When I was young, I would simply tell my parents that I was going out here or there and the rest was up to me and my friends. Having to create our own play challenged our creativity and imagination. We had to decide what we wanted to do and we had to make it happen. Sometimes, this took a lot of organizational skills.

For example, if I wanted to play football, I had to make sure that I would round up the necessary number of players to meet at the specified location and ensure that the necessary equipment was available to make it happen.

Playing hockey was an ongoing logistical and organizational process that forced us to be creative and imaginative. We spent months scouring the neighborhood looking for materials that we could use to make the equipment that we needed. We would enthusiastically ride our bikes looking for foam to make goalie pads. We would go to the local arenas and look through the trash bins for sticks that were salvageable. We made our goal nets out of plumbing pipe and meshing that the arena threw out and that we learned to patch.

We organized a hockey league, with teams made up of children who lived on different streets. We named ourselves the Major Street Devils because we lived on Major Street. We made sure that on game day each team would wear the same colored tops. Some teams created their own jerseys. We scouted several locations that were best suited to play hockey, where the ball would remain in play within a confined area and we would not spend the whole game chasing it. We were not bound by adult- controlled, rented space and time limits. We decided for how long we wanted to play. At times, we would just play until we no longer wanted to play; at other times, we played until we reached a certain tally of goals. Once we reached that number, someone would inevitably shout, “five more goals,” or “let’s play again” and we did. Our only limit was the disappearance of the sun. We often played until we could no longer see the ball, and sometimes we played even when we could no longer see the ball. We were largely bound by our own rules.

Most of today’s children don’t make pads and nets. Instead, their parents buy them from for-profit businesses. Then they don’t even organize their own hockey games, but join an organized league where everything is decided for them. It’s as if those of us who created our own unstructured free space as children continue to do it as adults, but this time not for ourselves but for our children. In the process, what are we depriving them of?