What are the Playwork Principles?
Do you have vivid memories of your childhood play? Remembering play days can often evoke a special kind of whole body and mind joy. We would love to hear about them. Your play memories can help us form a data base for learning and re-membering play, bringing it back into our children’s lives, re-learning what makes children feel really alive and happy as well as supporting their physical and mental health and their social learning.
” When I was a kid, I knew all of the best hiding spots on my block. I grew up on a street that had several households with children around my age and after school, when the weather was nice, we would often come together to play a big game of Man Hunt- a more mobile version of hide and seek.
My block provided the perfect boundaries because only one side of it was residential, while a church, funeral home and doctor’s office accounted for the rest. Their trees, gardens, parking lots and structures provided many places to hide that were rarely disturbed by the public. Several of my neighbours allowed us to play on their properties, so we had permission to hide on all but a few lots. However, since I was an ‘expert hider’ I was brave enough and willing to sneak into these ‘high risk’ areas.
When we played manhunt, I would jump from hiding spot to hiding spot –from tree to bush to doorway—and if found, I knew all of the short cuts back to home free. Sometimes I would even go out on my own when we weren’t playing to set up hiding spots: storing a sheet near some garbage cans as a disguise, or making clearings between bushes and walls. I saw this landscape as one of opportunities for revolutionary hiding spots, as part of my goal to be the first to discover new and creative places to hide.
Truthfully, I was probably not the only one who took the game this seriously, and I think that is why the other kids on my street and I took so long to tire of playing it. With the constant development of new hiding spots, the game never became easy for the hunters as they were never quite sure where to look, or boring for the hiders as they were always excited to test out new spots. We would play for hours, only returning to our homes in time for dinner.
These local games of manhunt, took place on my block, with about 10 other kids from my street. However as we grew older, we stopped spending time together as some families moved away, we attended several different schools, and we became pre-occupied with our own circles of friends. When I walked down the street, passing my favourite hiding spots, I was often reminded of the fun I used to have playing manhunt with my neighbours.
One day, when I was about 18, I found myself walking home from school with one of my neighbours, and we began reflecting on how much fun we used to have. This conversation quickly turned into a plan to call on the others and round up all of our friends for the biggest game of manhunt that our childhood selves would never have imagined.
On the day of the hunt, there were about 40 participants. With a bigger group in both size and numbers, it seemed appropriate to move on to bigger territories, so we crossed the street and took to the park to make new boundaries. With a library, tennis club, ice rink, parking lot and several sports field, these boundaries felt huge. While the hunt was fun, the running involved was exhausting and my patience to remain hidden was nothing like it used to be. The game quickly evolved into a hang-out in the park.
Because our student is a spatial analyst, we had to have a map!
Here is a fairly typical suburban setting, but there are a few special features on K’s block that are not typical and contributed, perhaps, to the pleasure of the game. The actual residential portion is only about 20% of the site, so only about a dozen houses. That would have been intimate. The rest of the block was taken up with other commercial uses – offering different terrain and a sense of the larger world – adventure for a child but yet, not so busy that parents would restrict children from using these areas.
K’s memory brings out many delightful themes about play. K and her pals were lucky to have parents who let them roam through the whole block, trusted them to respect the boundaries and they had neighbours who were tolerant of trespassers, even if they did not exactly invite the kids onto their properties.
Manhunt is the essence of social play but along with the sense of belonging and making something exciting together, K remembers the personal and private element that went into the game – the imaginative re-making of spaces into hiding spots – the scheming, the physical bravery and the thrill of being hunted as well as hunting. And notice how she found “loose parts” and hid them in the environment to make even better hiding spots.
Through hide ‘n seek in its various forms, children re-enact the essence of childhood – experiencing, in a playful and thrilling way, the inevitable separations and re-unions are part of growing up and are often painful – whether that is leaving home for all day school or finding yourself still dependant and connected when you are 16 years old.
K’s desire to re-experience the child’s euphoria with her teenage friends is a touching epilogue. Teens want to become children again, but they can’t and they found this out when the game faded – but there are compensations – in the hanging out that becomes their new way of playing.
I love this description of manhunt because it highlights how very important hide ‘n seek games are for children right up to their teenage years. This kind of play is often difficult for children in downtown Toronto or even some suburban settings. They don’t have roaming rights. Backyards are fenced. Parks are too open and flat – there are not enough good hiding spots. And the village of children is hard to find and keep.
What can we do about these obstacles? It is a complex knot to unravel but one place to start might be making our parks more interesting with a few more trees and bushes, a patch of forest, a shed structure with some “loose parts” available on occasion with the quiet presence of a rec worker and more community support for the roaming village of children.
Feeling inspired? Would you like to contribute to the research on play? Our work benefits from your stories and recollections. We invite you to describe a significant memory of how you played as a child and how you think it has affected you, professionally or personally?
PLAYbynature is working to put freely chosen self-directed play back into the lives of children, ages 3 - 15. Good quality play provision requires a web of inter-connected social and environmental supports. We work in collaboration with parents, caregivers, daycares, local agencies, schools, and city staff to introduce changes that will enhance children's play opportunities in parks, playgrounds, school grounds, green space and outdoor neighbourhood settings. We believe that anything we do to improve our public spaces for children's play and recreation will have a positive impact on the whole community - making Toronto a child-friendly city.