Play, Physical Activity and Public Health

The Reframing of Children's Leisure Lives

Stephanie A. Alexander, Katherine L. Frohlich, Caroline Fusco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351971690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Sportunterricht

Are children playing less than they used to? Are rising obesity rates linked to a decline in children's time to play freely? These and other related questions have filled the pages of newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals for the past decade. Researchers and journalists have attributed these issues to societal changes around children's lives and leisure, the growth of structured and organised activities and increasing perceptions of risk in children's play. Play, Physical Activity and Public Health presents a discussion of the way modern notions of play are rendering children's leisure activities less free and less engaged in simply for fun.

Based on original qualitative research, and analysis of contemporary media from Canada and elsewhere, this book argues that the growing health concerns around childhood play entail a paradox: by advocating, promoting, discussing, and re-directing children's play, a new form of children's leisure is emerging - one that is purpose-driven, instrumentalised for health, and ultimately, less free. We explore how play has become goal-oriented, a means to health ends, and how the management of pleasure in play as well as diverse risk discourses around play continue to limit and constrain possibilities for children and families to play and engage in leisure freely. Incorporating past critiques of this trend in play, we argue for research and practice to create new possibilities and ways of thinking about children's play, leisure, fun and childhood, that are less constrained and managed, and importantly less geared towards health goals.

This is a valuable resource for students of the sociology of sport, kinesiology, sports and health psychology, education, public health, and childhood studies. It is also an important read for school teachers, public health practitioners, psychologists, physical education teachers, academics and parents interested in how children's leisure lives are being shaped by the growing and diverse discussions around play.

Chapter 1
The play paradox

Figure 1.1 Alisha (8 years old) took a photo of Rapido, her pet snail.

Introduction

Are children playing less today than they used to? Are rising obesity rates among children in countries of the global north linked to the changing nature of children’s play and the reduced time, space and freedom they have to play? Questions such as these have filled the pages of newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals for almost a decade. Concomitantly, around 10 years ago, play advocates, researchers and journalists also began expressing concerns about children’s changing play culture attributing declines in free play to both societal changes and those regarding our perceptions of childhood. It was also at this time, in 2008, that one of the authors of this book (S. Alexander) began her PhD with one of her supervisors (K. Frohlich). Both of us became interested in these emerging discussions around children’s play in Canada and specifically the emerging interest in children’s leisure and play within Canadian public health.

In this book we discuss how ideas about childhood, health and play have begun to shift the nature of contemporary children’s play activities. In the context of widespread calls for children’s play to be protected and further promoted, we examine whether the engaged and organised promotion of children’s play may in effect make children’s play less free and less of an activity done “simply for fun”. We argue that the growing physical health concerns around children, and the promotion of explicitly healthy play entails a paradox. By advocating, promoting and re-directing children’s play towards activities that have a productive health end (i.e., physically active play) or that are predominantly safety-oriented, a new form of play seems to be emerging; one that is purpose-driven, risk-free, instrumentalised and, above all, less likely to be free. In this book we focus specifically on the development of the public health interest in play and trace the diverse events and circumstances that led up to the writing of the book. We outline the confluence of discussions, concerns and changes around childhood, children’s health and their leisure activities, and the subsequent development within public health of a focus on children’s play to promote physical activity.

In this first chapter, we introduce the “raison d’être” of the book: our curiosity and concern about the way playing was increasingly being conceptualised and then introduced into public health discourses. We briefly introduce some of the themes that fuelled our interest in the topic of children’s play and outline the theoretical framing of our research, including the concepts and lenses through which we analysed the current situation of play. We also present the methodologies we drew on to concretely examine children’s play. Finally, we provide an outline for each of the chapters of the book.

Where did our interest in play come from?

