Freedom from Parents

The most dramatic change in the day-to-day experience of childhood since the abolition of child labor is the decline of the street as a place where children can play writes Peter Wilby in the Guardian.

Britain has lost the art of socialising the young.

What we can do is give children more space and stop treating them as though they were an alien species, to be corralled into organised activities in designated locations. The street and the neighbourhood, not supervised playgrounds approved by health and safety officers, are the child's natural environment. That is where they should learn how to rub along with each other and with adults from outside the family; where they should learn the limits of acceptable social behaviour; where they should learn to climb and fall out of trees, to explore abandoned buildings and scrubby bits of unused land in which they can invent games and let off steam. "Even the youngest children talked about having freedom and time away from parents and adult supervision," says the Play England report