A few days ago, I was watching three children under the age of nine happily play unsupervised in the mud on the foreshore of a bay. No adults were in sight and the children were laughing as they poked sticks into the muddy water. The freedom they were experiencing reminded me of my own carefree childhood when I was allowed to roam my neighbourhood streets until it got dark.
Unfortunately, most children in Australia no longer experience such freedom. Their time is so strictly regimented between school and structured activities after school that they are losing the art of play. According to a MILO State of Play study in 2011, 45% of children in Australia don’t play every day. Curtin University research claims that in just one generation, outdoor play has decreased from 73% to just 13% of total play time. Such are the time limits on children today that some parents are structuring in time for unstructured play!
We don’t organize anything and the kids play. You know? Like, we just sit around in the back yard and let the kids be kids. We still watch them, of course.
One reason for this is over-anxious parents who worry that if they let their children out of sight, some calamity will befall the kids. This obsession with safety is permeating all aspects of Australian society. A recent article in Crikey suggests that some people actually like Australia’s ‘nanny state’:
When I get back to Australia and I’m not allowed to throw a Frisbee at the beach and I have to get a special council permit just to mind my own business ... I’ll say a prayer of thanks to Nanny, and enjoy the freedom - that’s right, haters, freedom – of feeling safe and protected.
Australia is fostering a risk-averse culture where people are reluctant to put themselves or their children ‘at risk’. What is deemed risky has become more tightly defined – so the independence granted to children in the past is now viewed as parental negligence. For example, children using a public toilet without an accompanying adult, walking to school by themselves, or simply crossing the street unaided.
Of course, children below a certain age do need supervision, but it seems the age children are considered old enough to do things independently is getting older and older.
It is time to take a stand against the paranoia gripping parents and remind them that although the worst-case scenario might happen one day, most of the time it doesn’t. Meanwhile, their children are losing out on developing valuable skills such as resilience, imagination and independence that come with unstructured play.
Sara Hudson is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.