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| Garden play yields happy, healthy children who sleep well |
And yet statistics from the UK’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents suggest life at home is about four times as dangerous indoors as out. This might reassure parents about outdoor play but we still face the challenge of how to lure children away from interactive fairy tales, video games, DVDs, television soap operas and online social networking.
In fact, any parent who invests as much time and money into designing equipment for outdoor play in their garden as they do on installing indoor electronic gadgetry is likely to be pleased with the return: happier, healthier children who sleep well.
A flying fox or zipwire strung between two trees, or between a suitably robust wall and the ground, makes an alluringly terrifying garden game. If you lack natural soft landing area it is worth buying a soft play surface that can be anything from custom-made rubber matting in your own (or your children’s) designs to rubber chippings.
Younger children are better off with a swing, although the soft landing advice still applies. Off-the-peg versions that come with a stand are great but a large swing made from a plank of wood slung from the branch of a mature, healthy tree can be even more fun. I made a three-seater for my children under the boughs of a horse chestnut so their legs swished through snowdrops and cow parsley in season. Now that they are teenagers and we have moved to the city a hammock has taken its place but they still talk about the swing, and our flying fox, with nostalgia.
Dens are another favourite that can be created with play tents in every shape, size and design from fairy castles and beauty parlours to grim-looking camouflaged “military complexes”. There are brightly coloured tunnels, too, that entertain and scare little children in equal measure. All the tunnels and tents are pop-up – and down – making assembly and storage easy and fast.
Trampolines are more permanent structures with seemingly permanent appeal. They are a fun way to help children – and their parents – burn off excess calories but can be dangerous and look awful. The solution is to dig a pit so that the top of the trampoline is at ground level. It won’t prevent accidents altogether but it will reduce their number and severity.
If trampoline installation seems daunting, then turn to sport: basketball, rounders (or baseball), back-garden cricket, football, badminton and even croquet. The equipment is inexpensive and can be ordered online. Just remember that these ball (and shuttlecock) games will be destroying your borders and wrecking your lawn for only a few years before the children get to their late teens and find other outlets for their energy. Any dreams about a beautiful garden can wait until then. On the other hand, I recently designed a garden with soccer “goal posts” made from rose stands that will come into their own in about five years when my clients’ youngest child is 18 and the David Austin roses have hardened up thanks to a regular hammering from footballs.
That particular client refused to let me install a pond because they felt it would be too dangerous for visiting youngsters. Children certainly need to be supervised when they play in or near water but they also need to be educated about natural dangers. Ponds give hours of interest. Our first was a brown plastic sink about 30cm across and 10cm deep. The children could have drowned in it if they had done handstands on that spot but, instead, they watched dragonfly larvae hatch and frogspawn transform into frogs.
Animals of many kinds attract children outside and, if horses are not a possibility, hens make lovely, productive pets that can be carried about and petted. We kept Black Rock hybrid hens and used to cook their eggs, along with potatoes and marshmallows, over a fire.
My children began their own camp-fire cooking in their early teens. Was it irresponsible to allow this to happen? There are always risks and, if an accident had happened I would be writing something different now. As it is, my eldest is on her gap year travelling round New Zealand and the far east, cooking most of her meals on camp fires. I’m so proud of her and feel my regime of forbidding TV and computer games during the school week has paid off.
Outdoor play, however mundane, has long-term benefits for youngsters. Small children go through a stage of being transfixed by apparently mundane things such as a patch of soil, grass, gravel and paving. Encourage this. Ask them about what they are looking at. Ask them if they would like to make patterns with the stones, blades of grass, leaves or feathers they have found and help them to use their treasures to make a headdress, decorate an old shirt or make a necklace for teddy.
My children found fossils in our gravel, beetles running through our flowerbeds and endless dying rabbits and birds that were nursed in moss nests until the Grim Reaper arrived, at which point lavish funerals and wakes were organised. Some might frown at the idea of a play funeral in the back garden but I take Albert Einstein’s view of the matter: “Play is the highest form of research”.
