06 Mar From Mud Pies to Safety Swings: How Childhood Play Has Transformed Over Generations
Rhonda Garad reminisces about the changing nature of child’s play.
My three-year-old curled up beside me and, gently removing my glasses, stared earnestly into my eyes and asked, “What are you doing Mum?” I replied that I was having fun. She looked at the newspaper I had been reading with its incomprehensible squiggles, its lack of catchy Wiggles tunes and bright, primary colours, and a look of extreme pity came over her face. Clearly, I did not understand the meaning of ‘fun’ and it was time she educated me.
A Child’s Definition of Fun
Taking me by the hand, she led me to the trampoline and began jumping with gay abandon, urging me to do the same. Slowly, I did as I was told and she encouraged me with great enthusiasm: “That’s very good Mummy!” My confidence grew under her diligent tutelage and I began to jump higher and higher until, throwing caution and fears of a dodgy pelvic floor to the wind, I was jumping like a woman possessed. Reckless giggling broke out from both of us and I had the giddy feeling of being deliciously weightless.
Then it happened – a moment when our jumping synchronised, resulting in a tsunami-like wave that flipped my little three year old into midair and dropped her somewhere over the side of the trampoline. A heart-stopping silence propelled me to crawl over the edge, only to see my little girl lying in her sandpit. She was making sand angels with her stretched out arms and legs and urged me to have a go.
A little jaded, we moved on to the local playground in hot pursuit of my inner child. As we scaled the rock-climbing wall, I reflected on how different the playground of today is to the ones we knew as kids. Back then, there was no rubber ‘flooring’ to soften a fall or rubber tubing to cover the chains on the swing, and no bright colours. No, the playground of the seventies was a gunmetal-grey place, full of long grass that had to be picked through carefully to avoid snakes. The main attraction was the long swing, an untreated piece of four-by-two that gave off splinters and could fit as many as 10 kids on it at once. Many a hot summer day was spent sucking on SunnyBoys (a frozen flavoured drink), singing loud and proud until we were hoarse. Our playgrounds may have lacked interesting equipment, but, more importantly, they also lacked parents, which was a major enticement.
Playgrounds Then and Now: A World Apart
As I watched the parents in this playground staying one nervous step behind their precious darlings, I thought about how easy our parents had it back then. A bowl of porridge in the morning and off we kids went until sunset when hunger and exhaustion drove us home. On hot days, we would venture to the river and jump off the small waterfall, at the end of which was a ‘stopping branch’ that would lever you back up the bank. If you were too slow and missed the stopping branch, you would be lost to the wilds of the river and your ghost would stalk the banks of the Campaspe forever. At least that was the story told to us in the night by our older siblings, and we were too terrified to test its veracity.The Freedom of Unsupervised Childhoods.
As kids, we had it easier too. For one thing, we were not expected to stay clean all of the time. Kids today seem to be inordinately clean. I think our parents didn’t care if we were dirty because our clothes were hand-me-downs anyway, not cute little numbers from the local department store. Making mud pies took up a great deal of my early childhood, so getting dirty was an occupational hazard. There were days when a few of us would produce so many pies that a gaping hole emerged in the garden, but not having the highly manicured gardens we have now, our parents didn’t mind if we dug halfway to China. I try to tell my 12 year old about some of this and he gives me a withering look, as if I’m as old as Methuselah, and precociously asks if we whittled wood as well.
I must admit that when I look at the velvet-edged world we have created for our children, I wonder how we survived. American author Flannery O’Connor once said, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days”.
Lessons in Survival, Not Just Play
Childhood seemed to be tougher back then when parents smacked without a second thought and any adult could reprimand any child, and schoolyard fights were real stone-throwing, punching-up affairs, and the tough ruled and the rest of us tried to stay invisibly in the middle somewhere. It was a time when to be seen to be too clever in class meant a ‘Chinese burn’ at lunchtime and to be labelled a brown nose for the day, and to be hit in the game of ‘tiggy’ with a wet tennis ball left you seriously winded.
Yes, looking back, it seemed less about having a ‘childhood’ and more about lessons in the art of survival. Perhaps, that’s the reason my daughter and I are having a hard time locating my inner child – because it wasn’t there in the first place. All that I seem to have located is my inner nausea from having attempted the tyre swing, the moving rubber floor and climbing to the top of the dragon head. And the brief wish runs through my dazed head to bring back the parentless playground.
Illustrations by Jody Pratt
