Play Sufficiency and the Child Friendly City

Unicef’s Child Friendly Cities & Communities programme works with local government organisations to embed children’s rights into practice. This rights-based approach refers to the freedoms and provisions all children are entitled to as young human beings. Of all the rights enshrined in the UNCRC, children’s right to play is one of the most easily overlooked, undervalued, and often undermined.

Societal changes over the last 50 years have increasingly restricted children's freedom to play outside. Factors like increased traffic and the loss of public play spaces have made it challenging for parents to allow outdoor play. Children’s right to play is marginalised or constrained in much of the public realm. This has led to children spending less time outside, having smaller roaming distances, and gaining autonomy in public spaces at a later age.

Playing and Being Well, an in-depth literature review of research into children’s play reveals that play is intimately connected to well-being. It fosters joy, enlivens public spaces, and cultivates positive feelings. Furthermore, children consistently place play at the top of what matters to them. Despite this, children’s right to play is rarely seen as a policy priority. Changing this situation requires adults to radically rethink our values about children, their childhoods, and their play.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommends that governmental support for children’s play should be based on the principle of sufficiency. In the UK, Wales and Scotland have taken legislative steps to ensure local authorities provide sufficient opportunities for play.

Cities like Leeds in England and Dublin in Ireland, as well as smaller settlements (including rural communities in Wales), are adopting and working with the concept at a more local level. Such examples illustrate the potential of play sufficiency to offer an organising principle for the development of more child-friendly communities and organisations, as well as being a powerful policy instrument for upholding children’s rights. In all such cases, hyperlocal research with children has been a catalyst for change across multiple levels of policy and practice.?

Play sufficiency is therefore a matter of spatial justice, working towards children having fair and just access to time, space and permission for play. This is about cultivating the conditions for children’s play to flourish, in local neighbourhoods, in schools, and throughout the wider public realm.

The principle of play sufficiency challenges notions of play as a time and space-bound activity, moving adult responsibilities beyond narrow definitions of play provision, towards a more collective and comprehensive response. Such an approach requires adults to take account of children’s everyday experiences of playing and how these are shaped by and can shape, the context in which children live.

By committing to play sufficiency, local governments legitimise play as an important outcome, justify the time and the human resources needed take account of and develop responses to children’s right to play. This is not only about creating spaces for play but integrating play into the broader scope of urban planning and community living. As such It calls for a collective response from professionals across various areas of work.

By prioritising play as central to our thinking, we can ensure children and their way of engaging with the world have much greater influence over how we govern and the types of environments we create for people. Play sufficiency provides a mechanism for local governments to deliver on their child-friendly intentions by orientating their ways of working towards children’s agenda of playing.

*This is an abridged version of a longer more in-depth blog hosted on our website. pop on by if you want the full version with supporting citations and reference list.

https://ludicology.com/store-room/play-sufficiency-and-the-child-friendly-city/