Children's Games in Street and Playground

Perhaps this book should come with a warning to parents: within these pages, children deliberately scare each other, ritually hurt each other, take foolish risks, promote fights, and play ten against one. Yet, throughout, they observe their own sense of fair play consistently.   “During the past fifty years, shelf-loads of books have been written instructing children in the games they ought to play—and some even instructing adults on how to instruct children in the games they ought to play—but few attempts have been made to record the games children in fact play.” This was Iona and Peter Opie's pertinent observation in 1969, and it was this gap that they sought to fill with their exhaustive survey, through the 1960s, of the games that children “in fact play” aged roughly between six and twelve years of age, and when outdoors—and usually out of sight.   The Opies were not interested in formal games and sports supervised by parents or teachers. What excited them were the rough-and-tumble