Final reflections at the end of the ICCP conference in Lisbon 2010

Without making a summary of the whole conference, several themes emerged that are worth further consideration in the future.

Children's play can be observed in three areas:
- in the family and at home
- in many institutions
- in public space.

1. Play at home
Children play at home most of all, both indoors and outdoors. And yet we know very little about their play in this space. There is not that much research on play at home with exception of children and electronic play (TV, computer, video, gsm, etc). It would be interesting to know when, with whom, with what, how long etc they play. This is even more relevant considering older boys play more on the computer.

2. Play in institutions
There is a lot of interest in children's play in schools, pre-school settings, playwork settings and so on. Most of the papers at the conference were focussing on this approach. The contributions we were listening to at the conference focussed attention on the instrumental use of play; which presented us with a paradox. In general there was a great respect for children's free play, there was the unspoken call to children: please surprise us while we are observing and listening to you. But at the same time there were many presentations informing us about very concrete playful learning activities.

3. Play in public space
It was noticeable that most of the speeches that dealt with the public domain were drawing attention to children's play in the street. There seems to be a growing consensus that children in public space should not only play on playgrounds; the whole public space should be playful. This is a positive evolution.

To conclude there was the difficult quote. To play is a children's right, but it seems to become their duty. We should consider this further.