Is play meaningful? A comment on the purposeful life.

I blame St Paul:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Those childish things are mostly about play, about the enjoyable but idle wasting of time with mere fun. And, in the stern puritan world of today, such things are not meaningful, play is not meaningful. Adults should be doing purposeful things that 'contribute' not frivolous fripperies, not leisure and pleasure.

Here's US "medical ethicist" (I've no idea either) and architect of 'Obamacare', Ezekiel Emmanuel:

These people who live a vigorous life to 70, 80, 90 years of age—when I look at what those people “do,” almost all of it is what I classify as play. It’s not meaningful work. They’re riding motorcycles; they’re hiking. Which can all have value—don’t get me wrong. But if it’s the main thing in your life? Ummm, that’s not probably a meaningful life.

This contains all the essential elements of the puritan - we live to work, to do purposeful and meaningful things. This is what matters not riding a motorbike or hiking the Sierras. Play is not what grown ups should do, we put away those childish things and did serious, sensible grown up projects, the things that constitute a meaningful life.

I retired this year because I'd had enough of what I was doing and am fortunate to be in a financial situation allowing me to do so. On Emmanuel's assessment, I'm no longer living a meaningful life. I've picked up those childish things again - going for walks, travelling to new places, playing Dungeons & Dragons, enjoying the place I live and time with friends and neighbours. There's a point when you realise that nothing much you do actually matters and it is strangely liberating.

Emmanuel's observation is his view as to what constitutes a meaningful life (or rather, since he doesn't say what his meaningful life contains, what doesn't constitute a meaningful life and the interviewer makes no attempt to extract an answer that might help). But I don't see playing games, enjoying the beauty of the world, spending time with family and friends as thing without meaning. In fact, compared to most folk's routine job, these are far more important and contain more meaning.

All this reflects the obsession with productivity as the sole measure of purpose. We're told that we're not productive enough and that this won't do at all, yet we're happier spending leisure time than we are with the drudge of our work. So, yes (and not for the first time) St Paul is wrong, or at least misunderstood. There is as much purpose in consumption, in the pleasures of life as there is in those dry tasks that puritans like Emmanuel consider meaningful.

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"What's the point of a Secret Club if it doesn't have a Secret Fort?" Building child-friendly cities.

Or at least the rose-tinted suburbs of my youth. As a seven-year-old, I walked with my sister to the bus stop at the end of The Glade, got the 54 bus across town and walked up Foxgrove Road to school. On our own. When I wasn't at school, we'd tramp cross country (if you call the allotments, Monk's Orchard Primary playing fields and Elmers End Cricket Club 'country') exploring all the exciting things that a boy could find in that little chunk of South London suburbia.

In the other direction were Long Lane woods and what we called the golf course (it used to be one but was just open land between Bywood Lane and Addiscombe). Across the Main Road were the old sewage works - we weren't supposed to go in there but we did - that are now South Norwood Country Park.

They were happy days. The world - at least this child's world - was a happy one.

So yes, let's start building cities for children not childless, boring grown-ups:

Everyday freedoms refer to children’s ability to travel safely on foot or bike and without an adult in their neighborhood—to school, to a rec center, to a park. The “popsicle test,” in which a child can walk from their home to a store, buy a popsicle, and return home before it melts, is one way to measure this ability. Children’s infrastructure means the network of spaces and streets that can make a city child-friendly and encourage these everyday freedoms.

And let's remember this isn't just about parks and playgrounds but about the marginalia of suburbia, the little bits of scrub land, the borders between schools and playing fields, the paths of streams - places to explore, discover and adventure. Remembering that child wants you only when they want you - this was the best line is a very bad film I watched recently - "What's the point of a Secret Club if it doesn't have a Secret Fort?"

