LETTER FROM THE GUEST EDITORS

For the last two years IPA has been immersed in the theme of Access to Play in Crisis (APC). Emerging are windows on the worlds of children that leave us lost in admiration of their ingenuity and resilience, and simultaneously aghast at the circumstances in which they play. As we conclude the first two years of APC projects, this special issue of PlayRights opens the shutters and lets in some light on play in the lives of children, even when those are lives of everyday crisis.

This issue aims to gives you a glimpse of what our researchers found when they spent time with children and families in six diverse locations, trying together to understand the mechanisms through which children exercise their right to play. The IPA research partners, located in Thailand, Nepal, India, Turkey, Lebanon and Japan, have between them have produced a rich body of information.

Our findings challenge preconceptions of risk (the railway line in one study is a comparative safe place to play as the dangers are predictable and learned compared to the unpredictable dangers of the river), where there is or isn’t opportunity to play (‘sneaking’ the chance to play appears to be pretty universal coping mechanism), what makes a ‘good’ environment for play (children in one of the studies are growing up in the worst living conditions in Kolkata but are agile, inventive, and happy – their only complaint is that a local park is barred to them due to discrimination).

Despite this, structural barriers to health, education, housing and employment rights are still conspire to defeat the resilience built and expressed through play. Critically, the studies force us to ask how the play ‘capital’ built by the children themselves can be maintained rather than eroded by such barriers and even by interventions and regeneration projects designed to improve matters.

To implement children’s right to play in situations of crisis, a major challenge is to expand the view point of agencies and funders of programmes /projects to include an understanding of the importance of play and link this to the Sustainable Development Goals particularly: health and wellbeing, quality education and sustainable cities and communities.

IPA believes it has taken a useful first step but we are now even more conscious of the need for a ladder of actions leading to policy and programmatic change.

There are two significant and stubborn challenges – 1) the varying levels of understanding of the importance of play in children’s lives and very different interpretations of what we mean by play (IPA uses the UN Committee on the Right of the Child definition, GC17, 2013) and 2) the prevailing trend to accept de facto the greater importance of adultorganised recreational and educational activities.

IPA does not suggest these are not of great value to children, however children’s own self-directed and freely chosen playing is vital to their mental and physical health, resilience, ability to cope, psychological healing and is, in itself, a form of self-protection which we must not overlook.

The Guest Editors for this issue of PlayRights Magazine are Theresa Casey (Scotland), Sudeshna Chatterjee (India) and Kathy Wong (Hong Kong); Cynthia Gentry (USA) is Editor.