WE'VE had the good luck for almost 40 years, including during our children's growing up, to live in cul de sacs.
When buying our first house, our main pre-occupation was what we could afford. Assessing the location for child friendliness never entered our minds.
So, happenchance, we were lucky to end up living round the corner from a school and in a street with lots of other children and safe play areas right outside our front doors.
And play they did. From after school till dark and sometimes in the dark, in everything but torrential rain, all the young people came out to play.
We parents had the wit not to interfere and the older ones kept an eye on the younger. Without consciously seeking it out for that purpose, we had landed in the perfect urban growing-up space for child development. Over the years we watched our children become street kids playing, falling out, forming and unforming alliances, developing games skills, with not a swing or a slide within a two-mile radius. Their experience in the city was nothing like my very rural country growing-up. There will be many readers who recall their mother's admonishment 'to get away off and don't let me see your face in this house till tea time'.
We children would be together for endless hours, playing hopscotch, investigating bird's nests, cycling to the beach to swim in arctic cold Co down water, climbing and falling off trees with ne'er a safety helmet in sight, and stealing the odd turnip from the field to keep away the hunger pangs. It is almost beyond belief that youngsters today might have that sort of freedom.
Yet children's' freedom and capacity to play largely unhindered, if not actually unsupervised, is a critical part of the development of human beings.
We are now experiencing what happens to children when their only playtime is in the form of prearranged play-dates (ugh) or worse still, the solitary obsessive preoccupation with internet social networks and games.
A few weeks ago dr Peter Gray, a psychology professor from Boston College, wrote an excellent article in the Independent about his concerns at the present government's determination to introduce longer school days. dr Gray pointed out how stupid and shortsighted this approach is.
He articulated the necessity for and many benefits of unstructured play.
Children learn how to be creative, to be in groups, they learn how to assert themselves and how to share, how to express anger and when not to. They learn to trust and be trusted and that loyalty in groups is important. They learn boundaries and what is tolerated and what is not. They learn to take risks to make mistakes and to recover, hopefully apologise and move on. Of course there were dangers in such free-range child management and accidents did happen but instinctively i think parents then knew that the risks were worth taking. dr Gray quotes studies which show that modern children are five to eight times more likely to be depressed than they were in the 1950s but, also worryingly, they are less creative, have less empathy and are more narcissistic than previous generations. It doesn't require much analysis to understand the importance of free play and the gap in children's development when this is hindered. Today's kids are so busy. There are so many worthy extra curricular activities to go to, all with rules and regulations about behaviour. The kids never get the chance to experiment because even in the limited free time left many parents are afraid to let their children out of their sight. Parents will quote stranger danger as behind their fear to let children loose. There is no evidence that children are in any more danger now than when i or my children were growing up.
What is indisputable is the increased volume and speed of traffic on the roads, and i am certainly not suggesting that we let children out at all in a busy through-road.
However, if we believe in the necessity of free play for children's development then ways must be found to create safe places to play. One suggestion would be to create certain areas in our housing estates as free range children zones.
Parents could for example form cooperatives to keep an eye on children in safe areas such as parks. There are any number of ideas but firstly today's parents need to listen to grandma's advice about what is best for their children