WHEN the Offspring were much younger their idea of a great day out was a trip to Hardcastle Crags (near Hebden Bridge) where they’d spend several hours dabbling in the stream, poking things with sticks, collecting stones, climbing trees and getting their clothes dirty.
It was the unstructured nature of it that appealed to them; the opportunity to be imaginative and mould their surroundings into playthings.
The local park, with its fenced-in, risk-assessed, rubberised safety-surfaced play area, couldn’t compete.
Given a choice they’d choose Hardcastle Crags every time, if only for the frisson of danger posed by the rickety rope swing over the river.
Which brings me nicely round to the new generation of play areas being created in Kirklees as part of a £225m government project called Playbuilder.
This scheme, from which Kirklees has accessed £2.5m over three years, aims to give youngsters the kind of adventurous outdoor play enjoyed by their parents and grandparents. I wear the scars on my knees as proof of my own free-range childhood.
Clearly someone somewhere has finally clocked the fact that we have an entire generation of children growing up without taking the small risks that teach us to take responsibility for our own actions.
In fact, I’d go one step further and say we now live in such a namby-pamby world, where someone can successful sue for slipping on a flower petal outside a florist, that our children are being led to believe someone else is always to blame when something goes wrong.
However, the new play areas will have no rubberised surfaces, only wood bark, and no expensive fences; they will comprise of logs, trees trunks, boulders, rope swings and water features. Most importantly, there will be no signs telling anyone what they can do and what they can’t.
“The play areas will encourage children to challenge themselves and with that will come bumps, bruises and scrapes,” says Kirklees project leader Amy Woodhead. Hopefully, a representative of Sue, Grabit and Run, will not be standing by poised to take legal action should anyone scratch themselves.
Although the provision of new play areas might seem like a minor matter in the great scheme of things, it actually represents a major shift in government thinking.
Hopefully, it will be the start of a new movement to restore childhood to children, an issue that is already on the electioneering agenda, with David Cameron promising to punish companies who market age-inappropriate products for youngsters.
But the next task must be to persuade parents that it’s worth allowing their children to play outside instead of plonking them in front of the television or computer, which might seem like a safer option but has dangers of its own – not least to their health and fitness.
In fact, even the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents believes that it would be better for children to risk physical injury than sit at home playing computer games.
But we live in such safety-obsessed times I suspect that many children, regularly driven everywhere, start high school without ever having crossed a road on their own. I hold my own hands up to this one.
In fact, the most dangerous thing they do in a day is weave through traffic in their parent’s car.
Education spokesman David Hanson, head of the Independent Association of Preparatory Schools, has spoken out about what he sees as a generation of children being protected from both risk and failure.
As he wisely points out, real life is full of risk, challenges and disappointments and it is neither helpful nor kind to raise youngsters to think otherwise.
We need our bumps and scrapes to teach us when to exercise caution. It’s part of the youthful exploration of the world, from which all animals learn and gain confidence.
Play Pathfinder status for Kirklees means that we’ll get extra funding for more ‘retro’ play areas than other local authorities.
Let’s hope that the first broken arm or leg doesn’t bring the whole project grinding to a halt because casualties are inevitable and, some might say, an inevitable part of growing up as nature intended.
