Continuing on….Part 3 Playground to Podium
Written by Paul Bicerkton
Empty parks Unfortunately, while steady progress has been made in establishing structured sporting opportunities, other trends have worked against the development of talent: over-protective and negative attitudes towards children; a ‘risk avoidance’ culture; and the instrumentalisation of sport to counter disassociated problems such as obesity. Gordon Brown’s safety and health preoccupations are symptomatic of a climate that currently associates any unsupervised or unstructured development as potentially dangerous. High-profile child abduction and murder cases have fueled such perceptions and have had a tangible impact.
External activity and unsupervised play are increasingly outlawed due to fears about the risks associated with the great outdoors. In fact, children are no more at risk now than they ever have been. The number of road traffic accidents has been falling steadily for well over a decade (7), violent crime has gradually decreased since the early 1980s (8), and child abduction and murder rates have remained largely unchanged for the past 50 years (9). The media furore regarding any potential incident is indicative of how rare (and tragic) these occurrences actually are. What has changed is the freedom children enjoy in their daily lives. Nowadays, 59 per cent of 5- to 10-year-olds walk to school, whereas in the 1970s it was 72 per cent (10).
It has been calculated that the free play range of children (the radius around the home to which children can roam alone) has, for nine-year-olds in the UK, shrunk to a ninth of what it was in 1970 (11). Any suggestion that children are safer as a result is ludicrous. Incidents such as abductions do not disappear when children are removed from the streets, but are simply driven elsewhere. A recent report by the popular BBC children’s news programme, Newsround, drew attention to children’s desire to play outdoors and be active, and their increasing frustration at the limits they faced (12).
Kids were questioned on a range of topics, with seven out of 10 saying they felt they didn’t get the chance to ‘play outside as much as they would like to’. ‘Adults can be very stupid sometimes’, said one particularly perceptive 14-year-old. ‘They ban everything, for health and safety reasons. If they’re going to ban such simple stuff they might as well lock all kids in empty rooms to keep them safe. Kids should be allowed to experiment and try things. Otherwise when they grow up they’ll make very stupid mistakes from not getting enough experience at childhood.’ Brown would do well to take heed of this advice. Outlawing computer games, television and junk food will not encourage more children into sport.
These activities are all acceptable in their own right, and children require and hugely benefit from the freedom to make some of their own choices, even if that means they sometimes make the wrong choices. Tommorrow the final installment…. TrackMomDr.Lorraine
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