The year 2008 was a defining year for what would be our work on children’s play within public health, and indeed, for Canadian discussions around children’s play more generally. It was that year that one of the book’s authors (S. Alexander) began her PhD with another of the authors (K. Frohlich) at the Université de Montréal’s School of Public Health in Canada. While discussing research topics, both observed that the issues and concerns around children’s “disappearing play” was becoming increasingly conspicuous and, indeed, hard to ignore. Whether it was the opinion pieces about declines in children’s spaces to play written up in national newspapers or scientific magazines (e.g., Chouinard, 2006, Le Devoir; Wenner, 2009, Scientific American Mind), interviews about the consequences of “play deficit” for children on radio or television programmes (e.g., McDonald, 2009, Quirks & Quarks; Kennedy, 2009, CBC Ideas; Harper, 2009, CTV) or the publication of several books highlighting the critical importance of play for psychological (and overall) well-being of children (e.g., Brown, 2009; Elkind, 2007; Honoré, 2009), the topic of children’s play, concern about its decline and an emphasis on the need to salvage it was omnipresent. This diverse body of knowledge was pointing to the emergence of a more general concern about the ways in which children play.

That same year, a Canadian non-profit organisation that evaluates and promotes children’s physical activity (Active Health Kids Canada) published their fifth annual Physical Activity Report Card for Children and Youth, and for the first time included the concept of “active play” as an indicator for children’s physical activity (we discuss this development further in Chapter 3). While previously relatively little had been discussed about the physical health benefits of children’s playing – much more was written about the psychological and social benefits of play – new discussions within public health were beginning to address the physically active elements of specific kinds of playing. Bearing witness to the emerging interest in children’s play from within our own discipline, we decided it was imperative to examine this more closely. Given that the interest in play was new within public health, we sought collaboration with the third author of this book, C. Fusco, an early-career researcher in Kinesiology and Physical Education (University of Toronto) at the time, to examine the introduction of children’s play into public health from a broader perspective. Dr. Fusco was studying children’s narratives about active school transport and the spaces of young people’s physical activity (Fusco, Moola, Faulkner, Buliung, & Richichi, 2012; Fusco, 2007) and was interested in joining our examinations of play. We all entered the world of play by reading broadly on the historical transformations around play in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and by examining play from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Our concern was to examine how the object of play came to be a significant component of children’s physical activity promotion within the larger field of Canadian public health.

Since 2008 – a good 7 years before we began writing this book – the notion of play as a public health concept and indicator for physical activity has only continued to proliferate and circulate. In 2015, for instance, a new position statement (which will be discussed in Chapter 5) was developed and written up to address and confront the general societal tendency toward the avoidance of risky outdoor active play. In 2016, the Lawson Foundation funded 18 projects across Canada as part of an Outdoor Play Strategy to promote children’s outdoor free play, active play and risky play. Children’s play has thus become a central component of physical activity and public health agendas. The PhD research therefore followed this momentum developing around play within public health and physical activity organisations since 2008. The project examined both the dominant perspectives on play and juxtaposed these with children’s own perspectives about their play preferences. To position the public health trends regarding play more broadly, this research also historically examined how contemporary ideas and concerns about play, health, physical activity and childhood developed in other fields (i.e., education, psychology, sociology of childhood) and how some of these were taken up by public health interventions to promote a form of physically active play.

The current book includes much of this work, but additionally draws on and includes new material and debates on childhood and play as these have continued to emerge in public health, physical education and popular discourses since 2014 when the PhD research was completed.

Children’s play in transformation

Our historical lens on the transformation of play over the last century or so has been informed largely by a diverse group of historians and play theorists (e.g., Baker, 2001; Caillois, 1961; Chudacoff, 2007; Frost, 2010; Gutman & de Coninck-Smith, 2008; Huizinga, 1949; Read, 2011; Schwartzman, 1976; Stearns, 2005; Sutton-Smith, 1981, 1997). Their histories of play have specifically examined how societal shifts have affected children’s lives and their play activities, and how this has altered the meanings attributed to playing. One of the most eminent 20th-century historians of play, Johan Huizinga, wrote the renowned book Homo Ludens (1949) which outlines his theory of play and its role in the development of western civilization. Huizinga’s reflections on play were strongly influenced by societal changes in early 20th-century Europe, which included the expansion of industrialisation, the aftermath of the First World War and the growing wave of nationalism and fascism that would eventually lead to the Second World War (Anchor, 1978). While his general critique of modern civilisation makes itself heard in Homo Ludens (e.g., “we have seen great nations losing every shred of honour, all sense of humour, the very idea of decency and fair play” p. 205), the critique of modern life recorded in Homo Ludens focuses specifically on the declining role attributed to play in his contemporary society (i.e., early 20th century). What emerges as especially prominent in Huizinga’s work is his observation that the play element, something he argues has always existed in society, was beginning to wane. He argues that already, as of the late 19th century, play in academic settings and schooling had begun to decline, and there was a growing tendency to “view play as something not quite respectful” (p. 192).

