Play ambassadors another sign of our wacky times

Remember when the word “ambassador” meant a diplomat who represented his country in another nation? No more.

A while back, ambassadors started turning up in Calgary’s off-leash parks. Ambassadors are volunteers who are there to remind the owners — not the dogs — to play nice in the off-leash parks by doing things like picking up their dogs’ poop. These ambassadors are sort of like alpha wolves for humans.

Now, we have play ambassadors. These are adults who go to children’s playgrounds and “facilitate” play. When you hear the word “facilitate,” you know right away that something politically correct is afoot.

We had play ambassadors when I was little. They were called mothers. Whenever a child said, “I’m bored. What can I do?” the mother/ambassador would say, “Go outside and play.”

Once outside, there were more play ambassadors, in the form of other kids with bright ideas for what to do.

Like Steve, a kid in my neighbourhood when we were growing up, who thought it would be a great idea to tie his little brother, Jimmy, to a tree in his backyard. Jimmy agreed to this after Steve told him that he could play the bad guy, and being the bad guy was best. Some ambassador today would probably report Steve to the political-correctness police and send Jimmy for sensitivity training, to teach him that being the bad guy isn’t cool.

Anyway, we tied Jimmy to a tree with some skipping ropes, and then ran off to play, forgetting all about him, until someone looked around and said, “Hey, where’s Jimmy?” Oops. Jimmy was right where we had left him. “I’m telling Mom,” Jimmy said as Steve untied him.

The Lawson Foundation, a nonprofit agency based in Toronto, is handing out $2.7 million to cities across Canada — including $312,000 to Calgary — in part to fund play ambassadors at local playgrounds.

The foundation’s Christine Alden described the ambassador’s job to the media thus: “(It’s) a professional who is trained to essentially facilitate and encourage children’s play without dictating what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.” To this end, these facilitators will be armed with duct tape, tubes, cardboard boxes, balls and skipping ropes.

Wow, that sounds exciting. Cardboard boxes and duct tape. Fun, fun, fun. This is supposed to be the paraphernalia of riskier, more unstructured play. I think riskier play involves kids hanging upside down from jungle gyms, throwing snowballs, playing tag (without some fretful adult equating it to sexual harassment), going down the slide backwards, pushing each other on swings to see how high they can go before the swing set leg comes out of the ground, and other stuff that, if left alone, kids will just naturally do.

“Because what I think what we’ve underestimated in children is their ability to actually play on their own and decide what to do … ” Alden said.

Then, why not let them? Just like the adults used to let us. The adults were not part of our world of play. They would have no more thought that we needed professionals to teach us how to play than they would have thought of visiting Mars. They were off doing whatever adults did during the daytime, and we rarely saw them or gave them a thought.

Generations of children before this one have managed to play without “facilitators.” Maybe things have reversed because this generation of children feels helpless in the face of their parents’ obsessions over abductions and other dangers outside, their over-structured, constraining, exhausting schedules of activities, and their lack of time to simply do nothing but be a kid.

Maybe they’ve surrendered themselves to their electronic gadgets out of a subconscious sense of hopelessness because they’re simply not free to be children, as others before them were free to be children.

Even Jimmy, literally tied to a tree on that long-ago summer’s afternoon, was so much more free than children are today.

Naomi Lakritz is a columnist with the Calgary Herald.