. Like you, we had other activities such as board games, a big trampoline and we lived by the sea.

I live in a fairly safe (almost but not quite gated) neighbourhood and despite lots of other children living here, none of them ever seem to come out to play. I would be happy to let ds 8 to be out for hours... In fact... I'd love it if he was out biking/running around/making dens etc but there is nobody for him to play with. I think it's a real shame.

So let him out? He doesn't need other children to play with. He can do all that on his own. In any event, you're one of the parents who isn't letting their kid out to play as well. Maybe if other parents saw your son out playing they'd let theirs out too.

I don't really get the point posters are trying to make by saying well give your children the same freedoms OP. The point is that it was social, always other children about to play with- as no one else seems to let their children do this it wouldn't be the same would it.

There is a huge loss of green space nowadays. Other spaces are restricted to just walking on the path, not venturing into the woods anymore. We have a smallish wood near us which is safe but lot os parents don't let their children out alone under secondary school age.

There are no cycle paths and cars do win in our area.

Most playgrounds are designed for very young children, most pre-teens find them boring, teens just sit andhang out.

DD does lots of the free play, roaming the woods, building dens, setting up a camp fire and playing in streams, either with us being out or with her Scout/Explorer group.

I don't really get the point posters are trying to make by saying well give your children the same freedoms OP. The point is that it was social, always other children about to play with- as no one else seems to let their children do this it wouldn't be the same would it.

Totally agree. We weren't just wandering around alone - there was an entire society of other children to interact with. I think some people never experienced that, so they don't understand what has been lost

Yes! Well, the 80s ones, anyway (same ones?). I remember the train one with the pair of trainers and the girl who screamed so loud she lost her voice. I remember the boy playing hide and seek in the gravel pit and his hole collapsed and he just never came out again.

These were shown to us at school! You just can't imagine that happening these days.

I grew up in a small village. Aged 7 I would cycle round to the nearest play park on my own to read my book, or I'd take my roller skates. I would walk down to the local shop from the same age. I also remember being about 8 and cycling from the village to the local RAF base, which involved taking a footpath in between two fields, no vehicular access. Now that location is exactly the kind of spot where something could happen, away from people. It was the route home from school for the RAF kids so well-known to have kids on it, usually without adults, because we took ourselves to school.

I loved riding my bike everywhere as a child and playing outside. But if there was even a fraction of the electronic entertainment and TV channels available back then as there is now, there would be no contest.
Also there were a lot of children abducted and murdered in the 79s/80s/90s. There always seemed to be a story in the news about a young girl being taken, not too dissimilar to today 😔
And not to mention the levels of traffic are much higher now. I wouldn’t want my children to face the abuse that is levelled at “bloody cyclist twats”.

My DC are allowed to play out.
It's important to become "streetwise" and where better to learn than on the streets in a group of other children?
The social aspect of negotiating friends and play are important life skills for adulthood.

It's the same as teaching online safety- spotting fact form fiction or any dangerous behaviour online is far more difficult than in RL.

By letting children play out, we might just give them that extra bit of vigilance that they need if targeted online.

No. Not bollocks.

Years ago no children had autism, for example, not because it didn’t exist but because it wasn’t diagnosed. The same with depression, anxiety and the like. Children with problems were just sent to reform schools or kept at home.

Soldiers returning from WWI weren’t diagnosed with PTSD, not because they didn’t have it but because it hadn’t been recognised.

No children in my year were gay. Not because being gay didn’t exist but because it was still seen as a failing and something to be mocked.

I had a pretty free range childhood, but I grew up in a small coastal village where we knew lots of people. We did do lots of going off on bikes and swum all day in the summer, but there were adults around keeping an eye, probably more than we realised. As a teenager I had a horse and used to just head off for a whole day with friends; if something happened (and it did sometimes) we would have to figure out how to sort it out. It does build resilience and confidence.

There was a lot less disposable income around as well, 'days out' were a rare treat, maybe once or twice in the holidays. We're heading back that way.