Right now we're cramming ever more 'housing units' into ever smaller spaces, recreating the hard, grazed-knees world of back-to-back terraces facing straight onto cobbled streets. We're forgetting the importance of the child's world, forgetting that it starts close to home and spreads as far as that child is brave enough to venture:

The most effective interventions are implemented at the hyperlocal level. Think front yards and neighborhoods. “On average,” the authors write, “[spaces in front of homes] make up at least 25 percent of a city’s space and have the greatest potential to encourage everyday freedoms and social interaction.” Focusing on the very local also means that more children can access the interventions.

Definitely. Make cities child friendly. Or maybe, I dunno, build suburbs again?

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How Dungeons & Dragons changed the world...

Mark, from his place in France, has written about computer games. But first he tells us where it started:

I suppose it started at uni, with Dungeons and Dragons. This role-playing combat and treasure-hunting game is based on a map, figurines and rolls of the dice. And lots of rules, looked up in a book, for how armour, weapons, magic spells, and everything else in the fantasy world actually work. (How much time, magical energy and money does it take to develop a micro-fireball oven?) We'd collect together of an evening around the boards, dice and a considerable amount of beer, and play through the night.

To which I respond: Boards? Figurines? Before settling down and remembering the thousands of hours I spent playing the game. And playing didn't just involve turning up for a few hours and rolling some dice (well, absolutely thousands of dice if truth be told) - we also created the dungeons from scratch including new monsters, traps and fiendish puzzles. I once designed (I think that's the term we use these days) an entire assassin's guild complete with its constitution - my career direction was set even then!

The idea that you could create a functional model place into which players could bring their own imagination, creativity and very large two-handed swords may seem unremarkable in this age of on-line gaming, but back in the 1970s Gary Gygax's innovation was quite the opposite - remarkable indeed. Never before had there been a game that put those childhood make-believe games into its system. And, though there'd been plenty of team games, Dungeons & Dragons was the first game to have both team and individual competition - you worked with other players to slay monsters, solve puzzles and run your fingers through the loot while acting as an individual player. D&D even provided a framework - the alignment chart - to allow such individualism to range across all the variations in human character.

D&D begat a host of other 'role-playing games' (RPGs) from Traveller, which involved romping about in space, through other fantasy games like Runequest, and even a Japanese samauri game called Bushido (with by far the most over-elaborate rule book). RPGs were designed based in the wild west or capturing the incipient madness in H P Lovecraft. All these took the same model - create a character, place that character in the game when he, she or it interests with other players, and explore scenarios created by a 'game-' or 'dungeon-master'. But, while each of these games picked up flaws in D&D, the basic combat and magic system remains hard to beat (and the basis for combat systems in a pile of popular computer games).

For me, the biggest thing about D&D was - and is - the character you create as this is central to the game's ethos (not, of course, that slaying bug-eyed monsters controlled by evil priests isn't fun). I wrote about it some while ago:

What you have is a cardboard cut-out character that would suit the typical Hollywood blockbuster based on some comic book. But this is Dungeons & Dragons and you can do better. Your level one male ranger (OK you chose that because you fancied Aragorn maybe) has to round out by interacting with the other players - perhaps he's a bit grumpy when he doesn't get his way, maybe he never buys a round, or has a tendency to quote bad poetry. While doing this, of course, you have to stay alive which means you need to co-operate - even with the righteous lawful good cleric.

By the time Aerosmith (or whatever your ranger's name is) has survived to be 4th or 5th level, you know what he's like, how he'll respond to other sorts of character, his foibles and preferences. And with his recently acquired Sword of Daemon (+2, +3 vs evil things from hell) you have a real character. For sure, some of the character is the player themselves (we aren't all Constantine Stanislavsky, after all), but you'll have wrapped your mind round how to develop a character. And the wonder of this is that, for all there's a dungeon and a dungeon master controlling the game, the success or otherwise isn't just about the quantity of goblins slain or giants hacked to pieces but about having created, with a few others, a game within that game.

