It Takes a Village - Janet Dick
Pittenweem resident, Janet Dick reflects on funding for children’s playparks and what it says about Fife – and everywhere else
Easter holiday time and the weather seems to be still in a Christmas time zone... wet windy and chilly outdoors. How on earth do parents manage to entertain children for days on end like this?? Get the Lego box out...more likely to be an Xbox or whatever 21st century version is current. Or fill the house with your neighbour's children in exchange for a day when yours go round to theirs... or wrap them up in wet weather gear and march boldly along to the playpark. Except there isn't a play park. Perhaps you hadn't noticed.
Perhaps your own children have grown up and moved to a place where their own brood have access to outdoor play facilities with ease. Glasgow maybe? Edinburgh? Perth? Inverness? Is it only in cities that councils feel they have a responsibility to provide playparks for their youngest members of the community? Seems like it. And Fife doesn't have much in the way of any cities, does it? Perhaps children living in semi-rural locations have places to play outdoors without the bother of a playpark. Well, we know that isn't true. Plenty of people living in the Kingdom have no access to outdoors, they live in flats or homes with no gardens. And even if they did have a garden or a small patch of grass, we're still not talking about a suitable place for children to PLAY. To meet with other children to interact with to engage with to enjoy the company of to fight and grumble with to learn the skills of dealing with conflict and disagreement to benefit from the lifelong support of FRIENDSHIP. And all of these also apply to the GROWN UPS. Parents need other parents to get them through the hard grinding delightful years of raising a new wholesome responsible likeable bunch of HUMANS. They can't do that on their own: ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ as the African proverb has it.
Nurturing children should not have to be dependent on fundraising efforts But in Fife it is. For reasons outlined in a large document (https://www.fife.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/161723/Play-Spaces-Strategy-draft.pdf ) Fife Council do not provide money to replace playparks. What they do however is help communities like ours towards funding sources to raise the necessary funds to do the job which they happily design build and maintain thereafter. They just don't give you their money, it's dedicated elsewhere. Plenty of other long documents will show you where that will be, I don't have the will to go looking for them.
Local authorities have a thankless task, (skimpy) devolved budgets from Elsewhere (London, Edinburgh) demand the creative skills of a magician to cover all the things they have to deal with. Potholes anybody??? How much MORE money do we need to sort them out and where does that extra money come from, certainly not play parks since they have NONE anyway. I do not blame THEM nor would I do THEIR job. What I will do however is roll my sleeves up and try to make a difference.
Pittenweem is a small community, a mixed community with divides between ‘blow-ins’ and those ‘fae here’. It's no different from any community anywhere else in the world. We're not special in any way, we have the same challenges as everybody else in the world. We can live our lives as individuals, or we can decide to live our lives as part of a wider network.
It's possible that you imagine children are not your responsibility. But they are. They are mine, yours and everybody else's. In the same way that YOU are mine. Remember that when your time comes to ask for help.