It already raises fundamental questions about childhood.
How much help do children need to do what should come naturally? And to what extent does expert guidance — embodied by the so-called play workers — represent adults’ expectations of children, rather than what the youngsters themselves want or need?
“My first impression is that this is more evidence that we don’t trust kids to play by themselves,” said Peter Stearns, provost of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and author of “Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America.” “And I think it’s fair to ask: Is this really for parents, to make them feel their kids are being properly guided while playing?”
On the surface, a managed playground is a natural extension of a culture that increasingly parcels childhood into schedules. Many children in urban areas from Boston to Houston no longer run out the front door to find their friends; their parents make play dates instead. And youngsters who once might have played on a sandlot or a backyard ice rink now enter organized leagues by first grade.
Pickup games are still around, but they have migrated from the street to computers, where friends gather online at sites like Neopets and Club Penguin.
Cultural critics have warned of the dangers of replacing spontaneous play with organized activities since the 1930s, when the historian Johan Huizinga published his classic, “Homo Ludens,” about the importance of spontaneous and unstructured play to the health of societies.
Children chasing, creeping, diving into alleyways and bushes may look somehow suspect, even dangerous. But experts say the free-for-all has a point: children develop independent judgment, and a sense of risk, privacy and invention all their own when they create play worlds that exclude parents and other adults. Forcing a children’s game to have some goal, as many parents have the urge to do, in effect installs a hall monitor in the game room.
Psychologists who spend time with children, moreover, say that it is important for youngsters to navigate kids-only play situations to develop their social instincts, such as how to join a game that has already started. Designers of the proposed playground were aiming for a space that, in a sense, recaptures the imaginative, collaborative games children used to organize routinely in their neighborhoods, before play dates and the American Youth Soccer Organization.” (New York Times )
