If you tie a dog to a stake long enough, it paces a small circle even after its chain has snapped. People do the same once they’ve got used to living and working in boxes. In most industrialised societies, adults say they seldom see children playing outside, “as we used to”. The roaming radius, or the distance children wander unsupervised, has shrunk from generation to generation. Schools have cut physical education in favour of “more important” subjects. Only when their offspring become visibly unfit do parents take note, enrolling them in team sports, buying them gear and driving them to gyms.
In those countries that have fenced playgrounds, safe crosswalks and wide pavements, parental anxiety is still keeping children in. Most are overwhelmed by media reports on “stranger danger” and laws on child safety have finished the job. One American mother was recently arrested for letting her 9-year-old play in a park while she was at work. To push back against paranoia gone berserk, some 400 organisations in the UK recently started the Wild Network, a campaign to get children outdoors. It will be interesting to watch how they dismantle the cages they’ve built around their own families.
Indian society is not known for its safety record, but our children are also living in increasingly small boxes. “When we were young,” the oldies reminisce, “we used to play outside till it got dark.” Yet, it is the oldies who badger and question the children as they walk out the door. Especially with their daughters, parents ask where they’re going, when they’ll be back, whom they’re playing with, and who is supervising. Children play by appointment.And where can they play? Within apartment complexes, car owners monopolise the common area.
Public playgrounds are scarce. Groups of boys quickly take over those spaces for cricket, leaving little room for younger children or girls to play. The kids eventually give up, and at that point the existing playgrounds also seem to be empty. Even the private garden has become a decorative adjunct to a house rather than a space to wander and play in. We gripe about mosquito bites, we hire people to plant the simplest vegetation. We forgo the chance to run our fingers through well-nourished soil or watch a thumbnail-size butterfly walk around the edge of a leaf. And when children never see their parents step into the garden, they feel it’s not safe or fun. Outdoor holidays have become a farce, with scheduled, guided activities at resorts, to which we are driven in a herd, or extreme adventures at extreme cost. Watch city people at a hill station, or even in their ancestral village, and you’ll find their outings consist of drives, picnics and visits to a market.
Children and adults rush back within doors, terrified of spiders, mosquito bites and even unpaved surfaces.
How did the outdoors become so alarming? Is it because parents, grandparents, and aunties are no longer out there? Have we abandoned the public space to a small few whom we then consider idle and potentially dangerous? Are we afraid our children will be free of our control for a few hours and play with “all sorts of kids”?
We must send our boys and girls back out to the world that is theirs by right, and we can only do that by recapturing it ourselves. Just get out. Don’t wait for a group or a time, simply explore your neighbourhood. When you meet a friend, don’t wave smartly and march on, stop to chat. Loiter on the corners. Ignore the shops and buildings and instead notice the trees, shrubs and weeds growing through the cracks in the walls.
Name the birds and butterflies along the way. Follow the uphill and downhill roads and the curves around a pond or hillock. Discover the lakes and canals. And don’t set a strict time to come home. We may rediscover somewhere deep inside us the kid who had to be dragged back in when it got dark. As more of us start living half outdoors again, that larger world becomes safer in reality and less alarming in our perception. We find that every ant doesn’t bite, full sleeves keep away mosquitoes, it’s not as dark as we think, and there’s always something new out there.
