Health and safety – a child’s joyful shouting perspective

One thing most playworkers know is that children can make you laugh. A lot. Sometimes you won’t even understand why or how they can make you laugh so much. This is one of my funniest moments on an adventure playground.

I was supervising a large fire, on a busy, hot summer day on a London adventure playground. Some boys had put a sheet of plywood on top of the fire. As the underneath of the plywood slowly heated up, the flames slid around the edge, and up the sides of the wood. A ten year old boy, a regular to the playground, known there since he was small, jumped over the flames onto the middle of the board, and repeatedly jumped up and down, waving his arms wildly in the air, screaming ‘HEALTH AND SAFETY, HEALTH AND SAFETY!’ then started laughing loads, and shouting ‘AARGH’ with a joyful expression, and massive smile on his face.

I recorded this in writing because it was funny but I couldn’t comprehend why, my mind was being stretched in order to try and make sense of this moment, and because I knew that it was unusual for this particular boy to express himself in this way. I think that the boy had some kind of learning difficulties, I don’t know which one or ones in particular, as playworkers are often not given this information by parents, who don’t want their children to be pigeonholed as having something ‘wrong’ with them, don’t want to deal with the same conversations about their child in another setting as well as school, or sometimes don’t have a diagnosis for the condition for their child. I just know that he generally went a bit slower than everyone else, moved slowly, spoke slowly, observed and watched what was going on a lot, but didn’t comment on anything too much, and that the playworkers made sure to explain things to him in a really clear, simple way, gave him a bit more input, and watched out for him a bit more than we needed to for most of the other children. He rarely shouted, was hardly ever loud, and hardly ever made sudden or large locomotor movements.

This moment is an example of how little we know about what is going on in childrens minds most of the time. And how they have a perspective, and might want to make a commentary on the world around them. What the boy was commenting on, and why, I will never know. I only know it was so funny because he seemed to be taking joy in mocking, and playing with something that maybe seemed stupid, or restrictive to him. I don’t know what he thought about in this moment, or if he thought about it, all I know is that he was playing with fire, with his body, with his voice, with the people around him who he was looking at and communicating with in that moment, and that he was playing with a concept, this ‘health and safety’ thing that he had obviously absorbed from the world, and the adult world around him. And he looked happy, as happy as I’ve ever seen anyone look.

fire, circumcision, and the meaning of ‘rich’ to an East London child

I’m volunteering on a play session on an adventure playground in East London. It is a large playground, with a firepit in an open grassy area, about 20 feet away from the nearest wooden play structure. I work on after school and holiday play sessions about once a week. I’m standing near the fire, and boys and girls are coming and going from around the fire.

One boy stands around the fire for a while, one or two foot away from me. He is about eleven or twelve years old. We haven’t met many times, and don’t know each other very well. I am surprised when he starts a conversation with me about circumcision. At one point he says ‘my mate had it done and he got two thousand pounds and a ride in a limo’. I don’t say too much, just ‘hmm’, ‘oh’ and things like that, and I make eye contact with him and nod my head occasionally. Another boy arrives around the fire and joins in the conversation.

I find it unusual that they are so comfortable talking to me about this. I try not to show this and carry on joining in with the conversation, nodding and making small noises, but saying very little.

The boy and his friend start talking to me about how much money it would be worth getting circumcised for, how much it would hurt, and the downsides of getting it done. Then the boys conversation turns to money, and Christmas presents. One of the boys said he is going to get £500.00 for Christmas. I say something along the lines of ‘wow, that’s a lot of money’ and he said ‘yeah, but I live on ****** estate, I’m not rich’. The estate is a large one, close to the playground, and to give a simplified version of its history, I will just say that it has a long background of problems related to drug and gang related crime, and the estate management’s neglect to the buildings. The estate is and feels a bit safer now than it was a few years ago, and I’ve been told by people who live there now that it’s better living there than it was before, but there is still a tense atmosphere there, and parts of it don’t feel really safe to me when I go through it. I find this interesting, the boy’s perception that he is not rich because he lives on this estate, whilst he is talking about being given what a lot of people would consider to be a large amount money for a present for a child.

The boy’s comment about his estate stuck in my head for a while. Maybe it can tell us something about how children from certain areas perceive themselves in terms of being rich or poor, and what it means to them to be poor.