‘We call this “play”,however…’: Navigating ‘play anxiety’ in early childhood education and care markets

Play anxiety

More than ever, consuming parents are required to navigate competing discourses of play. With the individualisation of responsibility inherent in neoliberal meritocracy (Barr et al., 2014; Hartley, 2012), parents must make decisions about where, when and how their children engage in play with the understanding that these decisions have consequences for their futures. The sorts of play that take place both within and outside of educational institutions come with risks and rewards that parents must navigate (Brooker, 2010; Waite et al., 2014). Similarly, parents face pressures about how to manage their children’s play time most efficiently in order to ensure they meet or exceed normative and timely development milestones (Ball, 2004; Vincent and Ball, 2007). These competing pressures represent contemporary society’s play anxiety.

Pedagogically, risky play is widely recognised as providing multiple advantages for children’s development. Stemming from Frobelian and Piagetian notions of learning development, dominant constructivist and social-constructivist educational theories tend to highlight play’s ability to support students’ incremental physical, social and cognitive growth (Bialostok, 2012; Little et al., 2011; Weisberg et al., 2016). Building on this, the element of risk in play highlights children’s agency in the learning process, whereby they are empowered to learn through trial, error and experimentation. As Little et al. (2011) argue, risky play ‘provides opportunities for challenge, testing limits, exploring boundaries and learning about injury-risk’ (p. 115). Furthermore, an element of risk that supports students’ physical, social and cognitive development is the introduction of excitement in a child’s learning experience. Many children garner enjoyment out of risky play which can have the effect of engendering states of flow in learning, sustaining children’s attention on playful tasks and inspiring love of play-based learning (Sandseter, 2007).

Nonetheless, concerns about risky play are widespread. One primary parental concern about play is that it is idle, unstructured and unconstructive. While competing studies have found differing results in terms of categories of parents who tend to embrace this idea, it remains a view that recurs in studies of parents’ perceptions of play (Brooker, 2010; Peterson et al., 2017; Kane, 2016; Little et al., 2011). Some scholars have found that vulnerable groups such as ethnic minority communities more consistently report concern over the idleness of play (Brooker, 2010; Chowdhury and Rivalland, 2012). Similarly, lower socioeconomic status families commonly report concerns over whether play is a valuable way to spend time if children are to improve their socioeconomic status (Goncu et al., 2007; Kane, 2016). Speaking from the United States, Kane (2016: 297) highlights how these play anxieties are only exacerbated by neoliberal rationalities that break down social safety nets and casualise work, and therefore reinforce the precariousness of children’s futures:

the play-learning binary coexists with and relies upon the hegemonic status of neoliberal economic practices and ideological formations. The economic uncertainty and labour market competition that characterises U.S. neoliberalism is tightly linked to parental anxieties regarding the future economic success and stability of their children.

Similarly, others link play anxiety to pressures on children to meet standards at early ages, pressuring practitioners into formalising instructional learning at younger ages than ever (Brooker, 2010; Sherwood and Reifel, 2010).

What is clear, then, is that there remains a discourse of play that sees it as separate from ‘real’ work. It is a perspective well entrenched into a society that continues to timetable and dissect ‘work time’ and ‘leisure time’ in educational institutions and workplaces. Western educational institutions, for example, often continue to use play as a classroom management tool, whereby play becomes the reward incentive for children’s behaviour during non-play work activities (Sherwood and Reifel, 2010). Similarly, unstructured play can be considered undesirable in educational institutions because it can be ‘associated with chaos, loss of adult control, and indeterminate outcomes’ (Wood, 2010: 14). Such practices only reinforce notions that play and work are mutually exclusive practices.

Second, play is increasingly seen by parents as an inherently risky activity. This is compounded by public discourses that publicise the risks of playing in public spaces in contemporary Western societies. Valentine (2004) draws connection between media hyperbole about rare and outlier cases and parents’ excessive restrictions of their children’s use of public space to play. Such ‘terror talk’ (Valentine, 2004) tends to focus upon people’s overblown sense of the dangers of paedophilia, abductions (Jenkins, 2006; Kennedy, 2010) and traffic danger (Jones, 2002). As moral panic about the safety of children grows, she argues, the spaces in which adults allow children to play shrink. Further, the spaces in which children continue to be allowed to play become more heavily policed in order that children’s safety is secured against the terrors of the adult world.

