We brought our children back to T&T in the 70s and we were never in doubt that we did the correct thing. There were problems with schooling but our children played outdoors, in the streets of our neighbourhood. Watching them play “pass out” cricket in front of my gate with the neighbour’s children was always a treat. From time to time, they disappeared for a while and the mother would get a bit anxious until we got a call from a neighbour saying they were by her making chow.
Young children running around a neighbourhood used to be a hallmark of childhood.
Those days are almost gone now with the advent of aggressive dogs, drivers and druggies. All of my children have happily emigrated. Every year, more and more of my patients are deciding to do the same.
One problem has to do with lifestyle and the ways children are forced to live these days in T&T, indoors, on phones, in cars, in air-conditioned schools and partitioned-off places where adults tell them how to bat or bowl or hit or kick a ball. Free play, the thing that develops a child’s mind and body, the one that allows children to make mistakes and correct them themselves, is never allowed. Unfortunately play has to be random, casual and unplanned to be effective.
The idea that risk-taking is bad has taken over modern lifestyles. For me, it came to a head during the COVID lockdowns when we were constantly told by the “authorities” not to take any risks because they were “following the science.”
There’s a useless statement if there ever was one. Science cannot be used to determine policy because science is constantly seeking truth and changing as new discoveries are found on and on. Making policy requires much more than knowing “the science.” It requires values and principles to determine a vision of the kind of society we want. Science is one part of that process.
But we now live in this risk-averse society, where the risk-averse lifestyle is taken to its ludicrous limit in paediatrics, where a child who plays outside is thought to be at risk of kidnapping, one with fever has dengue, a cold means bronchitis and a six-year-old boy who cannot sit still for 45 minutes has ADHD.
Some years ago, an interesting study was done in the UK. They looked at the range of play of a typical English family’s son in the same home, over the last 90 years. In the home there lived at various times, a grandfather, father and grandson. When the grandfather was a boy, he typically ranged up to 10 miles from his house. His son started the decline but still managed to find himself several miles from home in the course of his wandering. The grandson, born in 1990, was forbidden to play more than 100 yards from the same house. Today, it must be in the garden, with a cell phone for company.
The results are there to see: fat kids; bored kids; depressed kids, scared kids and aggressive kids.
We should be trying to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that we all remember from our own youth. The passive watching of a video screen does not simulate the uncertainty and risk, however minor, that makes natural exploration bracing.
But the days of free-range childhood are over, I guess. There’s nowhere for children to play the way we used to play. When was the last time a government housing project built a park for children to play or mothers to walk or fathers to lime? Instead, we have multi-million dollar sports projects, supposedly for elite athletes. Where are the results? What have we done this Olympics? Before you become an elite adult athlete, you have to have somewhere to run about.
Meanwhile, there is a growing body of scientific research that suggests children who are given early and ongoing exposure to nature, ie, playing outside, thrive in intellectual, spiritual and physical ways that their digital, house bound peers do not. Playing outside appears to reduce stress, sharpens concentration and promotes creative problem-solving.
Children who are disconnected from nature, are more likely to appear out of touch with reality, to be unable to cope with stress, and are more likely to have problems with attention and discipline. Their bodies are less nimble, their minds less broad and their senses duller.
The name of this new malady is nature-deficit disorder. Families can show the same symptoms, anger, increased feelings of stress, trouble paying attention, and feelings of not being in touch with the world.
Could this be part of the reason why there seems to be so much aggression around today?
