The play sector and every local authority that worked hard to produce aplay strategy for lottery funding will applaud the Children's Plan. Itrepresents the biggest national investment ever made to children's playin England.
Research has highlighted children's declining presence in the outdoorworld. Traffic, fear of crime and negative attitudes to children inpublic have all helped to create the phenomenon of the "battery-reared"child. Children today are too often considered neither welcome nor safeto be out or they are frequently corralled into denatured and sanitisedplay areas of little value to their instinctive need for imaginative"playscapes".
The diminution of traditional play strikes a popular nerve thatsomething is wrong: that childhood has lost something important.Additionally, there is a pervasive anxiety that the commercialisation ofchildhood has annexed children's leisure time. Thus, they areinsidiously enrolled into the consumer culture where they grow up toosoon, at the expense of a more natural induction into a society ofvalues and community.
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