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What makes a child friendly community
- 1. What makes a child-friendly community? Philip Waters – I Love Nature Saturday 18th March 2017
- 2. What makes a child-friendly community? Play Memories
- 3. International making cities liveable “Urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, planning and land development play essential roles in ensuring a sustainable physical and built environment. If our cities and towns are badly planned, children - like canaries in the mines - are the first to suffer.” What makes a child-friendly community? The container approach
- 4. ?+? = child-friendly community What makes a child-friendly community? The formula approach
- 5. Little Homosapien What makes a child-friendly community? What is a child?
- 6. What makes a child-friendly community? Child v Adult
- 7. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O Q R S T U P
- 8. What makes a child-friendly community? A playful approach?
- 9. What do you see?What makes a child-friendly community? A playful approach?
- 10. What makes a child-friendly community? A playful approach?
- 11. What makes a child-friendly community? A playful approach?
- 12. What makes a child-friendly community? A playful approach?
- 13. What makes a child-friendly community?
- 14. What makes a child-friendly community?
- 15. What makes a child-friendly community?
- 16. What makes a child-friendly community?
- 17. What makes a child-friendly community?
- 18. What makes a child-friendly community?
- 19. Thank You Philip Waters www.ilovenature.org.uk E: phil@ilovenature.org.uk
Editor's Notes
- My brief today, is to answer the question about what makes a child-friendly community? Seems simple enough. Or is it? I’ve been asked because much of my professional career – 22 years and counting - has been in contexts working with children and young people. I started 22 years ago working for a local preschool; children up to five years. And I knew then that I wanted to experience working with a broad age range and children in differing contexts. I have done this, yet find myself back working with eden on a pilot project about preschool children’s access to the natural world. My response to the issue of ‘child-friendly’ communities is an historical one. While we spend considerable efforts planning and thinking about the future; which do not exist as yet, and perhaps fretting about the state of the world today, I’d like to go back in tike and consider children and childhoods of the past. It is only the past that we can be certain of, and it is the past that has orchestrated where we are today. So lets go back in time…
- I’d like to take you back to your own childhoods. For some, this was a long long time ago, for others, just a few years perhaps. I’d like you to find a memory of yourself playing as a child. This can be a one-off memory, or a memory of a period of time. I’d like you to take a couple of minutes sharing your memory with someone next to you. How many of you were outside in your memory? In nature? How many had an adult present? I suspect that if we took all your memories and unpacked them, and then took all the best bits we would have the ingredients for a very child-friendly community. Yet, ironically, our memories don’t appear to have translated into child-friendly communities today. They’ve been lost in translation… dropped off in time, somewhere. Diluted by all sorts of concerns, such as traffic danger, stranger danger, fear of plants, fear of people fear of, well, fear! We live in very risk averse times. So lets think about those ingredients that might make up a child-friendly community.
- Some people take a spatial approach to this issue. It’s what I call the container approach. That is, we think of our community as a container, like a bin, into which we put all the right spatial bits and voila! We have a child-friendly community. The container might be appropriate to people like planners, who make sure there are schools, housing with gardens, playing fields, easy access by feet or car or train to shops and other facilities. If you’re lucky, these routes might be playful. How we configure our villages, towns and cities says a lot about what we think of children and/or young people. So this is the container approach to child-friendly communities.
- Another approach is what I would call the formula approach. That is, what are all the ingredients needed to make a child-friendly community? Can we list them, and ensure that the places where children live have all these ingredients? They might, like the container approach, be about the spatial configuration of towns and cities. Equally, they might be about our social and cultural practices; that is, how we get along with each other, and the provisions we put in place to make everything work just fine. But, I think there is another aspect missing here. One that involves a journey back in time (like your play memories), but also, and more importantly, a journey within.
- Without insulting your intelligence, I think part of the issue, historically, involves asking ourselves what is a child? Or, what is childhood? Again, just two minutes, chat to someone next to you and ask yourselves, what is a child? So, anybody want to offer their take on this?
