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Modern children are missing out on this vital life lesson

There’s something missing nowadays compared to the way things were during the 1960s when sports and games fitted into the broader backyard landscape.

Two children, a little blond girl and boy, standing side by side peeking over an old rustic wooden fence with just their eyes visible
Two children, a little blond girl and boy, standing side by side peeking over an old rustic wooden fence with just their eyes visible

The suburban home with a backyard sits at the heart of the Australian way of life. And despite relentless encouragement to “dense up”, the vast majority of us still live this way.

Over time this way of life has been reimaginedto align with modern values and expectations. In the 1960s of my childhood, our three-bedroom Housing Commission home comprised a footprint of about 130sqm positioned on a quarter-acre (1011sqm) block. Allowing for outhouses, this left perhaps 850sqm of private outdoor space for our family of eight. Fast-forward to today. The average new house is far bigger at around 240sqm, and the average new house block is smaller, say 500sqm or less. Over 60 years the home has bulked up while the block size has scaled back. How has this shaped the way we live?

An abundance of outdoor space in the 1960s created a culture of sportiness and of social connectivity. Football was played with local kids on the nature strip. Impromptu cricket matches were played in backyards. Every garage had an obligatory netball ring attached. There was ample backyard space for bike riding, for pogo sticks, for walking on home-made stilts, for building cubby houses.

Back then backyards were wondrous places with fruit trees, vegie patches, chook sheds, oil-drum incinerators, a wood heap, compost heap, rotary clothesline and outhouses including a washhouse and a lavatory. Sports and games fitted into the broader backyard landscape. My oldest brother organised neighbourhood boxing matches in our backyard; another brother used to enjoy pole-vaulting our backyard fence with a bamboo fishing pole.

The backyards of this era taught a generation how to have fun with improvised equipment and a gathering of neighbourhood kids. So much about suburban life has changed since the old days. Families are smaller. Households are richer. Parents are busier. But there’s more. Partly because backyards are so small, and because there’s fewer kids in the neighbourhood, it means social activities tend to be scheduled and held off-site rather than ad hoc, kid-initiated and backyard-focused.

Today’s sporting activities are less likely to comprise backyard matches but rather weekly lessons at local recreational facilities. And this surely means that today’s sporting talent is likely to be spotted earlier and can then be coached, trained and introduced to formal competition. Maybe there’s less need for free-range backyard space when there’s convenient access to communal sporting facilities.

And yet I still think there’s something missing nowadays, compared to the way things were back then. It’s the experience of forming relationships, of making up teams, of including every kid in the neighbourhood who wanted to play. Backyard games built resilience and social skills, including the skill of getting along with others in the neighbourhood.

Smaller backyards may have led to the early spotting of sports talent (perhaps evident in Paris) but I wonder if there isn’t a life skill that has been lost along the way: the ability to build relationships with whoever happens to be around and wants to enjoy the game. Finding ways to fit people in is a skill that I think goes a long way to building stronger communities.

Bernard Salt
Bernard SaltColumnist

Bernard Salt is widely regarded as one of Australia’s leading social commentators by business, the media and the broader community. He is the Managing Director of The Demographics Group, and he writes weekly columns for The Australian that deal with social, generational and demographic matters.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/modern-children-are-missing-out-on-this-vital-life-lesson/news-story/c77e89569c53fe182de24421867647fb