Looking back it sometimes seems childish to recall long conversations about what an imaginary character might do in a given situation - indeed, I'm sure that the worldly folk who though D&D was naff would make this point strongly. The thing is, however, that those conversations explored - through the medium of a game - a pile of concepts (what we mean by good and evil, the search for power, the benefits of collaboration) that would otherwise only get considered in the abstract. You learn more about evil by asking what a supposedly evil character would do than through argument, however reasoned. And it isn't simple, you quickly get past kill everyone and take all the gold (although I've done that too).

Dungeons & Dragons stretched the boundaries of the game (or at least the formal game - children had always, and still do, play games of imagination, what we'd now call RPGs) by allowing fantasy, in its widest sense, to arrive into the board game. The game became about personality, conversation, survival and growth rather than, in the old board game sense, winning or losing. Nobody dies when boys play cops and robbers but the idea of death is there as is questioning what is right and what is wrong. The child giving her dolls names, characters and roles does the same and we see it as a valuable way for that child to explore what it is to be human.

But, when children get to big school or thereabouts all this childishness has to stop. Games are either an entertaining means of passing time or else a simple matter of who wins and who loses. Outside drama classes and the school play there's none of this role-play and even the drama class wants you to be the person the playwright wants you to be not the role you want to try out. In the 1970s, for a bunch of mostly boys, mostly a bit nerdy and dorky, Dungeons & Dragons allowed them, without embarrassment, to play those games of imagination again. By making the games of young childhood fit with adult themes, D&D reinvented what grown-ups understand by a game, helped pave the way (along with complex war games from the likes of Strategy & Tactics) for computer gaming, and placed imagination right back at the heart of play where it belongs.
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Quote of the day: On hanging out

Fast food shops provide a place for kids to hang out:

Having saved the children from the perils of walking to school and active play we are surprised that they are fat. In fact I suspect that half the appeal of fast food joints to schoolchildren is not the food per se; rather it is the chance to hang out with their friends and make minor decisions about what they want to do next without adults looming over them.

At my school we weren't allowed (below sixth form) to leave the grounds at lunchtime. Each day a precious few passes were granted to fifth formers - we could, if we secured one of these passes, go as far as Crown Point (about 400 yards from the school gates) where there was a convenient cafe.

The other part of the quote is just as pertinent - children have few opportunities to be children, everything has to be managed, organised, supervised and monitored. The idea of just going out to play has gone. Worse still, we tend now to treat children just hanging out as pretty much anti-social behaviour.

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Children in cities

I've observed before that cities aren't designed for children. And that this is something of a problem if we are to become a more urban society. Indeed there are some people out there trying really hard to rediscover play in our hard-edged and adult city spaces like Emma Bearman's Playbox in Leeds. There's still a problem, especially in the biggest and grandest cities, and this from Aaron Renn sets it out:

These global cities are where the culture is made, where the media are, etc. To the extent that they represent a very atypical demographic profile that largely excludes families with school-aged children, this only perpetuates the “bubble” in which America’s leadership class often lives. The values and priorities of people without children are different from those with children. One example is the value people put on space. In our central cities populated with largely people who have no children, a big obsession is changing zoning regulations to allow smaller units, including so-called “micro-apartments.” These kinds of developments would enable more upscale young adult singles to live in cities. That’s good in itself. Yet it is not paired with equal concern about creating more housing for families.

I've a feeling - it's just that as I've not dug around for evidence - that densification, the process Renn describes above, makes having a family less likely and more difficult. The successful, well-educated London couple living in a great little rented apartment in Shoreditch or Stockwell will have a pretty decent life - good money, plenty of social life and a plethora of little consumer pleasures. They know, however, that having a family means leaving the heart of the city. Here's Renn again - speaking as a new father in New York's Upper West Side:

...it’s hard not to notice that while there are lots of very young children here, there are far fewer school aged ones. I don’t have any desire or plans to leave, but I have to recognize that children have a way of changing your priorities. Realistically, most people with school-aged children still seem to move to the suburbs. Those I see raising older kids in the city are generally well-off enough to afford large apartments or even single family homes (in cities like Chicago). They can also either pay the premium to live in a high quality neighborhood school zone or pay the freight for private schooling.

