Let’s build safe play spaces into our communities

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/29/lets-build-safe-play-spaces-into-our-communities

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I wholeheartedly agree that “children need plenty of self-directed outdoor play” (Screen-based lifestyle harms children’s health, Letters, 26 December). Children spend most of their lives at home, so the design of residential neighbourhoods is particularly crucial. Our research into how residents use external spaces near their homes reveals that where children play out for longer, independently, there is more social use by the rest of the community. Yet policy and practice do not work with us to achieve well-designed places for people to live in this way. As an architectural practice we know this first hand, we battle against car parking, space standards and myriad other regulations. However our research underpins our conviction and we are now focusing on the benefits of designing for independent mobility and play as a positive way to start to tackle the issue. 

Give children safe places to be outside and meet friends, and they will spend hours building resilience and burning calories alongside all the other health and wellbeing outcomes we desire. Screens might come along too, just don’t tell the parents.Dinah Bornat ZCD Architects and University of East London

• Your correspondent (Letters, 29 December) misses the point about our letter on children’s wellbeing. As a literacy specialist, I’d be worried if the under-sevens were spending as much time on solitary, sedentary “paper-based technology” as they spend today on the screen-based variety. However, there’s no danger of that, because they aren’t fluent readers or writers. Screen-based entertainment, on the other hand, is readily accessible from soon after birth, and steadily displacing activities that are vital for children’s physical, emotional, social and cognitive development.

A key factor in healthy all-round development during early childhood is active, creative, social play, with parents/carers and with other children. It’s particularly important that, from the age of two or three, children play outdoors with their peers, preferably in natural environments. This sort of activity is increasingly difficult for parents to provide, which helps explain their growing reliance on technological alternatives.

This is why our letter called for a kindergarten stage for children aged 3-7, focusing on social and emotional development and outdoor play, and for national guidelines on screen use for the under-12s. I helped to organise the letter because I believe both of these are now necessary if our children are to be adequately prepared not only for literacy, but for learning and life in general.Sue PalmerAuthor of Upstart: The Case for Raising the School Starting Age and Providing What the Under-Sevens Really Need

• Your correspondents ask for “the development of a coherent, well-funded approach to care and education from pre-birth to age seven”. Have they forgotten the Sure Start programme that was a significant element of the New Labour manifesto from 1997?

Based partly on the Reggio Emilia model in Italy and the pioneering work of organisations such as Learning Through Landscapes, those purpose-designed kindergartens were exemplary in recognising that the environment is central to the success of any early years programme, particularly one which is based on self-directed outdoor play.

For the system to work, as it does throughout Scandinavia, you need easy run-out-run-in play, and child-orientated external landscapes that are challenging and multidimensional (rather than flat, easy-to-supervise areas of dull asphalt), all within a secure enclosure.

We have really underestimated the benefits of investment in early-years education particularly for disadvantaged children, both in terms of the benefits for children themselves but also in payback for the public purse. Since 2008, many of the Sure Start children’s centres of that period have closed for lack of state funding, or have been given away to the private sector. Why not resurrect Sure Start rather than petitioning for yet another new early-years system, which, even if government were to agree, would take another generation to realise?Mark DudekAuthor of Spaces for Young Children (National Children’s Bureau)

• I was surprised to learn of neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl’s astonishment when the babies to whom she tried to teach Mandarin via video didn’t learn (Letters, 29 December) since it was well known when I was teaching child acquisition of language decades ago that babies require interaction with others to acquire language. But to deduce from this that screens are not only useless as learning tools but actually harmful seems a stretch. Living alone and being no DIY expert, I regularly turn to internet videos when I need to learn how do something practical.Jill WallisAston Clinton, Buckinghamshire

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