Families were typically bigger, with more contact across extended family networks, giving children frequent contact with adults - and other children - of many different ages.
Children today have more limited social interactions, due in part to the move to smaller and more dispersed families.
Add to that parental fears about traffic and crime, and the result is that parents are sharing ever more of their time and space with their children.
However, the Playday survey we commissioned with The Children's Society found that this does not necessarily translate into time spent playing together.
Most children told us that they rarely play with their parents, saying that they are often too busy or tired, and that they don't know how to play children's games. These findings suggest that parents' definition of play is much wider than children's, and that children have rather higher expectations of what it means to be playful.
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