In some of these great cities we make matters even worse because of the deliberate limitation of housing development through such things as zoning and green belt. Not only is raising a family in the city open only to the very rich (who have the cash) and the poor (who often have no choice) but increasingly the same goes for suburbia. This semi-detatched round the corner from where I was brought up now sells at about £450,000:



Maybe that's affordable to our hypothetical successful and well-educated London couple but I suspect the truth is that most of such people see this perfectly ordinary semi in an average South London suburb as beyond their means (not least because they'll probably need £45,000 cash deposit). So they stay right where they are putting off have children for another year, hoping for another promotion or a great new job that will make the family possible. And because there are fewer and fewer children, there are fewer and fewer facilities for those children. Why set up a ball park or soft play zone when there are no children to use it. Worse still those adults in the city without children resent the noisy intrusion and attention grabbing of children - even to calling for them to be banned from pubs and restaurants.

I don't want to change cities particularly. Central London was never all that child-friendly and I guess the same goes for Manhattan and San Francisco. But we create a problem if we see the great city as the model for everywhere - dense, crowded living, unsafe public spaces, congestion all leavened with 'culture'. Near every local planning document will talk about increasing housing density which means smaller gardens, more flats, less open space, narrower pavements and smaller rooms. All things that make bringing up children more difficult. The cities don't care - they're just importing the next generation of workers from other places and other countries - but, for all their finery and beauty cities like this are mistletoe, parasites on the productive, healthy apple tree of society. Good to kiss under but not not much else.

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Making a 'sustainable' park - thoughts from a visit to Rome

"Towards a sustainable park" proclaims the blurb on the posters that have been carefully pinned to the solid but, one hopes, temporary fencing. Or rather it says that in Italian complete with diagrams, pictures and the mindless impenetrability of bureaucratic language.

So what is this 'sustainable park' you may very well ask? After all that word 'sustainable' is one of those weasel words so confounded by being discussed and contested that the sense and purpose of the original word is lost in a fog of verbal concern wrapped around with calls for poorly specified action.

As we arrived in the park, it was clear that is was - as your mum would say - in a rather sorry state. It wasn't just the temporary fences or the lack of grass where the grass should be but rather the impression that nothing much had happened for a very long time. Yet the park had sustained - it's probably among the world's oldest parks (the very definition of 'sustainable' one might suggest) so it's not its continued existence that is the bother for those bureaucrats but something else.

Indeed, despite its slight sad state the park was well used combining the dog-walking and children playing functions of parks with a newer purpose of providing a place for African immigrants to lounge around - taking a break from the tough job of trying to flog cheap stuff to tourists (the plaintive cry of 'selfie selfie' being the newest street call from those trying to get folk to buy a selfie stick). And there's a basketball court (or rather whatever the Italians call a 'multi-use games area') where a bunch of young men were playing volleyball as well as what might once have been a properly laid out five-a-side pitch.

Along the sides of the slightly potholed paths are trees. Big trees - mostly stone pines, that icon of Italian treedom - and smaller trees. A multitude of trees. And it's these trees that are the problem with that sustainability. We have - as well as the conflict with regular every day uses of the park - an additional complication for this is Rome and the park is the Colle Oppio, one of the original seven hills of ancient Rome. Meaning, of course, that underneath every inch of the park lies irreplaceable ancient heritage. Those lovely trees - and most of them are lovely - have root systems that are gradually destroying that precious remainder of the lost city. The structures that remain - old bath houses, thermal springs, mosaics, monuments and homes - are unstable, quite literally crumbling away resulting in the project to do something.

And the something is - at its core - trying to get to a balance between the park as a place of play, the park as a green place in an urban environment and the park as a preservation of the past. You get a sense that each tiny piece of completed betterment has only come as a result of careful bartering between the heritage champions, the greens and the local folk who want somewhere to sit or a place for their children to play.

