Where Do the Children Play?
Film Review
Jeffrey Cushing
Citation: Cushing, Jeffrey. (2009). "Where Do the Children Play? Film Review." Children, Youth and Environments 19 (1). Retrieved [date] from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/
Cook, Christopher M. (producer) 2007-2008. Where Do the Children Play? Michigan Television. 60 mins. English. PBS.
While the essential dystopian nature of suburbia has become familiar to many of us through numerous visual, literary, and academic works in recent years, the impact that these changing environments have had on children has been addressed in popular culture to a far lesser degree. Where Do the Children Play? is a one-hour PBS documentary produced by Christopher Cook (2007-08) that begins to address some of the impacts these changes have produced on children. [See accompanying reviews of the film’s companion book and study guide].
We are probably all familiar to some degree with current statistics that point to rising occurrences of obesity, behavioral problems, and the use of pharmaceuticals to treat those behavioral problems in children and youth today. In addition, the paradigm of the suburban “soccer mom” has also become familiar: children are endlessly shuttled between a range of regimented activities—from sports to music lessons to clubs and religious activities. Many of these activities are promoted by parents with an eye ultimately turned to creating the sort of resumé believed to be most advantageous to eventually getting children into the “best” colleges and universities.
In addition, the post-World War II mass migration from cities and countryside to the suburbs has also drastically changed children’s environments, with two effects being particularly noticeable: a lack of easily-accessible common spaces, and an increasing isolation of children indoors.
The net effect on children of all of these changes, according to Where Do the Children Play?, has been a de-emphasis on the importance of spontaneous play, particularly in nature or natural settings.
The differences between indoor-centered and outdoor-centered environments are striking. The average child today spends four to six hours a day in front of a screen (television, computer, video game). While these types of environments can have some beneficial effects, such as increasing children’s vocabulary and their general knowledge of the world, they nonetheless present some limitations as well.
Among the most important of these limitations is the fact that screens, unlike natural settings, do not allow one to engage all of one’s senses at the same time. This factor is particularly important in that natural and immersive sensory environments allow and even promote the use of imagination in children. Unregimented environments allow us to develop a sense of what our own intrinsic predilections and abilities might be. The end result is that instead of producing regimented children who have been programmed to please adults in an essentially parent-driven process, play in natural environments in particular can ultimately foster creativity and innovation, and most importantly, producing people with the ability to think for themselves.
The documentary is broken up into a number of chapters, including “The Nature of Play,” “Suburbs,” “The City,” and “What’s Bugging Parents,” that address these aforementioned issues.
The good news is that rather than attempting to ship all children out to the countryside—an obviously impractical solution—urban environments too can produce a unique combination of benefits. Once the question of children’s basic safety in urban environments has been addressed, cities can often (contrary to popular belief) actually offer more benefits to children than more affluent suburbs. Chief among these benefits are a sense of community and an ability to effectively negotiate with peers in a social setting.
Where Do the Children Play? is primarily aimed at a lay audience, and in that sense successfully challenges popular notions of self-directed play as being unproductive. Cook’s background as a reporter and investigative journalist helps structure the narrative in an accessible way, and permits the documentary to present these ideas free from technical jargon. Nonetheless, a number of academic studies and case examples are presented, grounding important concepts in empirical as well as real-life terms.
Ultimately, the most compelling reason presented for why self-directed play in natural environments is socially important is that without the abilities to take risks, learn, and think for ourselves individually, we are much more susceptible to the dangers of an overly regimented society with an overly compliant populace. And this danger is certainly a very real one: if recent history shows anything, it points to the dangers when “groupthink” supplants the ability to think critically for oneself, and the courage to act on one’s own beliefs and principles.
The DVD version of the documentary does not come with a menu page or chapter selections, which can make navigating the film somewhat cumbersome. It would not run on my computer, and got stuck numerous times on my DVD player as well.
Nonetheless, the film successfully challenges a number of popular conceptions about the importance of play in childhood, what form that play should ideally take, and what the undeniably important but not-always-easily-perceived social effects of those choices might be.
Reviewer Information
Jeffrey Cushing received a Phi Beta Kappa degree in Philosophy before completing a Master’s degree in Journalism. He currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he works as a documentary filmmaker.