What is Adventure Play?
For most of us over 40, “adventure play” would have just been called “play” during our childhoods. We were probably allowed to play outside relatively unsupervised. Adults did not entertain children. Groups of children roaming around a neighborhood—or forests and fields—was a normal thing and not grounds for a call to the authorities.
Much has changed for the worse. Today, children have little unstructured time, and almost no time to themselves. Multiple factors have brought about this situation: increasing fears for childrens’ safety, traffic, the culture of litigation, an excessive focus on acheivement, long work hours for parents, and screens. The result of these restrictions on childhood are being seen in the well-documented increase in mental illness, obesity, and stress in the lives of children.
Adventure play is a model that attempts to recreate the freedom of childhood.
History
The first adventure playgrounds arose in the cities of Europe during WW2, when some intrepid educators and parents realized that children needed safe spaces to play in a time of crisis. Accounts of these early experiments are fascinating, as the founders struggled with a lack of materials, rather than a society hostile to natural play. (Today we have the opposite problem.) Photos of these early adventure playgrounds include handbuilt structures that would make any parent’s heart stop today, as well as bonfires, forts, caves and pits, and hundreds of children in attendance each day.
Adventure playgrounds continued to be prominent in Europe after the war, and represented remarkable efforts by towns and communities to create a democractic environment for children, providing a space of freedom and acceptance to all children where race and class were irrelevant.
In the United States the social climate for adventure playgrounds has been more difficult, but there were many experiments in the 1960s and 70s, in keeping with the spirit of the times. The city of Berkeley, CA still maintains an adventure playground that was founded in 1979.
Today, due to factors inhibiting children’s play mentioned above, there are very few adventure public playgrounds operating in the United States. Even so, parents and educators everywhere create similar environments in schools, parks, and backyards, because they recognize their value. An outstanding example of a true adventure playground was created in New York in 2016, Play: Ground NYC, and its popularity is a testament to the need for such spaces.
Here are some RESOURCES about the science of play, about adventure play specifically, and also the phenomenon of “nature-deficit disorder”:
Making Playgrounds A Little More Dangerous, NYT
Free To Learn, Peter Gray
Balanced and Barefoot, Angela J. Hanscom
Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv
Beyond Ecophobia, David Sobel