What adults lost when children stopped playing in the street
2024-08-02 12:30:00
TiranaPost
In the summer of 2009, Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson, two mothers living on Greville Road in Bristol, a medium-sized city in southwest England, found themselves in a strange situation: They had their children at home with them a lot of the time. "We were asking, how, why are they here?", said Roza. "Why aren't they outside?" The friends decided to do an experiment. They applied to close their street to traffic for two hours after school on a June afternoon – not for a party or an activity, but simply to let the children who lived there play. They deliberately didn't prepare games or activities, Rose told me, as that would have failed the purpose. They wanted to know: "With time, space and permission, what happens?"
The results were impressive. The dozens of kids who came out had no problem finding things to do. A little girl fell up and down the street, "3,000 times," Rose recalls. "She was very happy."
All of a sudden, the modern approach to children's play, where parents take them to playgrounds or other activities, seemed both unnecessarily extravagant and completely inadequate. The children did not need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less dependent on their parents and their time to go out.
The experiment also produced some unexpected results. As the children were released into the street, some of them met classmates, realizing only then that they were neighbors. It soon became clear to everyone there that Greville Road had many more children than they had previously thought. That session, and the many others it encouraged, also became a way for adults to get to know each other, which led to another discovery for Ferguson and Rose: In many ways, a world built for machines has made life much more difficult for adults.
The dominance of cars has turned children's play into work for parents, who have to coordinate and supervise children's time and drive them to playgrounds or meetings with peers. But it has also deprived adults of something deeper. Over the years, as Rose and Ferguson have extended their experiment to other parts of the UK, neighborhoods across the country have discovered that by letting children play in the fresh air, residents have discovered something they didn't they knew they had been missing: the ability to connect with people who live very close to them.
In modern times, people think of roads as serving the purposes of mobility – getting cars from one point to another, quickly and orderly. But before the invention of the automobile, "roads had many other functions," says Marcel Moran, a professor at New York University's Center for Urban Science and Progress. Streets were places where people sold goods and socialized. And especially as the US and Europe began to industrialize, the streets were the main place where the growing number of children living in cities went to play. This continued to be the case even after playgrounds became widespread in the 20th century. It was only when the number of cars on the road increased that things began to change. Society began to prioritize traffic and parking over children and their play.
The shift to a car-focused society only further undermined the idea that children have a place on or near the road. The growth of the suburbs, the construction of schools far from housing made it impractical for children to walk to school.
The street outside a child's home is very different from a playground or a private yard. It is a space that connects one house to another and is used by all residents, regardless of age or whether they have children. On the street, children learn how to find other people's houses. They also meet children who are not in their age group. For adults, the playground makes it easier to get to know everyone, rather than just when they go to take out the trash.
The truth is that the way children play changes the way they feel, giving adults the opportunity to engage in all kinds of socialization. Children themselves function as a kind of connective tissue for adults. When children play with each other, parents also bond with each other.
But children also serve to break the reserve that adults naturally have towards others. Children's tendency to transgress social boundaries—to stare a little longer, to ask direct questions, or to step into someone's yard—can prompt adults to transgress those boundaries as well.
Perhaps it's no surprise that playgrounds are among the few places where striking up a conversation with a stranger is considered socially acceptable and even expected. But by limiting play to just that, we may have inadvertently eliminated children's ability to make us connect with each other. / With cuts from The Atlantic
*This article was published by Bota.al and reposted by Tiranapost.al
