Once, when my youngest son was about four, he took himself off for a walk in the field in Suffolk. It slopes down gently towards the river giving it its name of Fen. New fencing to keep in the cattle and sheep that now graze the pastures meant that he was, essentially, enclosed. But to the vantage point of a four year old, he must have felt like his horizon was limitless. In that open field were insects and cow pats. Bones of dead pigeons picked off by the sparrow hawk. Rabbit warrens dug below the fencing. A wild world.
I watched him walk on short, study legs though the clumps of grasses, past dark green semi-circles showing where the mushroom rings were hiding. I was doing something domestic - laundry hanging, washing up, peeling, wiping, putting small cars into big plastic boxes. One of those jobs when children are small and the day turns into segments of time. You learn not to waste a slice.
A delivery van came up the drive which winds up through the edge of the field. I went to sign for the parcel.
‘There’s a child in that field’ the driver said, before I could. I followed his finger. My son was barely a third of the field away from us. He was just close enough for me to call and stop him if I did it loudly. I didn’t want to call and stop him.
‘Yes - it’s my son’ I said, writing my electronic signature, taking the parcel.
‘He’s in the field’ . The man looked confused.
‘Yes I know…’
‘He’s alone?’
‘It’s okay: he does it all the time’
‘But he’s by himself? In the field?’
I looked at him and understood that he didn’t understand.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll go and get him’
I take the parcel and begin to walk towards my son. He won’t, I know, mind me joining him. He will like it, as long as I don’t try to make him come back to the house. But I know too that I have broken a spell of something: something I had not understood was so precious to me until I became a parent and had to try and understand what I wanted for my children. Freedom. I wanted freedom. The gift of being unwatched.
I had it as a child. My sisters and I would play for hours on my grandparents farm, making houses out of high-stacked hay bales. I can still feel the scratch of hay against my skin as my leg slipped down between two bales, wedged firm. A generation further back, my mother would take her bicycle and be gone for hours, the only limit being mealtimes. In the farmhouse attic were boxes of the birds’ eggs she found, unborn contents blown out of a hole made in the end, their shells laid down in cotton wool.
Play is a fundamental right: the UN Conventional of the Rights of the Child says so.
But growing up in a city like London does not grant you the kind of freedom I had, either on the farm or playing 20:20 with my sisters and neighbours in amongst the cars on the street where I grew up. Now, only a quarter of children play out on the street. It is not only that the city feels full of danger, even if this perception - in a world where we are always monitored by cameras or our phone - is probably untrue. It’s because if I granted my ten year old son his dearly held wish to make the half hour walk to school alone he would, I suspect, be stopped and asked where his parent was. Why he was ‘unsupervised’. Maybe this is why British preschoolers apparently spend the majority of their time indoors.
I have thought a lot about it this week, while alone with my two sons on a surf camp in France. It rained so much they only had one morning surfing. Trapped most mornings in a sandy cabin with no clean clothes and a determination not to spend all the time on screens I struggled for ways to make them feel there was an adventure.
Not least because, as the signs said, ‘Children must be supervised at all times’.
In desperation, one morning, I revolted. I gave them a spurious enquiry - more loo roll, a lost ball, check out time, coffee - and told them to occupy themselves on their bikes around the campsite for a bit.
They disappeared delirious with the taste of freedom which comes, of course, with its cousin: responsibility. After an hour, the images in my head were of disaster. Face down in the indoor swimming pool. Broken arms and ambulances. Shame and judgement and social services. After an hour and a half I began to look and call. I found them full of stories. Each was edged with an energy so clear I could almost touch it.
How do we strike this balance between holding on and letting go? How do we make room for growth and responsibility and mistakes whilst letting that part of ourselves which wants to make everything safe, and good, quieten. And which, if I am honest, wants some kind of validation that I am doing it all right. How do we do this in an urban culture which is full of stories of danger. But what I have been thinking recently is how we do this not just for our children, but ourselves.
It is a lesson I have been learning this week which feels, somehow, to be a lesson for something greater. Letting go: of control; of taking responsibility for other people’s responses and reactions; of concern of others’ shame and judgement.
With children I think the balance of supervision and freedom changes as they do. The trick is realising where on the scale they are. But always there is a sense there must be something solid for them to come back to, no matter how far they’ve travelled. To step away as they did when they were learning to walk - look back, check, see you, look forward, take another step.
