Children’s Special Places: Exploring the Role of Forts, Dens, and Bush Houses in Middle Childhood

Foreword

FOREWORD How societies use and create spaces for children—day care centers, schools, theme parks, video games— determines how the next generation will see reality. Those who design software for kids or the play areas at fast food restaurants replicate some mental picture of users7 joy Conceptions of childhood past, present, and future and the corresponding worlds constructed by adults "for the kids" revolve around such issues as innocence and deviance, safety and abuse, contemporary kinderculture, and the "disappearance" of childhood. However, in our highly programmed and commercial world, little is known about why children gravitate to certain locales for comfort, excitement, self-awareness, or beauty and avoid other areas. Entomologist vii Foreword E. O. Wilson considers the early quest to constructsecret space a "fundamental trait of human nature" of "ultimate value to survival." Yetthis primal urge has largely escaped notice. David Sobel's Children's Special Places makes a novel contribution to the small but growing movement which pays heed to our need for play. His investigation of the role of forts, dens, and bush houses for children growing up in Devon, England, the island of Carriacou, West Indies, and rural and urban parts of the United States provides intimate access to a highly personal but littlestudied zone of human experience. "Sometimes I make a little playhouse for myself, I bring things to eat and read books" (Dwight, age 10). "v My secret den/ he whispered . v No one knows about this place, even my brother7 " (Alex). "I wanted me to go in it, but not other people " (Nechole, age 11). Such voices document a rare view of how the young seek refuge from grown-up society in realms that paradoxically ease their way into adulthood. Children know the importance of hiding out, of finding the "just for me" place where they cannot be seen. Peeking through a hollowed-out hedgerow or climbing a tree is the initial discovery of a "self-ish" space, a site detached from the ongoing intimate relation with parents, siblings, teachers, or peers. Playing house viii Foreword or capturing insects in small, cupped hands, children reframe the universe, teasing their imagination to find its own dimensions. We like to imagine that when this place of discovery is outdoors, kids will find that the best things in life are still free: sand, air, trees, animals, water. Toomany of our assumptions about childhood reflect romantic ideals of the past, not the white noise of today's advertising and mass media, which assault children with labels and "lifestyles." Fewer than two percent of Americans now grow up in the country. The high-rise housing projects of the 1950s offered playscapes of asphalt, metal jungle gyms, and concrete towers; today the relentless destruction of vegetation by developers and the mailing of recreational spaces indicate how little adults sincerely care about children's contact with living things or the social isolation of the very poor. Issues of land use now attract public interest and debate. Yet architects, real estate developers, and city planners remain half blind to ways the young relate to their physical surroundings in unstructured settings; rarely do they consider the needs of low-caste children or those for whom home is not safe. Millions of young people are growing up on sterile streets without backyards or safe parks. As vicarious pursuits, virtual pets, and synthetic playgrounds ix Foreword become pervasive, a world that allows minimal emotional engagement with animals and plants may be threatening to nature itself. Although a wide range of theories has been proposed to explain global transformations in politics, economics , and the environment over the last decade, children are seldom given space to reflect on the societies in which they live or the kind of play they like. Vagrant minors around the world search for safety in hideaways, and street children from Cairo to Bogota to Seoul are seen but not heard. Building on Edith Cobb's The Ecology of the Imagination in Childhood and Roger Hart's Children's Experience of Place, this volume awakens our awareness of how children, who own nothing, possess places. Examiningthe critical role of hideouts in middle childhood, Sobers cross-cultural research in environmental education suggests that between the ages of six and twelve what girls and boys want most of all is to "make a world in which to find a place to discover a self/7 However humble the shelter, these first getaways...