Why children must play outdoors

Fast urban development is encroaching on children's right to play and making it harder for parents to entice them to the "great outdoors", away from their coveted games console.

"True, children enjoy spending hours on the computer or the PlayStation, but it's healthier to get them outdoors and if there were more spaces where they could play, they would get out more," Commissioner for Children Sonia Camilleri said.

Safeguarding the child's right to play coupled with children's perceptions and experience of bullying will be at the forefront of Ms Camilleri's action plan for this year.

Having secured an increased budget, her office will be investing the money on two research projects, among others, that tackle these two important subjects.

"We want to have scientific and researched evidence to back our policies and ensure our children are being heard," she said in an interview, following the launch of her annual report.

Ms Camilleri said parents yearned to find new exciting alternatives for their children and many frequently called her asking for advice on where to take them to play.

Since promenades and gardens in most localities prohibit cyclists or rollerbladers, children are, in effect, banned. The few smooth stretches of land where they can roller-blade remained Hal-Far and Ta' Qali and Ms Camilleri felt that every locality should strive to designate an area where children can play safely.

"To make matters worse, the Playing Fields Association and local councils seem undecided over who should look after the playing grounds, which are sometimes used by drug addicts at night and syringes can be found lying around," she pointed out.

As studies show that Maltese 13-year-old boys and girls have eaten their way to the top and surpassed the US for the obesity trophy, Ms Camilleri said she felt that making more playing areas available would be instrumental to tackling what the World Health Organisation is describing as an epidemic.

She pointed out that schools, especially several run by the Church, have an important role in ensuring that children have more than a 30-minute break and the odd PE lesson.

"We feel the present situation in several Church schools, especially, goes against the child's right to play. They will learn better if they get out more," she pointed out.

Most children who constantly tune in to television stations showing extreme sports crave the chance of trying their hand at certain disciplines, albeit on a smaller, less dangerous scale.

Ms Camilleri praised the group of teenagers who founded Malta Skateboarding United and who pushed to get some land where they could practise their favourite sport.

"At the moment the PlayStation is the most fashionable 'in' pastime, but I believe that it's a matter of making a particular outdoor sport fashionable and then everybody will follow suit - I'm sure we can set a trend, especially since Malta is blessed with such lovely weather," she said.

Ms Camilleri also felt that schools were no longer leading the way in extra-curricular activities such as organising hikes to far-flung areas on the island.

"Bay Street seems to be the only place where these children spend their time. Some kids don't even know where Bahrija or Mtahleb are, because they're not being taken there. The other day a teacher told me that the kids chose to go to Bay Street when asked where they preferred, but do they actually know of the alternatives?"

She hoped that the research project her office is initiating will create the necessary awareness among all those involved in children's upbringing to put the child's right to play at the forefront of their projects.

Touching on the other research project, Ms Camilleri said that the Council for Children felt that bullying should be tackled from the child's perspective.

"The council, which is made up of children who advise me, felt that despite all the work being done to tackle this issue, bullying in schools remains reportedly very common."

Ms Camilleri said she has heard of incidents where girls face verbal abuse and boys are blackmailed and forced to surf porn sites on the internet. Bullying on school transport, especially among boys, was also worrying.

She said that school transport remained a no man's land, where the onus of supervision was placed squarely on the bus driver. Regular supervision had to be organised in a proper way to bring about some form of control.

"I decided to establish how widespread this phenomenon is by going directly to the children so that when I confront authorities with the problem I will have scientific evidence in hand and nobody can say that these are isolated cases," she said.

"The child's voice will be given a professional edge. We're not hearing the children enough."