Where have all the childhoods gone?

This article was written by Anne Longfield CBE, Chair of the Centre for Young Lives, and myself and was first published on the Transforming Society website in July 2024 - HERE

It has been over 15 years since Andy Burnham and Ed Balls put aside the pressures of their high-powered jobs as Cabinet Ministers and climbed on a swing rope together to launch Gordon Brown’s government’s Play Strategy. The photo shoot and their childlike enthusiasm were memorable, but the strategy itself is now largely forgotten.

Meanwhile, the very nature of childhood has changed in ways we could never have imagined.

Social media and smartphones, which have had such a huge impact on children’s lives, barely existed in 2008, and the austerity and cuts which saw so many playschemes, clubs and spaces lost, had yet to happen.

Over the last decade, children and families have lost so many different environments for play and fun. 800 playgrounds have closed, along with more than half of all youth centres and nearly every Sure Start centre. School playing fields have been sold off and our streets have heavier traffic and feel less safe for children to play. We live in an era of ‘No ball games’ signs and reduced school playtime.

The need for a new national conversation about how to encourage and support children to play has never been more urgent. 40 per cent of children now live with an unhealthy weight and more than 25 per cent are obese. Almost one in five has a probable mental health condition, and the digital world is having a far-reaching and sometimes damaging impact on many aspects of children’s lives.

These challenges, coupled with the changing nature of our communities and public spaces, 24/7 communication, screen time and that dramatic reduction in the availability of positive, safe places to play have changed children’s experiences of childhood.

Compared to the 1970s, children now spend 50 per cent less time in unstructured outdoor play. The British Children’s Play Survey of 2020 showed that children aged 5 to 11 played for just over three hours each day, with the majority of that happening at home or outside in home gardens, rather than in nature or in the community.

The loss of free play, particularly active outdoor play, initiated and directed by children themselves has meant many children are no longer playing for hours every day, burning calories, learning social and creative skills, making sense of the world around them, and reducing stress.

Yet over the last decade there has been an unforgiveable absence of vision for optimising opportunities to play.

That is why we have launched the Raising the Nation Play Commission, led by Paul in partnership with Anne’s new Centre for Young Lives thinktank.

It follows the publication last year of Paul’s book on childhood and children’s policy, Raising the Nation. While writing it, Paul saw with clarity not only that we need to do more for children as a society, but how absolutely central play is to happy childhoods. He dedicated a chapter to set out how play is the main way in which children (particularly younger children) explore, experiment and build an understanding of the world, and made the case for public policy ideas to encourage it supported by essay contributions from experts such as Professor Paul Ramchandani, ‘Professor of Play’ at the University of Cambridge and Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Chair of Learning through Play at the LEGO Foundation.

We believe that all of us should be asking what can be done to support all our children to thrive – so each can build their confidence, have life-affirming childhoods, and reach their full potential. Indeed, we should each be demanding it. Part of that should be encouraging and discovering the benefits of play.

Over the next 12 months, we will gather evidence, listen to expertise, hear from children and parents and visit pioneering programmes, so that we can develop an ambitious and deliverable framework for the government to create an environment, facilities, time and a culture that supports and encourages play. We will examine how to boost learning through play, explore the availability of public and private spaces, look at the changing school day and changing environments outside school, ask how and where children can play in the digital and offline worlds, and find out more about parents’ relationship to play.

We will also investigate whether an effective and enforceable right to play exists in law in England and explore what legal recourse families could use to ensure developers and landlords build, sell and rent housing with adequate and maintained spaces for their children to play.

Our group of independent and highly respected expert Play Commissioners are working with us to deliver our final report on 11 June 2025 – the second International Day of Play.

Our timing could not be better. The incoming Labour government offers a new opportunity to look afresh at many of the barriers holding back children’s development, wellbeing and happiness. Already we have been delighted with the numerous offers of support from organisations, experts, politicians and people with lived experiences who share our belief that play should be a policy priority.

We aren’t prepared to sit back and watch as more of our children spend less and less time playing, while becoming unhealthier and unhappier. We believe that play can and should become a central part of childhood again, and that government can play a creative, leading role in supporting parents, families and children to play.

It’s time to give children back their childhoods.