Child right to relax and play

Children estopped from playing; hindering child development?

When meeting a group of amigos during a school-reunion, all you reminisce and feel nostalgic about is the good old days.  Tracing derrière where playing with friends was the only priority. It’s the time when we as individuals develop pleasurable memoirs. We accrued echoing to that fun-time childhood we lived. Playing is also very crucial for child’s enjoyment and social, physical, intellectual and emotional development.  When approached the kids asking what is central in their lives playing and friends capped the list.

Playing permits children to socialize and choose their own friends. Well, we are those lucky ones to squeeze and juice the advantages we gained from freedom to play. Many people think playing is optional and not fundamental. At this day, parents have hard-pressed their children in the battle of budding competition. Parents demand their children to be an all-rounder, be it in sports, education, cultural activities and technology. Children are suffering a loss of leaving behind their innocence; they are just hopping rabbits, which jump from one class to another. They are so imprisoned that children are missing the most important phase of the lives. Cheers to the merciless competitive civilization.

To discuss the topic in more intense, poverty is also one reason depriving children from playing and relaxing. We have habitually come across deplorable sights of small children working at off road Dhabas, sweeping the floor and tables clean, serving us with hospitality albeit, they might be famished. Children are enforced to misstep their childhood just for few penny. Family financial crisis burdens the child with responsibility to run their family living. Children are handed over with mops instead of toys. Most of the child labours work a day and night shift snatching away their time to relax and leisure.

For making the current situations nastiest, now children are even barred to play in their society complex. In a recent case, the grandmother and mother of an 11-year-old boy who live in a housing complex in Borivali have complained to the Child Rights Commission that the society in which they stay has barred children from playing and cycling in an open section of the complex. Norms have been put up and nay child flouting the norms would be fined. This, the CRC application says, has been done to fright the children and is having an effect on the children - all between 9 and 12 years of age. A report prepared by the recognized psychiatrist Dr. Harish Shetty on Heramb (the child victim living in the society whose grandmother and mother filed a complaint) a few days after the family acknowledged this communication says the boy needs "counseling and observation across at least 12 weeks for his anxiety." It records that the child is scared of going down and playing in the compound or meeting his friends there as "he may be arrested and put in jail."

The application says, "The child who was happy-go-lucky is now a bundle of nerves. Since he is frightened to be dragged to police-station on playing in the society compound - he often used to remain silent for hours together. He suffered from fever for four days and was unable to concentrate on his studies." (Online newspaper source).

Play during early years helps the children to diminish children’s fretfulness and bellicosity (aggression) and build their self-esteem and self-reliance. Further, it helps kids to recuperate from trauma and tackle with different situations. Children learn solidarity playing in groups.

so many benefits bind with playing to nurture and develop the child, how can playing be “optional” and not fundamental? The Convention on the Rights of the Child in the United Nations General Assembly was adopted long back and is recognized internationally. But it would be naive to think that all children in the world are able to exercise this right. In today’s intricate global problems, we must not forget the unique needs and pleasures of childhood or the power of sport and play in transforming lives. When broods play, the world triumphs! 


SAYALI PARAB