Where Do the Children Play?

It’s taken as a matter of fact that play in young animals is a necessary part of learning about their world, of becoming fully functional adults. Human children used to play. Nearly everywhere you went, there were children out and about. Riding bicycles for the pure joy of it. Getting into mischief. Playing games with each other. Learning about each other without interference. Benignly watched over by everyone—because, somehow, we all knew that the children were our future.

What happened? Where do the children play? Do they really even play anymore? And what does it mean for their health, both mental and physical? Will they have any ability to know their own limits and how far they can push? Will they have any sense about safety or just follow what their governments tell them?

We’re already seeing some of the results:

• Children don’t get enough sunlight. Even when they do go out—carefully supervised, of course—unwarranted fears pushed by the nanny state have their parents slathering them with cancer-inducing sunscreens. It’s no wonder Vitamin D deficiency is becoming rampant, with a large percentage of children developing rickets.
• Surely a fair part of pandemic obesity, with the attendant diseases like diabetes, results from lack of exercise—the exercise that children used to get simply by being children.
• Intelligence is going down, and as Dr. Mercola has documented, lack of exercise affects mental ability.
• Exercise is a critical part of mental health. As anyone who’s into exercise can tell you, it is a significant mood elevator, releasing endorphins that can lift us out of depression and help us find motivation to accomplish tasks.

Are there risks in letting children go out to play? Of course there are—but they need to be balanced against the clear harm done by keeping our children inside and “safe”. Destroying their ability to think, make decisions, and develop healthy bodies and minds is the price being paid for all this “safety”.

There’s no simple solution. The semi-wild places where children once roamed no longer exist in most areas. Turning our streets over to vehicular traffic leaves the kids relegated to the sidewalks and pavement. Even this is denied them as the fear of strangers is beaten into us. Playgrounds rarely exist for free play, but instead are patrolled by adults, who usher them to and from by schedule. Only carefully monitored “safe” play is allowed.

We live in a mass production world, and children are treated as part of that process. They’re pushed into controlled play, usually indoors. They have little say about what they’ll do. Every minute is planned and organized. Aside from the strain on parents, where is the child’s joy in discoveries made on his own initiative? Where, in fact, does a child develop that initiative? Playing inside controlled environments, at set times, with no chance of coming into contact with children from other levels of society and knowing that their every move is watched, cannot possibly promote true initiative. Could the destruction of initiative be the result?

Is that the goal? To produce automatons—obedient, unthinking, physically weak cogs in the machinery of the corporate behemoth? What comes next—genetically engineering play out of the child?

What have we become to let this be our children’s lives? And where are we going? As Yusuf Islam sang, using the elegant words of poetry far better than I could ever hope to describe it:

Well I think it’s fine, building jumbo planes
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, ’cause you can get anything.

I know we’ve come a long way
We’re changin’ day to day
But tell me:
Where do the children play?

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass
For your lorry loads pumpin’ petrol gas.
And you make them long and you make them tough
But they just go on and on and it seems that you can’t get off.

Well your crack-the-skyscrapers fill the air
But will you keep on building higher til there’s no more room up there?

Will you make us laugh?
Will you make us cry?
Will you tell when to live?
Will you tell us when to die?

I know we’ve come a long way
We’re changin’ day to day
But tell me:
Where do the children play?

Here he is singing Where Do the Children Play? We need to think about it.

Tagged mass production, mass production world, mental health, play risks, play safety, politics, where do the children play, yusuf islam