As a result, today’s generation of children in the United Kingdom play outdoors at less than half the rate of their parents’ generation, while more than half of the current generation are only permitted by their parents to climb trees under supervision (Karsten, 2005; Kennedy, 2010). Physical contact between children and their peers or adult carers during play has also been found to have been curtailed by fears of sexual predators and physical harm to children. Appropriate play in risk society (Beck, 1992) is therefore increasingly being considered as indoor and supervised where risks of harm from both predatory strangers and the outdoor world are curtailed (Jenkins, 2006).

One response to the growing sense that the world is increasingly unacceptably risky for children has been to work to eliminate risk altogether. Kennedy (2010) highlights how moral panics about ‘bad’ schools and growing ‘compensation culture’ has led parents and practitioners to redouble their focus on risk mitigation. A political culture in which targets are set for reduction in harm compounds risk aversiveness, whereby the focus becomes on eliminating all risky play rather than assessing the balance of risk and reward (Kennedy, 2010; Waite et al., 2014). In reaction, practitioners turn their focus on avoiding circumstances in which outcomes are uncertain and uncontainable in order to secure certainty in uncertain times. Such an approach to risk is evident in England’s Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) statutory framework (DfE, 2012):

Providers must ensure that they take all reasonable steps to ensure staff and children in their care are not exposed to risks and must be able to demonstrate how they are managing risks … Risk assessments should identify aspects of the environment that need to be checked on a regular basis, when and by whom those aspects will be checked, and how the risk will be removed or minimised.

Here, there is no distinction between acceptable and unacceptable risk (Kennedy, 2010; Wood, 2014). Rather, risk is put into the document as a roundly negative concept to be avoided by practitioners at all costs. Riskiness, in this sense, is an unacceptable luxury in contemporary childhood.

In reaction to the risk aversiveness of contemporary English ECEC provision, there has emerged a small but significant countercultural embrace of risky play led by the progressive Forest Schools movement (Connolly and Haughton, 2017; Gilchrist et al., 2017; Leather, 2018). This movement emphasises the role of outdoor education year-round – in all weather – for developing resilient, resourceful and creative children. Central to Forest Schools is the notion of child agency, whereby risk assessments are the responsibility of children. In this approach, children are taught to assess their own comfort with the riskiness of an activity. While Forest Schools have become more popular in England, they have been criticised for being implemented differently across different nations (Gilchrist et al., 2017; Leather, 2018). Scandinavian nations, where Forest Schools originated, have been widely successful in implementing a risk-embracing Forest School approach, while British educational institutions have continued to be cautious in their implementation. Indeed, despite the rise of the Forest School movement, British interpretations often lead to weather-contingent, educator-controlled outdoor activities even when a Forest Schools approach is attempted (Connolly and Haughton, 2017; Leather, 2018).

Another disruption to the dominant discourse of risk aversiveness has emerged from the political right. Playful risk-taking can be put into right-wing neoliberal discourse as beneficial and indeed necessary for children’s self-government (Bialostok, 2012; O’Malley, 2016). Risk-takers can be framed as bold, forward-thinking leaders whose risky activities are a sign that they are ideal enterprising subjects. As Bialostok (2012: 92; Bialostok and Kamberelis, 2010) argues, the ideal neoliberal subject ‘associates risk-taking with autonomy, freedom, and choice, concepts firmly embedded in, and complicit with, neoliberal notions of empowerment through self-help and self-governance’. Good risk takers can be rewarded as successful neoliberal subjects, while bad risk takers can become losers who have failed to sufficiently self-govern. Here, risk is not only pedagogically desirable, but carries with it a moral dimension (Bialostok, 2012; O’Malley, 2016). Risk-takers are idealised as the business leaders, sports stars and media personalities who took the risky opportunities that saw them rise to the top. It is a meritocratic message in which the outcomes of risk-takers’ choices are framed as rewards for their personal abilities to navigate a risky world.

Discourses of play are not, therefore, straightforward and assembling the ideal child through consumption is no easy task. Play can be seen as both a challenge and opportunity, but also something that must be constantly managed and controlled by astute and forward-thinking parents (Jackson and Scott, 1999; Jones, 2004). In other words, parents are obligated to negotiate competing notions of play – and the risks inherent in each – in order to make decisions about their children’s play opportunities, knowing that their early experience may significantly impact their long-term futures.

