Words: Rebekah McCrorie (she/her)
Creative outlets have been transferred to the internet: play has become pixelated.
Nowadays, it’s no secret that parents are sedating their children’s adventurousness with tablets that require a stable WiFi connection to kick in. The side effects of this perturbing shift from outdoor-centred play in daylight to screen-centred play in blue light are abundant: a detachment from reality, absence of social connection with other children, eyesight issues, and impacted speech development, to name a few. Skinned knees have been replaced with repetitive strain injuries and overactive imaginations with “brainrot”. Delectable mud pies garnished with pebbles and grass, like the ones I once whipped up in my garden circa 2009, have been taken off the menu, replaced by repetitive restaurant games. Do children still play in sandboxes anymore, or are they solely playing online sandbox games instead? The truth is, kids aren’t playing like they used to pre-internet. But, parents aren’t parenting like they used to either, and it’s all down to that omnipresent online sphere which nobody can seem to detach from, no matter how many wrinkles are folded into your skin.
Growing up in a little coastal town, I recall days spent picnicking on the gritty sand, collecting sea glass and seashells as souvenirs before the tide swept them away along with my memories. The world (or at least my little town) was my oyster. I’d play dress-up, construct structurally unsound forts from chairs and blankets, and spend hours doodling and scribbling. Nowadays, kids are dressing up in Dress to Impress and building forts in Fortnite until their eyes go square. That’s not to say my childhood was wholly tech-free – little me was enamoured with Zoella’s quintessential YouTube vlogs and games like Doodle Jump and Angry Ninja – but my screen wasn’t perennially glued to my hand. Rather, my hands were sticky with glue residue from hours spent sticking glitter-covered pieces of fusilli to paint-smeared canvases. It’s not that this juvenile desire to create and craft has dissipated, but rather that it has moved online, leading to a distinct detachment and decline in practical skills. Creative outlets have been transferred to the internet: play has become pixelated.
My parents – and each generation that preceded them – were given free rein of the world around them. They rolled around on hay bales at the nearby farm, vanished into the woods for hours on end, and came back by dinner time with dirt-caked fingernails to show for it. There were no phones, no login streaks to maintain, and no Life360 – the latter would send a helicopter parent into a frenzy these days. For teacher Nicola, 49, the shift in play over the years has been stark. ‘I don’t see kids playing in the street where I live,’ she tells me. ‘When I was younger, they’d be playing football in the park. Now, there’s hardly any kids in the streets spontaneously having fun, and playdates are organised and timetabled by parents. Children don’t ring doorbells anymore and ask other kids to come out and play like they used to.’ With only one in four of today’s children playing outside in their local streets compared to around three quarters of “baby boomers,” this decline in childhood outdoorsiness is clear as day, but the reasoning behind it is a little more foggy. Why has time once spent playing in nature been supplanted by hours glued to screens?
The answer may lie in the detachment of the iPad. Amidst a myriad of news reports on every parents’ worst nightmare, the concept of a controlled, digital crèche appeals to anxious caregivers. Tech has given parents constant access to news reports and statistics on the unsafe nature of society, and although stranger danger and the risks of children playing unsupervised aren’t anything new, our lives are intertwined with a fear-mongering internet that amplifies worries and encourages consumerism in the form of the latest device that can track your child’s every move. However, the issue is that these children aren’t leaving the house. Children can fight zombies, visit the pyramids of Egypt, and embark on a safari, all from the comfort of their living room. They can become seasoned gardeners in Grow a Garden without even picking up a trowel, but online, mind-numbing games could never compare to the thrill of growing my first carrot in my garden’s vegetable patch when I was eight, and could never supplement the precious Vitamin D I absorbed underneath dappled sunlight.
The National Play Commission recently found that the time children spend outdoors has declined by 50% in a generation, so where our ancestors once developed green fingers and cultivated a kinship with Mother Nature, kids are now busy tending to pixelated peace lilies on Roblox without getting a speck of dirt under their fingernails. However, this artificial environment is far from the utopia parents desire. In fact, playing online isn’t much safer than playing outdoors. You can still catch viruses, albeit digitally, and predators can have free rein over how they dress up their avatars, meaning 65-year-old “Brian” can play a perverse game of dress-up and become 10-year-old “Lisa” in a mere few clicks. Parents may be under the impression that their children are safe from creeps in white vans and lurkers in playgrounds by plonking them in front of a screen, but exploitation and manipulation run rampant inside all those ones and zeroes, allowing predators like “Brian” to quite literally become a one and a zero with little to stop him.
Restoring the “outdoorsy adolescence” that our parents and grandparents once had won’t be child’s play, but we should make an attempt to wean kids off iPads before dressing up and scavenger hunts become distant memories. Kerby is already critically endangered, and Conkers is on the brink of extinction, but maybe there’s time to save hopscotch and tag if we all work to bring back the good old art of playing and refuse to let it become a souvenir of the past, for the next generation’s sake. It’s up to us. It’s up to you. Tag, you’re it.