When people ask about political decision-making, we tend to think about new laws or grand strategy. We seldom consider that the toughest political places are these very contested places where many good things are wanted but their priority is contested - ancient ruins worth saving, trees that help the city breathe, playgrounds for toddlers to swing and gardens for us to walk. We can have all of these things but only if we accept some limitation and it falls on the political process - in its broadest meaning - to decide on those constraints, to broker agreements between trees and ruins, and to referee the disputes and disagreements. While all the time knowing that there's an imperative to get the job done, to make that sustainable park.

Right now the Colle Oppio is a mess. At some point it won't be. The challenge will be - and I hope this is the case although my Italian is far too limited to understand everything the signs say - to balance those competing needs, to make a place for tourists (Colle Oppio is 400 yards from the Colosseum), residents, workers and the inevitable flotsam of a city park.

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Ban everything, ban it now. For the children.

Back in early 1970s South London, I used to drag my self from bed, throw on clothes and some breakfast down my gullet, get on my bike and cycle to Elmers End News. Where, as generations of children before me had done, I picked up a bag of newspapers and shoved them through a load of doors. As it happens the round I did took me back over the railway bridge and past the cricket club (holding my nose at the stench from the paint factory and tannery) almost to home. I then got into my school uniform and cycled to school in SE19.

There was nothing unusual about all this, it was what loads of other children did. For sure there were some who had other jobs - milk rounds, serving in shops, washing cars at the garage, helping on a market stall. But children worked. In my case it was simple - once I was 13 and could get a paper round there was no more pocket money (as an aside my last pocket money amount was 12p).

Apparently all this wasn't a useful exercise in self-organising and an introduction to work but an offence to my rights:

Turning to newspaper delivery rounds, it said that “allowing children to work before school begins in the morning is, in principle, contrary” to the charter, because it puts at risk their “attendance, receptiveness and homework”.

This 'charter' is the European Social Charter (and before you all get anti-EU on me, this was signed by the UK in 1961 long before we joined that awful organisation) and it has apparently been captured by the 'wrap children in cotton wool' school of thinking along with the deranged idea that making children do anything is some sort of imposition rather than an education.

We live in a world where parents are told that just beyond their sight is a terrible dark place filled with stranger danger, with poisonous plants, with trees that might be climbed, with bicycles ridden dangerously without brakes down steep hills. The idea that an eight year old could safely walk half a mile to a bus stop, get on a bus across town and walk another few hundred yards to school - on his own (or with his nine-year-old sister) would horrify both our fussy authorities and most modern parents. Yet that is what I did every day of school - as did many other children.

And the idea that it infringes a teenager's rights to do an hour's work before school (so as to get a little money for the teenager to spend on sweets, comics, games, trips and records) is such manifest nonsense it makes one wonder what sort of weird old world the people who sit on the European Committee on Social Rights inhabit. I do know, however, that what we see is people who respond to everything they dislike with proposals for a ban, for restrictions, for controls. Instead of an exciting world for children to explore, these people see a world from which children must be protected. Until that day, after the hangover has passed from the 18th birthday party (although our social rights fascists almost certainly disapprove of drinking), when blinking and naive the fully fledged grown up is thrown into that big ole world to make his or her own way.

We damage children more by 'protecting' them, restricting their play, limiting their chances to learn about work and managing their social interactions to the extent that they become stultified, the very antithesis of fun. Everywhere we go there are signs designed to close off the world from children - don't climb trees, don't go on the grass, don't play ball games, don't run, don't sing, don't cross, don't do this, don't do the other. There are no signs that say please play here, have fun, take a risk or two, swim, run, laugh and dance.

Instead we see people who behave like the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - corralling children into a dull, purposeful programme of approved activities monitored by the agents of those authorities. Much of the effort here is dedicated to creating obedient little unchallenging conformists. And what we create are a bunch of snowflakes who demand safe spaces, who cry at criticism and who would rather ban free speech than accept that some people are unpleasant or rude. Disagreement is dealt with not through a handshake and "we'll talk about this again" but by one or other party running off to cuddle a teddy bear while listening to calming whale sounds.

