Children will become more violent if denied chance to play, expert warns

SOCIETY WILL “reap a whirlwind” if it does not begin to provide more play opportunities for our children, a conference on early childhood has heard.

Bob Hughes, the national co-ordinator for play education in Britain, said that if children did not get the necessary stimulation from their environment “it will almost certainly result in human beings being more violent”.

Many more children were suffering from psychiatric disorders and becoming more violent, he said. Mr Hughes pointed to recent incidents of lone gunmen who opened fire on their communities in the US and elsewhere and he predicted that the incidence of such shootings would increase.

He was speaking at a weekend conference in Dublin organised by the Irish Pre-school Play Association (IPPA). He said a Zurich study in the mid-1990s had found that children who were not allowed out to play suffered from symptoms including unhappiness, aggression, a lack of concentration and an inability to make friends.

“The reasons given by parents for not allowing their children out to play were fear of predatory adults and traffic. Increasingly though, many parents are prohibiting their children from playing out for far less rational reasons than potential abduction or death,” he said.

“They are simply afraid that they will hurt themselves. The potential impact of this phenomenon is a generation of children who are clumsy, unsocial, anxious and, if you’ll forgive the term, potentially street-stupid, as opposed to street-wise.”

He said some parents felt they had to construct “a fantasy of immortality” around children but by projecting their own fears, they were making these outcomes more, not less, likely, he said.

Suicide, depression and self-harming were being offered as symptoms of our children’s inability to adapt to the world we were creating for them, he said.

And while many children were being bubble-wrapped against physical danger, “almost all children . . . are left completely exposed to the psychological pressures of life in the modern world”.

Mr Hughes warned of “a price to pay” if children were not allowed to play, “to counteract the impact both of bubble-wrapping and more effectively respond to the technological vice into which their heads are being forced”.

Prof Sheila Greene, chairwoman of the Children’s Research Centre at Trinity College in Dublin, said play was such a critical part of children’s development but it was being encroached upon in many different ways. “The ‘scholarisation’ or ‘schoolification’ of early childhood is something we all have to resist,” she said.