The study

Thirteen ECEC provider websites from one city in Northern England were selected for analysis of how they construct the role of play in their marketing endeavours. Websites were selected as a text for analysis because the website is a form of online prospectus that works to package play for the ready consumption of clientele (Drew, 2013). Websites are often the first point of contact between parents or potential clientele and the providers (Drew, 2013; Wilkins, 2012; Wilson and Carlsen, 2016; Winter et al., 2003). The website, and particularly its homepage, can therefore influence parents’ first impressions of education providers and their values. The website acts as a text that makes an ‘offer’ to parents, showing them what to expect of the child’s play experience. It follows that the ways an ECEC provider website constructs play are highly important for informing potential clients about the forms of play that the providers embrace. The website is therefore a particularly useful site for examining the relationship between neoliberal marketisation and discourses of play.

To analyse the websites, critical discourse analytic methods were employed. Critical discourse analysis involves the study of the ways texts construct social categories such as children’s play in ways that normalise certain social understandings about those categories (Søndergaard, 2002; Van Leeuwen, 2008; Yell, 2005; Youdell, 2006). It is a methodological approach that acknowledges that messages texts produce have the power to influence the ways in which people interpret and anticipate social spaces and interactions (Youdell, 2006). Discourse analytic approaches tend to highlight not only what knowledges are privileged within a text, but also those knowledges that are silenced through textual production (Fairclough, 2013; Søndergaard, 2002). They are therefore particularly useful for the analysis of the dominant ways of seeing socially constructed concepts within a particular time and space.

All of the websites’ main pages accessible through their menus were included in the analysis, including common pages such as the ‘About’ and ‘Home’ pages, and any text or images that were embedded in each page. Key ‘interpretations that are active in the material’ (Søndergaard, 2002: 191) – including the inclusions and exclusions inherent in those interpretations – were gleaned from a first pass of all texts. Upon the second pass of the texts, exemplar quotes and images that illuminated the key discursive constructions of play in the texts were extracted. The remainder of this article explores the differing and even contradictory discursive notions of children’s guided, risky and risk-averse play that emerged during the website analysis.

Mobilising the parent

All websites in this study situate their offers as solutions to parents’ anxieties and desires. Indeed, several providers explicitly highlight the anxiety inherent in choosing a provider on their websites:

we never underestimate how difficult a decision it is to leave your child in the care of others and our aim is to ensure that you have all the information you need to make this very important decision. [Centre E]

Lovely nursery, felt upset leaving my daughter as we are never apart, but [name redacted] and the other staff are helping me relax, fab! [Centre L]

Selecting a childcare is one of the biggest decisions as a parent. [Centre D]

We promise … a new sense of freedom and peace of mind for YOU, content and reassured in the knowledge that your child is being well looked after and developing important new skills. [Centre H]

Having alluded to the idea that selecting a provider can be a difficult decision, the websites also tend to reinforce the high stakes involved:

We believe that the early years of a child’s life are fundamental in laying down the foundations for the future. [Centre B]

[We] give all children, regardless of their background and circumstances, the best possible start and lay secure foundations for their next stages of schooling. [Centre C]

One particularly direct website even linked their early years’ provision with higher education potential decades down the track:

Many of our children have gone on to achieve university degrees. Capitalising on the great start they had with. [Centre A]

In this instance, the website is explicit in emphasising the high stakes of parents’ consumer choices. The choice to come to this provider matters, it implies, not only for the child’s present happiness, but for their entire life course. The choice, then, is a risky one. Here, these high-stakes anxieties which are ‘in part produced by the market’ are also ‘market opportunities – spaces to be filled’ (Ball, 2004: 4). Having indicated the high stakes of the parent’s decision, Centre A’s website highlights that it has the proven bona fides to navigate the path towards higher education, given that others who have made the choice to select this provider saw their children end up at university, so yours can too!

In doing this, Centre A reinforces that the parents who choose their centres are ‘good’ neoliberal subjects using their consumer agency well in order to maximise their child’s chances of a secure future. In the words of Rose (2008), these consumers ‘must calculate their actions in terms of a kind of “investment” in themselves, in their families, and maximise this investment’ (p. 98) through their purchasing power. The implication here is also that the early years cannot be spent idly. What happens now is important for setting the foundations for the future. The stress on the importance of these years for learning and development works to feed into first key theme discussed below: play as a structured and intentional activity.

