Organised ‘Fun’

When I was growing up, if it wasn’t snowing, sleeting or raining in a monsoon-like fashion, my mother would open the back door, push me and my siblings out and order us to “play”.

After kicking stones around and muttering about the rain and the cold, we would be forced – out of the necessity to kill a few hours and avoid hypothermia – to invent ways to entertain ourselves. Using tennis rackets, soggy footballs, a clothes line and the key ingredient – our imagination – we would make up games to keep ourselves amused. Inevitably we would be joined by cousins or neighbours from ‘over the wall’ and between us we’d play until we were called in for dinner, or until one of us showed signs of acute pneumonia.

Today, kids are ferried about in oversized Jeeps. They get picked up from school and taken straight to ballet, piano, football, tennis, gym club, drama club, Taekwando, hip-hop, rugby, yoga…. There is no time for good old fashioned play anymore. What ever happened to cowboys and Indians?

We are creating a generation of children who never have the time to use their imaginations. They never get the opportunity to exercise their creative muscles. They don’t get the chance to devise games, conjure up imaginary worlds, meet invisible friends, make-up stories…or just be goofy together.

Gone are the days of making pirate ships and fortresses out of old rugs, some clothes pegs and a couple of kitchen chairs. Now children are taken to ‘play parks’ that have life-size pirate ships to climb on. Where’s the fun in that?

But it’s children’s birthday parties that take the biscuit (pun entirely intended!). I remember happily sitting in big circles playing pass the parcel and musical chairs followed by boisterous three legged races under the drizzle in my friends’ back gardens. When the games were over you’d eat soggy banana sandwiches and home-made buns with uneven icing. The birthday cake would then be produced – it was almost always two sponge discs held together with a filling of raspberry jam and cream – fantastic.

Now, most parties (my own kids’ included) take place in indoor play gyms that always smell of urine – those big pools full of coloured balls are feeding ground for over excited kids to pee in.  On the rare occasion that a party is being held at home, an ‘entertainer’ is hired to make up games for the guests – remember they have no imaginations of their own so they need the help. These professional artists dance, pull rabbits out of hats and create complex architectural structures using balloons. Today’s birthday cakes are intricate works of art. I was at a party recently where the mother produced a cake in the shape of an enchanted castle. Walt Disney himself couldn’t have conjured up anything more elaborate. But none of the kids liked it. It looked magnificent but tasted awful. Shouldn’t that tell us something?

Where is this all going? What kind of examples are we teaching our children? What kind of children are we raising? Ones that will never be able to do anything for themselves, because they are constantly being stimulated. And we, the parents, are to blame. We need to stop dragging our kids around from activity to activity and let them be. Let them invent, create and make-up their own fun.

My four year old son recently complained as I was dragging him out the door for a play-date, that he just wanted to stay at home in his pyjamas and play with his toys.

“But you’ll be bored in half an hour,” I hustled him into the car.

With a whole day of rain before me, I had panicked and organised to meet a friend and her four year old boy at a local jungle gym. My son spent most of the afternoon queuing to go down slides or being crushed in a vat of smelly balls. I drank vile coffee and tried to catch up with my friend as we valiantly attempted to ignore the background noise of wailing children while our two sons totally ignored each other.
As we were leaving my friend’s little boy tripped, walloped his head on the side of a chair and had to be rushed to hospital where he received eight stitches.

Will I be staying at home the next time it rains and encouraging my son to entertain himself? Hell yes