It's ok to recognise that some things were not great- the safeguarding was rubbish, I think there would be connuptions at some of the unsupervised stuff we did in the water- while being sad at a loss of risky play and outside time. I would maybe think about moving? A relative lives on a traffic free estate with a big meadow and her kids play out all the time. We've designed towns and cities in thrall to the car and with a loss of social spaces, but I think there are places this can be done. We try and give ours as much acess to this as possible, but we currently live in a developing country where there are virtually no communal play spaces (although quite little kids do walk to school on their own and the streets are commandeered for football). There are rocketing obesity rates here as a result. When at home we live on a culdesac which works well for bikes etc. Play is SO important. It's how kids learn.

Also maybe have a look at the playstreets movement- could you get together with some neighbours and organise one every so often?

Yabu. I am older than you and never played out like this because frankly it isn't and has never been safe for a child of 8 to be off biking about the neighbourhood alone. Just because nothing happened to you doesn't mean it was safe.

There are also plenty of ways imaginative play can happen without roaming the streets unsupervised. This morning my little one has used play bricks to make a rocket, a robot, a building for mummy and a bridge that fell down. She is now using a fidget spinner pretending it is a merry go round for her little figure ttoys.She will later go to the park where she usually pretends the climbing frame is an ice cream parlour and makes ice creams then she will be going to play with cousins in the garden again making up games and stories like normal (usually princesses or tea parties or schools or racing drivers as they're very little). As she gets older she will no doubt advance this play

playingout.net/

Worth a look.

In part I agree with you OP though my childhood was not the same as yours. Living in a quiet cul-de-sac I expect led to my parents giving me more freedom that I would have had if we had lived elsewhere.

I think the reasons are many and some have been mentioned already, such as the loss of green spaces. I am sure that awareness of those who have harmed children has contributed.

@SuziLikeSuziQ I remember watching the farm one at school. It was horrific.

I don't really get the point posters are trying to make by saying well give your children the same freedoms OP. The point is that it was social, always other children about to play with- as no one else seems to let their children do this it wouldn't be the same would it

Point being you can hardly moan about their being no children to play with if you don't let yours out. You're moaning about other people displaying the same behaviour as you ie keeping your kids inside. Its nonsensical. That poster lives in a gated community. She's is a very much more privileged position than most to let her kids out but she still won't. But if she felt there were so many huge benefits to letting her kid play out she would be pushing him out the door in his safe community to build dens and ride his bike around the woods and swim in streams unsupervised.

Maybe she actually feels it's not safe and her rose tinted glasses are getting in the way. But of course its easier to blame it on other parents for not providing playmates.

My daughter is 8 and us out round our estate everyday with her bike/scooter. One if the reasons we chose this house is it's safety tbh. I think it's very different in different areas. My elder 2 had the same at our old house.

It's not all round the town though and they have limits that they respect. Current 8 year old isn't allowed in the woods out back yet, too many random dog walkers.

Mostly I know vaguely where she is and there's 3 of her friends houses I can check in at. All of our houses face each of the open spaces they might be using. It's a very safe area.

That said I do holler out to door occasionally to see what she's up to but the worst they've done is knock on some neighbourhood doors asking for sponsorship and all of us parents bollocked them lol. I have a big teacher gob so I can get them all hearing me from across the park!

Most kids here over the age of 5 play out unsupervisedz

Just to add without being stealth boasty, it's an affluent estate. Just as a juxtaposition to ops working class situation, it's definitely what would be classed as middle class round here. Though I'm rapidly lowering the tone with my fish wife yelling and clapped out cars!

I never experienced this - for starters there were only about 3 other kids on my street of 100+ houses - and these were all family sized houses on a then-new build estate. I wonder if demographic change has had a hand in this, as there became fewer kids compared to childless couples and pensioners?

You are 100% right.

Just like it wasn't safer to play out before. There were still paedophiles. Less awareness and more social acceptance of just being aware of that creepy man in the neighbourhood/over friendly uncle etc. There are a decent amount of historic sexual abuse claims about now and uncovered abuse cases from 70s/80s etc. It will be interesting whether this is as common in years to come or if more stuff will be dealt with closer to the time it happened.