- Throughout history children have been a marginalized social group. They have been constructed in different ways. At one point they were seen as inherently evil and needing teaching, and in some cases beating, to set them on a path of righteousness! There were also times when children were seen as angelic, and others when they were seen as ‘needy’. There were times when children had to work the farms, climb up chimneys, go down mine shafts, etc. And there were times, to this current day in fact, where children are perceived as in a process of development. The question is, developing into what? In schools and childcare establishments across the UK children are catered for, not as a children in the hear and now, but rather as adults in the making, as if adulthood is the necessary end-point of one’s developmental journey. This has invariably meant that most of what adults do for children is not about them as children, but about them as the adults they will one day become when they contribute as ‘full’ human beings to economic society. The very nature of this paradigm, of this set of beliefs and attitudes shapes not only what we think of children, but also of how we engage with them. Thus education is not a process to serve transformation in the individual, but a vehicle for producing adult commodities. Children are constantly set apart from adults, they are what geographers and sociologists call, being ‘othered’. That is, if they are not adult, they must be something different, something other. By ‘othering’ children we have unfortunately created a world that is dominated by adult ways of being, adult ideals.
- A matrix grab of children in different cultures during the 20th and 21st centuries. 3 images you like, and 3 you don’t. What does the selection of these images tell us about ourselves, and the way we view children? Are we creating back stories for each of these children, based on all the story elements we see in the pictures? Are we making assumptions? Do we do this to children we meet in the flesh? Thus in understanding children, we must first understand ourselves, and how we view the world.
- Do we see cracks in pavement?...
- We can look at play through many different lenses, psychologically, as in the psycholudic model, or in the way we provide the space, time and resources to maximize on a rich variety of play experiences. However one of the most crucial elements is about how we, the adults, approach play, and more importantly, children’s play. Let’s take this example found in a ancient text called the Buskers Guide to Playing Out. Imagine Jenny, six years old, is playing in the sandpit. The adult approaches and asks: What you doing, Jenny? Jenny turns to the adult and says: “I'm burying Boris the dinosaur in the sand, because he’s been naughty.” The adult responds: “That’s nice dear, but just remember your snack will be ready in a few minutes so you must wash your hands, and don’t get your new shoes dirty.” The adult walks away. There’s nothing wrong with this approach or response by the adult, although it fails to do one thing, perhaps the most important thing. It fails to recognize Jenny’s moment of play as the most important part of the interaction. The adult tries to pull jenny from her play into their own adult world, where adult things are thought to be more important, such as cleaning hands, eating snacks and keeping shoes clean. What if the adult had taken a different approach. “Hi Jenny, what are you doing?” “I’ve buried Boris the dinosaur in the sand.” “Not Boris! The Dinosaur!” the adult backs away. “Last time he escaped he chased me around the garden trying to bite me on the bottom!” In this example the adult responded in a playful way, and probably, as a result, will now have access to Jenny’s play world. It is the stepping out of adult mode into playful mode that often makes the difference in our relationships with children. To reiterate this point, and some of the earlier points made, place complex object, like a book, in the middle of circle and ask individuals to describe what they see. Get to a point where at least one person cannot see a part of the object that someone else opposite can. That is to demonstrate that we all come at situations, contexts from different perspectives, different angles. But being playful could be the one means by which we all approach our work with children, and certainly our relationships with them.
- Although this tern sounds brutal, what it means is that children will bring their own play to its natural conclusion when given the time and space to do so. In the picture the girl at the back has decided to leave the net of her own accord, she’s finished playing with this object. Too often, however, other aspects of life, often determined by adults, stop children from annihilating their own play; think of clock watching, telling children to stop what they’re doing because some other pressing adult concern comes into play.
- Dysplay is when a child gets no response from the play cues they send out, and as a result their play drive decreases and they may become socially isolated, or even play deprived (we’ll chat about this shortly). The playworker might support the child in getting appropriate responses so that this doesn’t happen.
- Introduce by playing film – Out to Play