"Ban everything, ban it now - for the children" is one of the most corrupting approaches to social policy ever. It creates weak-willed, dependent people who believe they've some sort of right never to be challenged, never to be upset and certainly never to be offended. And it is used - again and again - to control both the transition to being a grown up and to stop grown up people from doing things of which the controlling authorities disapprove. Don't drink - for the sake of the children. Don't smoke - the children, you know. Don't eat fat, salt or sugary foods - think what you're doing to the children.

None of this protects children. All it does is reinforce again the process of creating supine, subservient masses who, in the manner of Huxley's 'Brave New World', gladly accept authoritarianism - "for the good of the children".

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Welcome to Midwich - New Puritans, schools and the brainwashing of children

The New Puritan agenda is at its most insistent in schools:

Mr Ayers also spoke out after his son had a fun-size pack of Maltesers confiscated by teachers after it was spotted in his lunch box.

My Ayers said: 'I put the Maltesers in as a weekly treat, but the school confiscated them for some reason.

'The school should be concentrating on other things rather than banning children playing games and taking their chocolate away.'

It is for the children, we're told. Not only is 'obesity' a worry but play must be purposeful - directed to the agenda of creating supine, dependent and content children. Any hint of assertiveness, any exploration of violence, and the authorities step in - only they have the power (but it is exercised oh so benignly):

Headteacher Karen Jaeggi defended the policy this week, saying: 'We actively discourage children from playing violent games or games involving imaginary weapons in the playground by explaining to them what it represents.

'Some children can be easily frightened by violent play which is often influenced by computer games and we feel that such games can have a harmful effect on young minds.'

You see what's happening here? Children are being told that only certain type of play are acceptable - making a gun with your fingers and say "pyoinng, pyoingg...you're dead" isn't approved.

The most worrying thing about this is the absolute certainty of the head teacher. She is sure in her belief, her faith in the new puritan message. Parents putting a pack of fun sized Maltesers in a lunch box is the root cause of obesity - leave aside that the contents of a child's lunchbox is nothing at all to do with the school. And gangs, murder and general badness comes as a result of kids playing cops and robbers - egged on by the manipulative and shady exploiters of the computer games business.

What we don't see - these extreme events give us a glimpse behind the curtain - is the every day brain washing of children in the New Puritan agenda. Whether it's misinforming them about recycling, promoting the distortion of 'fair trade' or implicit criticism of parents for drinking, smoking or eating foods that aren't approved. And all of this is wrapped up in pseudo-science and an unquestioning acceptance of whatever the New Puritan priests tell the teachers.

Welcome to Midwich.


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A playground for people not a showcase for developers - thoughts on Bradford City Centre

I spent a pleasant hour talking to Jim Greenhalgh from the T&A this afternoon. He’d rung me with a question along the lines of: “so how did we end up with Bradford Centre Regeneration?”

The result was that long conversation – we started with Odsal (remember “Superdome”) where I remarked that we had a scheme, it was funded, we’d given it planning permission only for a certain John Prescott to refuse permission because of the proposed Tesco supermarket that made the finances stack up. We got the Tesco – it’s at Great Horton less than a mile away from Odsal – but we never got the new stadium, not even while Gerry Sutcliffe the local MP was Sports Minister.

But the real conversation was about the City Centre. I don’t know what Jim will take from our chat or indeed what he’ll write but these are the things that stood out for me:

1.       We need to look at the Alsop masterplan again – not at the teddy bears or the weird architecture but at its essential principle. Alsop gave us an “anti-development” masterplan, something of a reverse field of dreams. Knock down all the 1960s rubbish and replace it with a park. And then see what happens. It took me five or so years to realise just how insightful this vision was – with a future where town centres have to change with our retail habits, this ‘wait and see’ approach now seems very wise.

