Freedom to Play: We Made Our Own Fun

Karen Danielson, Ph.D., is a research consultant at Laurentian
University who specializes in leisure, textiles, family life, and Japan.

Freedom to Play is a collection of written material by about a hundred
different authors from across Canada. Some of the material was written
by children between 1900 and the 1950s and published in the children’s
pages of rural newspapers. Other contributions are from adults who
remember childhood play experiences in that period.

The editor describes typical play patterns in her introductory
comments. Children were often sent outside to play and were responsible
for organizing their own activities. They valued their freedom to wander
and explore everything in their world, and they rarely played their
games to completion. Through the contributions, we see how some children
who lived by the ocean learned to build boats while others played at
being cowboys, seamstresses, or merchants. Activities that were common
across the country included marble games in spring, making angels in the
snow, and skipping. The influences of war, racism, and technology are
apparent in some of the play activities described in the book.

Freedom to Play is valuable resource for those interested in social
history. Older readers will find many reminders of their own childhood,
while young people are likely to enjoy reading the letters that were
written by their peers from the past.