Recent surveys have shown children’s independent mobility has declined and that opportunities to play are much more restricted than they were in previous generations. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. For most children there is a higher level of adult surveillance than we would have been used to when we were younger but many children still play out unaccompanied by adults. It’s just that we have stopped noticing, in part because we believe the evidence of the same statistics.
‘We have given up haunting the places where children play, we no longer have eyes for their games, and not noticing them suppose they have vanished’. Children’s Games in Street and Playground – Iona and Peter Opie.
When One False Move was originally published in 1990 it showed that in 1971, 80 per cent of children were allowed to travel to school without adult supervision but by 1990, this had…
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