Child friendly communities

Last week I attended a public lecture hosted at Melbourne University as part of Home, School and Spaces in between: Child friendly cities symposium. The presenter was Tim Gill, a British policy analyst, who spoke to the topic No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society (also the title of his book released last year).

This was an architectural and planning focused session so not borne out of early childhood theory. Gill started his session by asking the audience to reflect on their favourite places to play as children and sure enough, they were all outdoor and all largely unsupervised by adults.

He presented an interesting assessment on the over regulation of the lives of children and how this has affected the places and spaces we create for them in our communities. He spoke how 'good parenting' is slowly becoming associated with 'controlling parenting' and spoke to a Daily Mail article that was published last year examining the gradual restrictions placed on children 'roaming' over four generations (featuring a fascinating visual).

Whilst not saying anything particularly new or overly thought provoking, other than a few interesting stats and great shots of highly regulated English playgrounds, I think some interesting partnerships could be developed between early childhood researchers and those more aesthetically inclined in order to continue to push children into the forefront of public policy decisions. Working on projects promoting child friendly communities can integrate all sorts of knowledge and expertise and the key point would be that the focus of everyone's attention is childhoods and children. This opens up space for exploring how we can (re)construct and shape children's lives in our Western societies, which was one of Gill's overriding messages in his presentation.

His website is here.