Covid-19 has given children new words and ideas to play with

From The Economist. Full story here.

Playground Culture: The pandemic has made play at once more modern and more old-fashioned

At school, I’ve invented a game with my friends,” says Griffin, a nine-year-old Australian boy. The rules of Corona Tip are simple. One child chases the others, touching as many as he can. Anyone caught is “in corona”. They join the chaser in pursuit of those remaining, as do all the children they tag in turn—a neat demonstration of exponential growth. The game ends when everybody has been caught.

Griffin’s account was collected by the Pandemic Play Project, one of several groups researching children’s behaviour in the covid-19 era. Children in many countries were kept apart for long spells in 2020 and 2021. When they returned to school, they were often banned from touching. Playgrounds have been segregated by year group and some equipment removed. How have these changes affected play?

It is partly an anthropological question. Some of the researchers are inspired by Iona and Peter Opie, who wrote a series of books about children’s games, songs, rhymes and jokes beginning in the late 1940s. The Opies argued that primary-school children had a distinct oral culture, which they transmitted to each other under the noses of adults. Much of their lore was decades, even centuries old. Children’s culture, they wrote, is as special as that of “some dwindling aboriginal tribe”.