‘Planned, purposeful play’: play for learning as an intentional activity

In appealing to the anxieties and desires of parents, the websites in this study tend to focus heavily on staking claims that the sorts of play they provide enables students to ‘get ahead’ in their development. In the process, anxieties about what sorts of play are desirable (and, by exclusion, what sorts are undesirable) are presented through the websites’ narratives. Namely, providers tend to highlight how their attentiveness to children’s play – in the form of scaffolding and control – gives children an edge that will allow them to succeed. Guided play allows providers to show how it is the guiding hand of the ECEC provider that makes a difference in successfully laying down the foundations for the future.

Thus, promotion of planned, purposeful play is one of the most salient ways in which providers work to mobilise consumers. Here, the providers work to dispel the stubborn discursive construction of play as antithetical to work by highlighting that good play focuses explicitly on learning outcomes, and implicitly, that bad play – the sort that is idle and directionless – might occur without the provider’s guiding hand. To reinforce this message, providers’ websites tend to privilege play that is visibly and conspicuously oriented towards learning outcomes, while pushing to the margins notions of free, uncontrolled and unabated playful opportunities (Wood, 2010).

In highlighting the authority of their forms of guided play, several websites start out by showing that their forms of play are supported by the authority of EYFS curriculum, which ties play to developmental learning outcomes:

Practitioners teach children by ensuring challenging playful opportunities across all areas of learning and development (Development Matters in the EYFS, 2012). [Centre B, Quoting the EYFS]

The aim of the EYFS is to ensure that every child is given the opportunity to learn through high quality play experiences and that they will be supported through this journey by their relationship with. [Centre J]

Young children learn best by playing and exploring, being active, and through creative and critical thinking, both indoors and outdoors, and this play based approach forms the basis of the Early Years Foundation Stage. [Centre C]

Others refer directly to the notion of guided play:

Toddlers learn best through happy structured play where they are allowed to use their new found movement and speech to the full. [Centre A]

Our environment is crucial to offering appropriate challenges through planned purposeful play and it has taken us many years to get to where we are now. [Centre K]

In these cases, it appears that play is not quite enough in and of itself. Adult-imposed order is required in order to fend off the anxious notion that play is an uncontrolled, inane or risky activity (Brooker, 2010; Wood, 2010). The image of Rousseau’s Émile, free from the worries of the adult world (Matthews et al., 2000) is sidelined here, replaced with the image of the managed child. In promoting the provider’s capacity to deliver results for anxious parents, managed play moves front and centre in early years discourse.

A key way of showing the pedagogical intentionality of providers’ guided play activities is to emphasise the role of practitioners playing with children. It appears that ECEC providers are cognisant of the need to appear as if their staff are attentively intervening, cossetting and hovering:

we call this ‘play’, however the importance is placed upon the staff member being aware of the child’s investigations and offers careful planning to ensure the correct play experiences are provided. [Centre M]

if [children] are not taking part in an adult-led or facilitated activity, we want to know that they are engaging with the environment fruitfully. Tracking sheets are used periodically to make sure that the environment is serving the needs of individual children. [Centre K]

All activities enable children to learn through play, with the support of adults, and help them to develop at their own pace. [Centre B]

Similarly, the constant placement of staff playing with children in images on the websites give the impression that ‘we care’ and ‘we’re hands-on’. It allays the notion that early years practitioners are simply babysitters, by highlighting that they are serious pedagogues and fastidiously attentive to clients’ children.

Furthermore, children tend to be pictured interacting with their environments by playing with man-made play materials (telephones, books, stackable blocks) designed specifically with developmentally appropriate play in mind. Often, the websites contain salient images of children cooking, eating and role-playing [Centre F, Centre K, Centre E] to make explicit the link between play and learning. When children are not present in images, play rooms are frequently framed in ways in which play materials are conspicuously in-focus and in the foreground of the image. Across the set of images on the websites, purpose-built man-made materials remain central elements in children’s play experiences. As several ECEC providers explain:

chalk boards and painting frames not only present continuity and developmental challenges but also cover additional aspects of creative and exploratory learning. [Centre K]

Our toddler and pre-school rooms are exceptional, each boasting well designed environments with high quality resources. Each room offers a fantastic range of exciting play and learning opportunities. [Centre A]