2.       Think more about Bradford’s changing demographic rather than trying to attract a specific trendy middle-class audience. Over the past twenty years, Bradford’s middle-class has become less white – we now have a significant and important Asian middle class and the City Centre needs to reflect their preferences, what entertain them as much as it does the white population in places like Cullingworth. You only have to take a peek at the queues for iPads to understand the significance of this Asian demographic.

3.       Take control of our own destiny – for years we’ve wrapped ourselves in complicated developer-led schemes that, with one or two exceptions like Eastbrook Hall and Manningham Mills simply haven’t materialised. The Council needs to take command for once rather than hiding behind other bodies and assorted “special purpose vehicles”. Right now there’s the chance to build on the success of the Council-funded City Park – perhaps working with the Media Museum to complete a wonderful set of developments around that museum, the Alhambra Theatre, the old central library and the former Odeon. And we can put up much of the funding ourselves – Bradford Council has £180 million in reserves and an annual income of over £1.3 billion.

4.       Assume there won’t be any “funny money” – for twenty years the City has sat waiting for the generosity of central government or else the good fortune of lottery or other “bids”. This is a regeneration strategy akin to using the 4.30 at Kempton Park as an investment strategy. It might work but the chances are it won’t!

5.       Animate the City – spend more on events, on dance, on music, on street markets, on things that bring people into the City. Aim for a situation where Mr & Mrs Bradfordian wake up on a Saturday morning and discuss what to do that day concluding with “let’s go into Bradford, there’s always something on”.

We have been hesitant, over-reliant on private investment and lacking in the understanding needed to implement that masterplan we paid so much for. It wasn’t about developers and development. It wasn’t about retailers and office blocks. It was about a park, about creating a great place for Bradford’s people to promenade, to party and to play in.

Perhaps, after nearly ten years of pretending otherwise, we can get on with delivering that vision of a different kind of City centre. A City centre that’s a playground for people rather than a showcase for developers.

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New Puritan advice to mums - allow your children to play?

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The nanny-in-chief is to issue guidance to all those Mums and Dads who don't know the bleedin' obvious:

The health guidance will be issued this week by Professor Dame Sally Davies, chief medical officer for England, and her counterparts across the country, the Sunday Times reported.

She said: “For children that are not yet walking, there is considerable evidence that letting children crawl, play or roll around on the floor is essential during early years.

"Play that allows under-fives to move about is critical and three hours a day is essential."

You really couldn't make this up could you? Millions spent on telling parents that kids should play - while at the same time bashing them with dire warnings about safety. Doubtless the play inspectors will follow!

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Tenets of the New Puritans #2: "It's for the children" - the curse of the play strategy

“It’s for the children” or “think of the children” has become a core mantra for the New Puritan – we should hide cigarettes and alcohol just in case some child might catch a glimpse and be drawn inexorably towards the evil weed or corrupting liquor. And a host of restrictions and controls – some advocate building huge firewalls – are needed in case a child stumbles across a little bare flesh on the Internet.

Great calls go up when an actor lights up on film or television – especially when that actors is a cartoon chameleon.

Anti-smoking campaigners have branded the animated film Rango a public health hazard for encouraging children to take up the habit.

A raft of groups said the PG feature, which opened last Friday, is setting a bad example by featuring more than 60 instances of characters puffing away.

Doubtless our brave campaigners care only for the welfare of children, just as do those people who insist on airbrushing out I K Brunel’s cigar.

But there is a more insidious problem with the New Puritans and children – the de facto banning of play. Or rather its replacement with something that is similar to play but, by being directed by the New Puritan, ceases to be such a thing. After all we didn’t need a “play strategy” did we?

Children and young people are to be encouraged to give their opinions on Bradford's play strategy and play provision by calling a play "hotline".

The authority will publicise the All to Play For strategy using brightly coloured posters and cards featuring the number for Bradford early years and childcare service.

Ali Long, play development and training officer, said the play team of four full-time staff and other mobile playworkers wanted to hear directly from children and young people.