While Huizinga writes about the changes in play more generally, including adult play, contemporary historians writing about the 19th and 20th centuries have also observed changes, specifically with regard to children’s play and its impact on psychological and social development. These more recent discussions centre on shifts from what many call unstructured and freer play in diverse play spaces, to forms of play that are increasingly structured, highly organised and adult-supervised. Play activities that were not explicitly fulfilling an aim (i.e., learning, development) began to be viewed as unproductive and were already being rejected in the early 20th century in favour of “good” productive play (Chudacoff, 2007; Frost, 2010; Read, 2011).

Play research has also been prominent in studies of children’s schooling, sport and physical education. While these studies are too numerous to mention here, we acknowledge some of the scholars who have developed the wealth of literature on critical studies of physical education (Dowling, Fitzgerald, & Flintoff, 2012; Evans, Davis, & Wright, 2004; Evans, Rich, Davis, & Allwood, 2008; Whitehead, Telfer, & Lambert, 2014; Wright & Harwood, 2009) and those who have problematised children’s participation in sport, recreation, play and physical activity (Dagkas & Armour, 2012; Dagkas & Burrows, 2016; Eichberg, 2017; Green & Smith, 2016; Harvey & Light, 2013; Parker & Vinson, 2013; Wright & Macdonald, 2010). Historically, it has been organised sports activities that have been seen as more purposeful, productive and community oriented than play and as such, children, particularly middle-class children, were ushered towards sport, recreation and leisure activities, which do not necessarily include play experiences (Human Kinetics, 2013). While children have always engaged in play and leisure, and have played sports and games in various societies (Kamphorst & Roberts, 1989), in western industrialised nations, child and youth sport has become a billion-dollar industry (Gatz, Messner, & Ball-Rokeach, 2002). Child and youth sports were originally organised around the beliefs about what sport could provide for children – character development, teamwork and commitment (Holt, 2008; Gatz et al., 2002), and there is a wealth of literature on the rise of child and youth sports in the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Kremer, Trew, & Ogle, 1997). Specifically, children and youth were encouraged to engage in individual or team sports, and were less encouraged to simply engage in leisure play, take part in risky sports or become involved in counter-culture activities, although that trend is changing (Reinhart, 2014; Thorpe, 2012). Furthermore, as less space was made available for free play and leisure outdoors because urban planning began to design children out of street spaces (Moore, 1987), more children were harried into cars and driven to local arenas, playing fields, baseball diamonds and recreation centres (Thompson, 1999). With this, attention turned away from the provision of time and space for unstructured free play.

The success of child and youth sports in the latter half of the 20th century is undeniable, but now more than ever this path to play(ing) is being questioned. Children’s sports have been riddled with concerns about the welfare of young people in those sports, the abuse of young athletes by coaches and highly competitive parents (Atkinson, 2009; Brackenridge, Pitchford, Russell, & Nutt, 2007; Lang & Harthill, 2015), the anti-social traits that can be learned through youth competitive sport (Atkinson, 2009) and, finally, the culture of risk-taking and injury that is perpetuated in youth sports, particularly masculine-identified sports (Kehler & Atkinson, 2010). Additionally, organised youth sport has succeeded in dividing children in terms of their sex/gender, social class, racialization and abilities (Azzarito & Macdonald, 2016; Messner, 2011). Although, play may (re)produce these divisions (Gagen, 2000), in and of itself, it is not organised along the same lines as competitive youth sports and recreation (Fr...