The Story of Childhood by Libby Brooks Page A

an advance? Teaching unions have expressed scepticism thatsufficient money is earmarked to do more than offer Coke and board-games. And concerns have been raised about privatisation through the back door, as schools have to buy in extra-curricular activities.
    It is notable that Rosie preferred to complete at home the tropical island book she designed at school. Her father says that she now prefers to write here, where she colours in her library carefully. Writing at school has become boring to her, he suspects because the teaching has lately been focused towards SATS outcomes.
    One Saturday, Rosie is alone in the house with her mother, because Livvy has gone to a birthday party. She’s eating a snack of ham and baguette, grapes and half a banana. Simon and Linda have been painting. The house is beginning to feel more like home. Rosie sits on the couch, channel-hopping. Television is compelling. She has written down on a tiny purple clipboard what she likes to watch so she won’t forget. She likes
Lilo and Stitch, Teen Angel, Lizzie MacGuire, Big Bang
, and
Sabrina
. TV offers another world of stories, which often happen in American accents.
    Livvy has gone to the Wacky Warehouse: ‘It’s this big house with two really big slides and a ladder and a really big tube and a play area for little children.’ Although Rosie has been there on occasion herself, there is still a sense of inequity about this afternoon.
    We go to the park. Rosie discharges from her front door like a bullet. There is one road to cross and she jigs on the edge of the pavement, her trajectory disrupted. She runs, skips, bounces to the swings, but this apparatus is too structured for her purposes. Rosie is fortunate: Audit Commission figures suggest that the average child under twelve has a ration of 2.3 square metres of outdoor play space – about the size of akitchen table. This park is an extension of her domain, full of unassuming places with wild stories attached. There are dangers too. A witch lives behind that wall.
    While defending play as an activity involving worthwhile risk, Peter Moss and Pat Petrie of the Institute of Education consider how children develop their own collective social lives which operate alongside the dominant adult culture. Here, play is not a means to an educational end, but ‘a central activity … what children do, often on the margins of the adult world, making use of the minutes between adult-directed activities for their own purposes.’ They echo the work of the anthropologist Erik Erikson, who cautioned adults against defining play as ‘not work’, arguing that this was to exclude children from an early source of identity.
    Noting how children transform and subvert adult cultural forms, Moss and Petrie give the example of how children’s maps of familiar areas may give prominence to features that are inconsequential to adults: ‘Children use features of school playgrounds intended for other purposes for their own; flights of steps may become jumping apparatuses, castles, alien dens, shops. In a London suburb, a grassed bank, with scrubby trees, runs for a short stretch alongside the pavement … For at least seventy years … children have scrambled on to the bank and walked behind the trees for a matter of twenty yards and then clambered down again. They have worn a clear, narrow path. This path has no place in adult culture – for adults, paths are usually taken to reach a destination; yet children endow following the path with their own meanings, it is part of their local culture.’
    The creation of private spaces, away from adult eyes and sometimes away from other children, is an essential part of childhood culture. The Green Alliance/Demos report alsonoted that secret or special places, whether hidden at the bottom of the garden or in overgrown parkland, were particularly important to children. They were places for quiet reflection, storytelling and