This was just going to be a place to put some links for Play Day really, but it is interesting to see BBC reportage on the issues around play. On the one hand, it reports that Parents feel something is fundamentally wrong with modern childhood – and this is the link – but Over-cautious parents stop play in the report linked here. One of their latest posts bemoans the lack of knowledge about nature, but it’s a shame that BBC Wildlife’s article is only half-heartedly represented here, as a sort of teaser for “go and buy the magazine.”
The tension is not just from the BBC needing both stories and balance, however; it comes from the ambiguity we have around seeing outside as a place of danger, something I suspect we get, at heart, from maintaining the warning stories of a rural past (e.g. Red Riding Hood from France [although note that the link takes you to the great book by Jack Zipes rather than a text of the story per se], the almost global Witch-in-the-Woods type stories such as Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman, which is the folk-tale basis for our generation’s flagship fear-of-the-woods experience, the Blair Witch Project) in urban environments, so that the myth comes about that Outdoors is Bad. It is possible that we feel somehow that children should learn from adults to fear an Unknown and possibly supernatural evil in the Antiqua Sylva. I don’t know.
Tragically, this juxtaposition has a further complication in today’s story from S Wales, and there might be more to contemplate about incremental exposure to hazards being part of the education we need to give children, if we are not to seem as if we accept awful occurrences like this with a callous “accidents will happen” shrug.
nicktomjoe 