All toys and resources are set at the children’s level, sand, water and paint are always available for the children. [Centre J]

Such a narrative also works to push aside valuable types of play that are not visibly structured, such as free or solitary play. While some websites make passing mention of the value of ‘free play’, such narratives are significantly less salient (Søndergaard, 2002). This is not to say that guided play is in any way bad or inappropriate. Indeed, there is a great deal of literature that supports the place of guided play in child development (Weisberg et al., 2016). Rather, it is to highlight how guided play is likely to become the privileged public construction of children’s play in a marketised context in which good pedagogy must be visible and obvious in order for play to be packaged as a marketable educational commodity on advertising texts. Guided play becomes a way in which the providers can sell themselves as actively working in pursuit of parents’ desires for children’s rapid development that will enrich their futures. Similarly, the implication is that parents who select a provider who actively intervenes in play are good neoliberal subjects who manage their consumption well. They embody consumer subjectivities that have ‘secure[d] the best future for their offspring’ (Rose, 1999: 182) through their consumption choices. From the options available to them, parents are reminded that selecting providers who heavily manage and scaffold play is the correct response to their play anxiety.

‘Calculated risks’ in the Garden of Eden

The second prominent theme emergent from the study centres on websites’ complex constructions of risky play. Capitalising on ‘terror talk’, it appears almost compulsory for the websites in this study to highlight the importance of safety; however, many of the websites also make reference to risky play as an ideal. Here, the ECEC providers appear acutely aware of the need to allay parents’ anxieties about an unsafe world beyond the home, while also appealing to desires to see children pushing their boundaries in the interest of personal development. It tends to be the case, then, that risky play moves in and out of marketing texts in somewhat contradictory ways, but consistently in ways that work to mobilise parents’ anxieties and desires.

Perhaps what is most interesting is that mention of risky play – which occurred in 6 of the 13 webpages – tends to occur on the ‘Home’ and ‘Values’ pages of the websites. These sections of web pages work to depict a brand’s aspirational values (Drew, 2013; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006), and in this sense are more commonly used to reinforce desires rather than anxieties. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) argue, elements that are placed in salient ‘values’ areas of a text tend to be ‘the idealized or generalized essence of the information’ (p. 193).

Thus, when risky play emerges within the websites in this study, it is put into discourse as an ideal or a ‘value statement’:

We offer a challenging environment both indoors and outdoors, to allow children to take risks within their capabilities. [Centre M]

[Centre K] offers children the opportunities to take calculated risks – because we believe that nurturing creativity means making sure that our children can be independent and make their own choices.

We want our children to learn by playing, asking questions, exploring, taking risks, making mistakes and trying again. [Centre F]

What might be telling, however, is that platitudes about the intrinsic value of risk-taking tend not to be sustained by imagery or text deeper down in the websites. Following Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006: 193) again, text deeper into a document tends not to represent the ‘ideal’ but the ‘real’ – for example, the finer print. In their reading of Western advertising texts, they argue, ‘the upper section tends to make ‘emotive’ appeal and show us ‘what might be’; the lower section tends to be more informative and practical, showing us ‘what is’’. Such a reading seems to ring true in my reading of discourses of risky play on the websites in this study: initial value statements about risky play are quickly overcome with imagery of safe spaces and constant refrains about the premium placed on child safety.

Indeed, responding to parents’ fears, all websites in this study reinforce that ‘Safety and welfare are our top priorities’ [Centre I]:

[Centre E] is a stimulating, safe and secure environment for your child and we pride ourselves on our warm and welcoming atmosphere.

[We are concerned with] allowing you the peace of mind to pursue your own busy lifestyle, secure in the knowledge that your child is in safe, caring hands. [Centre B]

Our Caterpillar room offers babies a safe, homely and stimulating environment that encourages exploration and investigation through play. [Centre J]

Similarly, the images on websites tend to work to show to parents the risk-aversive approach of the providers. In fact, not once did an image appear of children playing that remotely appeared to contain elements that would imply lack of control over the situation. ECEC providers tend instead to depict enclosed play areas. These enclosed areas call intertextual reference (Cranny-Francis, 2005) to the purity of the Garden of Eden in which innocents are protected from the evils beyond, as well as Holt’s (1974) notion of the walled garden in which children are raised under guidance and protection.