Maybe this is how we must do it for ourselves. Except we must become our own home to return to. We step out into new terrain. Experiment. Fail. Fall down. Break stuff. Feel humiliated. Afraid. Exposed. Get it Wrong. Hurt ourselves. But all of this is okay if we are able to return to ourselves; go back to who we really our; come back to our authenticity. If we are able to hold onto that, as our children hold us when they come back with sandy hair and bruised knees and fast-spoken stories, maybe then we are able to grow in the same way we hope they do.
Read about: Today’s story in the Financial Times calling for a ‘national play strategy’ to increase the amount of time children spend playing outdoors.
Do: The Wildlife Trusts often run excellent and inexpensive/free activities for kids - YES YOU CAN (USUALLY) DROP THEM OFF - and are worth checking out
Loved reading this post Sarah.
Having grown up on a farm, having returned to that farm to raise my three boys and having turned it into a “school”….all because of the reasons you list…about wanting freedom for my boys and professionally (I’m a teacher) thinking schooling is way, way off what children need nowadays….your post has me thinking about play and education.
1) Play will never truly be valued in schools and society because it is greater than the sum of its parts. We know how valuable it is for healthy development, but it can’t be measured, tested, monetised…and in our current post industrial, child need inputs and measurable outputs, outdated education system….it will only ever be an educational initiative that schools adopt and not hold the weight it deserves. In my mind every preconception about what children need stems from our education system.
2) The feelings you mention as a mother and primary caregiver…I align with a sort of inbuilt responsibility to nurture and do what instinctively feels right for our children. I also wonder if these feelings are a sort of push back to the education system / societal expectation that goes against the desire to provide freedom / play….but that are so engrained in us all, that we sort of roll over and accept them? Allowing your child to walk across that field allowed him so much and yet so many of us, myself included, send our children to institutions that act oppositely to what we instinctively feel is right….just because it’s the way it is.
3) I’m basically obsessed with the cross over of regen farming principles and using those principles in education. We need an education system that is whole child focused, that will ensure all children thrive and that allows the planet to thrive to ensure continued “success” for our species…oh, all in a time where speed of change will be so so fast.
4) My waffling point is, I feel we need to lean into those feelings of instinctively providing what our children need and start to use our PTAs, our local councils etc to value play and freedom. As a bunch of mums (imagine the force!) we tackled our children’s school because as teenage boys, our boys were always “in trouble” low level stuff but enough to give them a reputation, “boys will be boys” etc….makes me furious! Give them a designated space to kick a football around, play and let off steam and they weren’t “naughty” anymore. It’s not hard.
5) I’m so annoyed at myself for buying into a system I feel is so outdated / unhelpful / damaging - that we are creating a school - having run a fully outdoor nursery for 14 years, we are now pushing through to provide a place in which to learn, that is unlike so many schools in this country. It identifies children are complex and yet schooling needn’t be complicated.
6) I am also currently supporting my eldest through GCSEs….which haven’t changed in 30 yrs…they haven’t changed in 30 yrs….let that sink in….everything we know about neuroscience, what equates to meaningful, lifelong learning, later outcomes in life, looking at other countries that have got it right / better….and we are still trying to measure the future success of children by insisting they speak naturally in a Spanish oral exam when there is nothing natural about the situation. You get my point.
As I stare down the barrel of the day ahead where I’ll be consumed with practising how to order a steak medium rare, change a pair of trousers in Corte Ingles and remember how to say, “I want to be a fire fighter when I’m older” (only that he doesn’t, but bombero sticks in his head for some reason) ….i will, like you feel so conscious of building in adventure to the day. Yesterday that looked like a dog walk across the fields where we all spent 30 mins trying to hit a fence upright from 20 m off with stones.
I left them all to it and they came back 40 mins later, out of breath, full of who had hit the fence.
Long and short of it is, we need to challenge the very concept of education, that what, how’s and why’s and then we won’t be hassled by delivery drivers or have to fight against what we feel is right for our children.
Wow, firstly that the first two like are Tom White and myself! (Hello Tom, no relation I suspect).
Secondly Wow as Im taken back to my childhood of having free rein on the farm here a surrounding countryside where I roamed free every weekend and all school holidays only checking in back at base at mealtimes. What did I learn beyond recognising even bird, animal and natural feature in the area? common sense and a sense of preservation. I carried a huge sheath knife on my belt, often had an air rifle under my arm, clambered on bale stacks, rode on the link arms of the open (no cab)Ford 4000 tractor driven by Coy Carter for acres and acres and never got trapped. We recognised danger and respected it, we learned the sounds and smells of the countryside and respected it. Thanks for taking me back 60 years. D.