Too Much Freedom

Is there such a thing as too much freedom in play? The posting “Play” by the student writing as “Free Rein” in which she shares her memories of her own childhood experience of playing, suggests to me that perhaps there is such a thing as too much. This idea contrasts with those expressed by Tim Edensor and  his co-authors in the the chapter of their work, “Urban Wildscapes”, from “Playing in industrial ruins”. Edensor celebrates play in chaotic, unsupervised environments, but Free Rein’s account of her own childhood experience challenges the notion that the most productive play arises when children are free from supervision and the usual constraints of regulated environments. Her account points to the alternative view that children will engage in the most challenging form of play, stretching the boundaries of power relations, when they are forced to into contact with these boundaries by the limits of their environment. Simultaneously, her account supports Edensor’s claim that play can “make wild those spaces that otherwise may be seen as 'smooth'”.

Free Rein remembers growing up in an estate where she “was the only girl [her age] in a group of over ten boys” with whom her mother made her play, wanting her to have companions her own age. At first it was hard, but she eventually became part of their group and fondly remembers her childhood with  “unfathomable joy” as a time “when play was play”. One interesting feature of her account is that she implies that if it wasn’t for her mother’s “insistence” she would have chosen to play with the younger girls rather than with boys. As Edensor writes, quoting Harker “playing can more often than not be used to reinforce… existing power relations” (75). Children are not free from the social conscience of their society. Free Rein was aware of the separation between genders and would have rather played with younger children than crossed this divide. It was the limits of her environment, the absence of girls her age, that forced her to make the leap.

Although Edensor acknowledges that play is not entirely impossible in “tightly regulated, materially consistent, and controlled environments” (75) he claims that it “might be suppressed” (75). This claim is based on the assumption that “freedom from direct retribution is essential” (76) to play, and that spaces where “the untying of objects from obvious position and function… allows them to be interpreted and played with in ways that allow scope for imaginative improvisation and exploration, [facilitate play that].... may conjure up and enact the different potentialities that have previously only existed as unactualized possibilities, generating heightened sensual, affective, and embodied experiences that open the potential spatial, social, political, and material orderings to be confounded and threatened by the immanent, sensual, improvisational qualities of play” (76). In summary, children need opportunities for self directed play to engage in activities that challenge established orders. Free Rein’s account hints at the limits to this theory.

Free Reins experience suggests that children’s comfort zones exist within existing social structures, and so if given too free of an environment, where they can play while staying within the limits of these structures, they will not move beyond them and challenge established power relations. Edensor assumes that these structures will be “threatened” when children are able to freely interact with their environments in inventive ways, but the same unregulated environments that allow for such inventiveness may also be lacking in limitations that force children to be creative in finding ways to be able to play- they might be too easily manipulated. Arguably, more truly creative manipulation or interaction might occur when children are forced to repurpose objects or play with those who they wouldn’t in an environment with more opportunity for easy or comfortable play. Although children might effectively play with established structures in their interactions with “wild” spaces it will be by luck that they do so. However, if children are forced to make do in limited environments then it is inevitable that they will play with established orders. They will have no choice but to reorder their environments to find games.

Regulated settings may lack in the material diversity of the “wild” spaces that Edensor celebrates but Free Rein’s account suggests that this might not be much of a concern either. She remembers playing in a field with her friends, and that they described it as “our field”. The description “our” is indicative of how children can carve out their own world within a public setting. The field that Free Rein played in may not have been an overly regulated space- but most fields don’t have much “material diversity”. Children may see potential for playing in areas where adults fail to recognize it. It is this ability of a childs to claim possession of a space and change its purpose through imagination that allows for what Edensor refers to as making “wild those spaces that otherwise may be seen as 'smooth'”. It is also this ability which is key to a child’s “threatening” of established power relations. Because children can create play spaces within limited environments they can successfully interact with these environments even when it means playing outside of their comfort zone.

 

Works Cited

Free Rein. “Play.” Online posting. 20 Sept. 2016. Serendip Studio. 21 Sept. 2016.

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Tim Edensor, Bethan Evans, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington and Jon Binnie. Playing in

Industrial Ruins: Interrogating Teleological Understandings of Play in Spaces of

Material Alterity and Low Surveillance. Urban Wildscapes. Ed. Anna Jorgensen and

Richard Keenan. New York: Routledge, 2011. 65-79.