Some ECEC providers go so far as to provide images of their indoor locations dressed up as the outdoors, as if to make a value statement again about the ideal of unfettered outdoor adventures, while also showing the ‘reality’ that indoors are, simply, a safer option. In Centre E, trees are painted onto walls, faux trees are placed in the middle of play areas with lightbulbs handing from the branches, and mounds of fake grass are laid-out for children to sit upon while they read books. In Centre I, the entire outdoor area has the grass ripped up and replaced with a safer – but still green – spongey surface. Here, the supposed safety of purpose-built spaces (Kennedy, 2010) is reaffirmed, while symbolic reference is made to the freedoms of unfettered outdoor play (Jones, 2002).

Similarly, ostensibly ‘natural’ outdoor play areas are often manicured and gardened to give the impression of orderliness and control. This works to provide both the appearance of outdoor freedoms and the bubble-wrapped experience of tightly controlled play (Malone, 2007). In an image depicting Centre B’s outdoor play area, a tree is provided for climbing, but the tree is cut and laid on its side so that students cannot achieve heights beyond a few simple steps. Meanwhile, the only naturally growing trees left standing cluster around the fence lines in a way that gives the appearance of children in nature, while in reality these trees act only as a backdrop to the manicured and controlled environments in which children are shown playing.

Furthermore, outdoor play is often mentioned in the same breath as gardening: an activity that involves the domestication of the environment and the creation of orderliness (Holt, 1974; Malone, 2007). Indeed, Centre A labelled their outdoor area ‘beautiful private gardens’, bringing to mind a vision of blossoming flowers cultivated by humans. In other words, the use of the concept of gardens for outdoor places domesticates them and imposes a sense of structure in which safe play can take place.

Thus, risky play moves into discourse as an ideal, but one that cannot quite be achieved in an era of managerial risk aversion and social anxiety. It appears that the result is semantic homage to risk-taking on strategic aspirational areas of websites, even while it is in practice a highly policed activity, as exemplified by the imagery and text throughout the remainder of the websites. Such a construction is a far cry from visions of children wandering off with friends to be ‘pioneers’ or ‘adventurers’ [Centre A] in any real sense. This tight management of child’s play works to placate play anxiety and assures parents that the ECEC provider has foreseen and accounted for all possible eventualities.

I would suggest, furthermore, that the providers are showing awareness of the complexities involved in parents’ play anxieties. They juggle a desire for a perhaps lost vision of risky, unfettered play with anxiety about children’s safety in a risky world. The discursive work undertaken here works to appease ‘the seeming discursive dichotomies of parenting that … make parenting the “millennium child” a complicated and contradictory task’ (Barr et al., 2014: 303). In other words, the websites are constructing play in ways that navigate aspirations and anxieties simultaneously, even when those constructions appear incompatible.

Conclusion

Throughout the course of their daily lives, parents are presented with a range of messages about parenting and childhood that emphasise differing notions of children’s play. In marketised times, ECEC providers’ advertising texts further disseminate discourses of play, and work to appeal to parents as enterprising consumers whose high-stakes decisions about play provision matter to their children’s futures. By analysing these practices, this article has rendered visible some ways in which play can come into discourse in a marketised neoliberal context. This article’s position has not been to argue for or against particular discourses of play. Rather, by examining discursive constructions of play in marketing materials, this article has aimed to ‘trouble and disturb taken-for-granted discursive practices’ (Søndergaard, 2002: 196) in relation to play. Working with the understanding that providers appeal to parents’ anxieties and desires for their children, I have argued that providers’ narratives reveal the complexities and contradictions inherent in contemporary notions of play in the early years. Indeed, what have emerged are contradictory discursive constructions of play that move through notions of risk aversion, idealised risk-taking and constant adult control.

Discourses of play such as those that emerge on ECEC provider websites have implications for how children will materially encounter play (Brooker, 2010; McInnes et al., 2011) and the ways children can be expected to move through their play environments. Thus, there remains a need to problematise emergent notions of play in the context of neoliberal rationalities and consider their consequences for how children’s uncertain futures will be structured by their experiences as neoliberal subjects. While adult play anxiety increasingly features in discursive constructions of children’s play, there remains the likelihood that children’s play spaces and play activities will continue to be restricted and restructured to meet the anxieties of adults, rather than the needs or desires of children.