“Have they forgotten how to play?” Games, toys and children’s play

In the early 1990s, several concerns were raised about the changing nature of play. These concerns were based on the observation was that a combination of several factors, including parental anxieties that limited the time children spent outdoors, and the emergence of new technologies, had changed children’s play culture. Julia Llewellyn for the Times asked “have they forgotton how to play?” and continued: “the playground echoed with skipping rhymes, clapping hands, bouncing balls, and the screams of the girls who had been caught in kiss chase. Today, however, the playgrounds have fallen silent. The only sound is the dull bleeping of hand-held computer games. Children seem to have lost the ability to invent their own entertainment, preferring to rely on expensive machines. When they do venture into the playground, teachers observe, it is to re-enact the video nasty of the night before.”

It was observed that communal, outdoor play was increasingly replaced with solitary, indoor play, and these different types of play were compared and contrasted as “good” vs “bad.” In her piece for the Independent, Clare Garner quoted developmental psychologist Prof. Elizabeth Newson from Nottingham University, “Something has been lost and I don’t know how you make up for it. Whether you could, even, given that children aren’t allowed to go out and do things themselves anymore,” and social psychologist Prof Jeffrey Goldstein from Utrecht University: “The whole of childhood is devoted to questions of independence, identity and friendship. Everything is put to that service. Children use the opportunities we offer them. In this age, children use computers to help them decide what sort of person they are.”

Some researchers, like folklorist Iona Opie, who had been conducting fieldwork in playgrounds and on streets with her husband Peter Opie since the 1950s, disagreed. According to Opie, children’s play culture constantly changed through time and context, with certain elements travelling from generation to generation, and that “continually, over the past three centuries, adults have lamented the disappearance of the games they enjoyed playing as children.” Still, the widely accepted view was that the changing nature of play would be detrimental for children’s social development in the long term. There were even several initiatives to encourage children to play traditional games disregarding that adult-led play was bound to be different from child-child interaction.

Several of these news reports on the disappearance of traditional games and play quoted the Euromonitor State of Play survey, as well as the Play for Life’s reports. The latter report was written for a post-war charity funded by the Quaker Peace and Service to campaign against the commercialisation of childhood and violent toys. In the mainstream media, these concerns were translated into an ambigous fear of the new and mourning of the old, and the transformation of play, which reflected an unnamed worry at the face of constant change.

Quoted news:

lona Opie. “Let’s play skipping-the-generation game.” The Guardian, 01 January 1991.
Clare Garner. “The loss of our innocence.” The Independent, 15 August 1996.
Julia Llewellyn Smith. “Have they forgotten how to play?” The Times, 27 July 1993.

More on the sociology and history of play:

Elizabeth Stutz. What are They Doing Now?: A Study of the Interests and Leisure Pursuits of Children between 7 and 14, carried out in Norwich in 1990 and 1991. Quaker Peace & Service. Norwich: Play for Life, 1991.
William A. Corsaro. “Interpretive Reproduction in Children’s Play,” in American Journal of Play, vol. 4, no. 4, 2012.
The Iona and Peter Opie Archive of childhood culture in Britain, past and present.

[cite]