Where will the children play?

There is no question that plants and green space are an essential part of life for children and key to their development.

Mark Long, promoting the Green City initiative in the UK says

'we only need to look to the obesity epidemic, the increasing inability among children to understand and assess risk, poor spatial understanding, impaired social skills, or the reduced ability to navigate the ‘real’ world to see the direct consequences of decisions that push green space and plants to the margins'.

A citizen's right

When it comes down to practicalities, the way we build our living and working environments must take account of our basic need for green space. For example, children have a basic need for play space.

David Lloyd George speaking at the launch of the National Playing Fields association in 1925 told the assembled dignitaries that:

‘The child’s right to play is the citizens’ first claim on the community…no community can infringe that right without doing enduring harm to the minds and bodies of it’s citizens.’

Outdoor averse

Wendy Titman, of Wendy Titman Associates, has dedicated much of her professional life to highlighting the needs of children in terms of the provision of green space. She observes that we are rearing a generation that is ‘outdoor averse’, that we as a society are storing up huge problems for the future with the inadequate provision for outdoor learning and play that is available to most of pre-school children. Her research has pointed to epidemics in allergies and obesity and she aligns them with the historical ills of rickets and TB. Ms Titman argues that both pairs of problems are consequences of the direction that society has taken and that making the outdoors available, appealing and meaningful to children should be at the core of the solution of today’s problems just as it was 100 years ago.

Mark Long says:
‘The current trends are very worrying. Children are the future; we must not deprive them of their right to grow through experiencing nature'.