"Kids just don't know how to play the way we used to." You've probably said it more than once yourself - but so did your parents, their parents and their parents before them. In fact, far from today's children fast becoming a breed of fat blobbies who spend the day slobbed out in front of the TV or PC, they are just as imaginative and creative as ever and like nothing more than to spend the day outside playing, recent publications suggest. Researchers Opie and Opie have just published the last of their renowned trilogy, Games Children Play With Things. They cite experts, parents and other adults who over the centuries have bemoaned "the degeneration of childhood" and mourned the lost "art of playing games". The truth is quite different, they argue. "Unless they are seriously undernourished or in a state of fear, children will always play when they are on their own, unsupervised, in the freedom of an open space."

Rob Wheway, a play consultant and co-author of a report entitled Facilitating Play on Housing Es- tates, agrees. "We observed children, aged three to 16, on 12 housing estates built between the 1890s and 1990s and we found that far from being couch potatoes, children naturally want to run around and play outside." The report, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was designed to ascertain children's preferences for places to play. "We found that children prefer a diverse outdoor environment, with opportunities for extended mobility," Wheway says. "They do like specially designed play areas, but they like to roam about, play where they can see and be seen and feel part of the community. Given the freedom, children can be seen playing in up to five different places in an hour. Part of the play is actually choosing where to go, and getting there is usually a fun-packed adventure."

Not only is the freedom to wander about and play something children still love, it is also essential for their well being, he says. "Outdoor play affords children the opportunity to get all sorts of natural exercise and stay fit and healthy. It is also a means through which children learn important things like taking turns, making rules, obeying rules and a variety of social skills."

Many adults argue that children display little initiative and creativity with their games. But Opie and Opie blame the parents. Adults, they write, can be "savagely critical of the supposed sophistication or inertia of contemporary schoolchildren, and equally self-righteous about their own childhoods . . . At the same time, they all but prevent their children from making their own amusements by supplying them with generous pocket money and expensive toys."

FEAR FOR children's safety is another key issue. According to Wheway, "stranger danger" and bullying mean parents often discourage their children from going out to play; thus they miss out on situations where all sorts of inventive games might happen. However, the real source of the problem is the car. "Through our research, the effect the car has on children's play became patently obvious," Wheway says. "Where traffic could go through fast, regardless of how high the density, there were very few children out and about."

Parents increasingly express concerns about allowing children out to play, walk to school, even run an errand to the shop because of the speed of cars on the roads.

According to Wheway, "it isn't enough to provide safe play areas and corral children into them. It seriously limits their play opportunities and cuts them off from the rest of the community, so they are usually doomed to failure because children end up ignoring them."

Wheway's recommendations include designing and adapting enviroments to meet the actual needs of children and outdoor play. "We have to change our whole perception of the role of the car in society," he says. "We could see clearly that in areas where traffic couldn't drive through at high speed, children were out and about playing all sorts of games. "If children are to exploit their environment fully, and have as much fun out playing as they need and are entitled to, traffic-calming measures and footpath networks linking places children want to access - grassy areas, playgrounds, schools and shops - should be introduced."

All the evidence points in the same direction: provide children with the safety, freedom and opportunities to play, and they will tend to spend the day out having fun. As Opie and Opie say, much like every other generation, today's children will be seen "feeding the horse with bits of apple, hanging head-down over the railway bridge, jumping off walls" - all those things we did, and would probably prefer our children didn't!

Rob Wheway will speak at Investing in Play, a conference on play policy development, this Thursday at Belfast Castle. For further information contact PlayBoard (tel: (08) (01232) 560010).