Play and Nostalgia

In his review of a recent BBC series called Hop, Skip and Jump: The Story of Children’s Play: Moving Indoors, Patrick West notes that "...we should regard childhoods of yesterday with ambivalence – and sometimes even appreciate the often paradoxical nature of society's nostalgia. A frequent lament by those who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s is that back then there were so many wonderful bombsites and ruined houses to explore, which is tantamount to thanking the Luftwaffe – who possibly killed these children's parents – for a happy childhood."

"...times have changed," he goes on to say, "and...when it comes to how we let our children play, some things are wrong today, but other things were wrong yesterday."

I suppose nostalgia is an inevitable component of any attempts at understanding the nature of children's play. In attempting to understand how children are playing, we naturally refer to our own childhood. It is challenging, to say the least, to get any accurate picture of how children are playing with what and whom, let alone a clear understanding of how we can support and nourish those play experiences. Realizing that we can't get there by comparing our childhood to theirs is at least a first step.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith