It Took a Village to Raise a Child. How Does It Happen Today?
We all know the saying. It took a village to raise a child — and most of us, if we are honest, have a feeling for what it meant even if we have never lived it. It meant that children were not the exclusive property of their parents, watched over by anxious adults in sealed domestic units. It meant that childhood happened in public, in shared space, under the loose and largely benign supervision of a whole community. Other adults kept an eye. Older children showed younger ones the ropes. Children learned from each other as much as from their parents, and from the world itself as much as from either.
I remember something of that world. Regular walks in the woods, unaccompanied. Expeditions to fish for water-snails in the ponds nearby — my first business venture, as it happens, selling them to Cramphorns who sold them on to garden-pond owners. I remember the rooks above, the plop of a water-rat off the bank, the cluck of a moorhen, the buzz of insects. A mile to school and back, with the possibility of an ice cream on the way back. Parents who got to know each other at the school gate, groups of children ambling along with a parent loosely in tow. None of this felt like education. All of it was.
The shrinking world of childhood
That world has been contracting for two generations, and we now have the data to prove it. In 1971, eight out of ten children aged seven or eight travelled to school on their own. By 1990 that figure had dropped to fewer than one in ten. Research by Dr William Bird for Natural England and the RSPB traced the roaming range of four generations of one Sheffield family: a child who walked six miles unaccompanied to his favourite fishing spot in 1926; his grandson who cycled freely around the estate and walked to school alone in the 1970s; and his great-grandson in 2007, who was driven to school, taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike, and allowed to roam no more than 300 yards from home. Four generations. From six miles to 300 yards.
Tim Gill, in his landmark study No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007), identified the forces driving this contraction: the growth of road traffic, car-dependent lifestyles, longer working hours, the decline of public space, and the rise of indoor leisure. Together, he argued, these changes have reinforced what he calls “the logic of containment” — a generalised, deeply held belief that children are essentially vulnerable, that the world outside is essentially dangerous, and that the right response is to keep children inside, supervised, and safe. The result, as Gill pointed out, is that children are statistically safer than at any point in human history — and yet more restricted in their everyday freedom than any previous generation.
The consequences are not trivial. Research consistently shows that children deprived of contact with nature and unstructured outdoor experience are at greater risk of anxiety and depression. Time in green spaces reduces stress within minutes. Children’s behaviour and school work improve when their environment includes natural elements. The evidence that free, child-directed play is essential to healthy development is robust and growing.
What free play actually does
Peter Gray, in Free to Learn (2013), argues that the decline in child-directed free play since the mid-twentieth century correlates precisely with rising rates of anxiety, depression, and inability to cope in young people. His argument is not sentimental. Free play, he contends, is the primary means by which children develop autonomy, self-regulation, and resilience — the capacity to manage their own emotions, negotiate with others, take risks, fail, and try again. These are not soft skills. They are the foundations of a functioning adult life.
The LEGO Foundation’s research into learning through play identifies five characteristics that make play such a powerful tool for development: it is joyful, meaningful, actively engaging, iterative, and socially interactive. Joy is associated with increased dopamine levels linked to memory, attention, creativity, and motivation. Active engagement exercises the brain networks responsible for self-control. Social interaction is not merely pleasant but essential — particularly for the complex, higher-order skills like critical thinking and creativity that no amount of passive instruction can develop. Agency — the freedom to direct one’s own activity, to be supported rather than directed — is identified as a critical requirement for effective learning.
Business leaders now rank creativity as the most sought-after skill in the working world, and millions of children will grow up to do jobs that do not yet exist. The capacity to connect, explore, and transform — to think creatively — is built through exactly the kind of play that children are increasingly denied.
Screens are not a substitute
Into the space left by the contraction of outdoor freedom has rushed the screen. Children aged eight to nine now spend nearly two hours online every day; by thirteen to fourteen that figure has risen to four hours; by fifteen to seventeen, to more than six hours a day. Sixty-four per cent of children aged eight to fourteen are using devices between eleven at night and five in the morning (Ofcom, Online Nation, December 2025).
This is not simply a matter of time. Social media algorithms are designed to amplify content that drives strong reactions — controversy, outrage, division. That is the business model: maximise engagement, increase clicks and views, with no regard for the consequences. Children who have not had years of exposure to other children and adults, who have not learned through play and conversation how to read people, form opinions, and filter what they are told, have no defences against what the screen suggests. The result, as the data now makes plain, is an epidemic of anxiety, loneliness, and what young people themselves call “brain rot.” Continuing for years it is also the reason for the current riots in Southampton and Belfast people angry, afraid of ‘the other’, with no means of expression or confidence in politicians, only able to be aggressive.
Finding the village
Research at the University of Bristol, led by Consultant Paediatrician, Dr Tom Allport, and amplified through the work of Samira Musse and the Find Your Village Network, is examining how families can find or recreate the conditions the village once provided. Beginning with Somali refugee communities building new lives in unfamiliar surroundings, this work has broadened into a multi-layered initiative combining research, advocacy, and peer support — and campaigning for more green spaces and parks for children in east Bristol. The Find Your Village Network understands that the village is not just a metaphor: it requires actual physical space, parks, and places where children can play and parents can connect.
‘Play helps build social skills and confidence, which are hugely important for life trajectories — including wellbeing, participation, employment, and health,’ Dr Allport observes. ‘We know that people who do poorly developmentally in youth often go on to do poorly in terms of health, employment and crime. If we want to improve the health of our nations, we have to invest in pregnancy and early years.’
But the problem is not simply one of physical space. Here, in a small Cotswold village, the village green and the playing field still exist. You rarely see children playing there unsupervised. The space is there; the freedom to use it has quietly disappeared. The logic of containment that Tim Gill identified in urban streets has reached even the most apparently child-friendly rural settings. It is a cultural shift as much as a physical one — and no amount of new parkland will reverse it on its own.
What the arts give back
One of those spaces is school. Not the school of standardised tests and exam preparation — the school that the government’s own Curriculum and Assessment Review (Francis, 2025) found has systematically squeezed out the arts over fifteen years, leaving the most disadvantaged children with almost no access to creative education. But the school that CATS is trying to build, one arts experience at a time, in sixty-nine primary schools across Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire, schools with an arts-rich environment.
What arts education gives children is, at its best, precisely what free play gives them: agency, iteration, joy, social connection, the experience of making meaning from materials and imagination. A child moulding clay is not being told the right answer. A child learning to sing is not being tested. A child creating a sculpture that will be exhibited in a professional show — and being greeted, when she arrives, as an exhibiting artist, her hand shaken, told what an honour it is to meet her — is experiencing something that no screen, no worksheet, and no risk assessment can provide. For two weeks after that show, Malia told her parents every day: I’m an artist.
The LEGO Foundation describes the deepest form of creative learning as transformation — the moment when a child’s own understanding of the world is changed by what they have made or discovered. That is what arts education at its best delivers. It is also, in a different register, what the village once delivered: the experience of being a person in the world, with something to offer it, and somewhere to belong.
Cotswolds Arts Through Schools is working in the schools where that experience is hardest to come by and most needed. The arts are not a luxury addition to a crowded curriculum. They are one of the last remaining spaces where children can be, in the fullest sense, children.
And, maybe, we can all encourage our children and grand-children to play outdoors, alone and with friends, without close supervision and away from screens. The statistics show it is not half as risky as we have come to fear!