You see the problem is that we might just do the wrong kind of play – you know, the bad sort:

Teachers reprimanded two seven-year-old boys for playing army games - because it amounted to 'threatening behaviour'. The youngsters were disciplined after they were spotted making gun-shapes with their hands.

Play strategies are intended for purposeful things, they are part of learning – we might see them as the creation of a dutiful generation of young New Puritans. Children face barriers to play (which don’t extend to adults telling them to stop that and stop it now) and we should be concerned about “the quality of play environments”. This whole approach, the idea that we need centrally-directed strategies is deeply worrying.

In its way the Bradford strategy both compounds and also comprehends the problem:

Access to the outdoor environment for play remains a high priority for children and young people. We are currently witnessing the growth of a new phenomenon – that described by a number of professionals as the “battery child syndrome” where today’s children are often denied the play opportunities that earlier generations took for granted.

But nowhere does the document admit to the source of the problem. A while ago I mused on the joys of being ten:

We climbed over the fence to play football in the school grounds (it is only a rumour that we climbed on the roof) & could cross the fields to Elmers End Cricket Club and watch them play – and so long as I was back for tea no-one bothered

With Jeremy Lesuik I got the bus and tube to go to football – Highbury, Stamford Bridge, Upton Park – on our own and paid for from our pocket money. And in the Summer a trip to The Oval or Lords for cricket

Mr Sparks took us to the old golf course to play cricket – on occasion up to twenty or so playing an impromptu game. In bad weather he took us swimming. We walked the two miles there and back to South Norwood pool

...And climbing the cherry trees and digging for Roman remains in the garden (which of course we found in abundance)

Now I know part of this is nostalgia but the bigger part is a recognition is what we have lost in our search for a risk free “play environment”. And more importantly in making sure no voices other than the approved New Puritan voice are directed to the upbringing of children.  We touched above on bad play for boys (you know the stuff with guns and violence – they would play like that if it wasn’t for TV and video games) but there’s also bad play for girls too. The difference is that this sort of bad play isn’t attacked by punishing the girl but by directing our attention to mum or to the shopkeeper:

Bailey's report asks for government and business to work together to tackle the problem – for example, by ending the sale of inappropriately "sexy" clothing for young children, such as underwired bras and T-shirts with suggestive slogans. But Bailey recommends that if progress is not made the government should force retailers to make the changes in 18 months.

Cameron's letter says: "I note that many of the actions you suggest are for business and regulators to follow rather than for government. I support this emphasis, as it consistent with this government's overall approach and my long-held belief that the leading force for progress should be social responsibility, not state control."

That girls want to play dressing up, to try out make up, to pretend to be models or princesses is normal behaviour not premature sexualisation – if there is a problem it is with adults sees anything sexual about a nine-year-old child, whatever they are wearing. Yet that is precisely what the New Puritans are doing – suggesting that girls dressing-up is ‘premature sexualisation’ is precisely the same mistake as we make by saying that a women in a mini-skirt is asking to be raped.

In all this we see a conflicted attitude to children but one dominated by a corrupted idea of childhood – one where children can have all of the fun we had without any of the risks, where our obsession with sex is visited onto the one group in society without that obsession and where play must be directed to purposeful things rather than indulged in for its own sake.

It seems to me that when society thinks it needs a play strategy – apparently because children have “a right to play” under the “UN Charter on the Rights of the Child” – that society has lost its way. Yes children need to play but we don’t need a strategy, we don’t need directing in this, we know (and children certainly know) what to do.

Pleasure – hedonistic, undirected, indulgent pleasure – is a human need. Sadly, the New Puritans believe only certain kinds of pleasure are worthy of encouragement and that many great pleasures are harmful, sinful, a cost to society. And must be ‘denormalised’. So it is with children’s play – it must be supervised, directed, managed and prescribed , made ‘safe’ and expunged of any corrupting influences from ‘harmful’ adult pleasures.

But of course we do it all “for the children”.

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