Is it time to let children play outdoors once more?

Back in 2008 the decline in children’s play was laid bare when Government ministers admitted that one in four eight- to 10-year-olds have never played outside without an adult and one in three parents will not even allow older children, aged eight to 15, to play outside the house or garden.

A national consultation that followed this also showed that children start playing outside later in life; the average age at which they are allowed out without supervision has risen from seven in the 1970’s to over eight today. The crisis is being made worse by increased traffic and parked cars, less tolerance of young people and fear of ‘stranger danger’.

Despite strong evidence that playing freely strengthens friendships, keeps children healthy and helps them to cope with risky situations, ministers will admit that the opportunities for children to do so have been falling rapidly.

‘We know 80 per cent of children prefer to play outside and 86 per cent of parents agreed that on a nice day their children would prefer to go to the park than watch TV,’ said Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary at the time. ‘Yet children spend less time playing outside than they would like and less than their parents did as children.’

‘In our consultations parents told us this is because there are not enough safe places to go – and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that parents think their children are safer playing inside on a computer than outside.’

That is despite the fact that Tanya Byron, a television psychologist who has carried out a review for the government on the risks of computer games and the internet, found that allowing children to surf websites freely was the equivalent of letting them outside without supervision. Yet parental fears, Byron concluded, had ‘driven a generation of children indoors’.

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