Big Kids

Soft play areas didn’t exist when I was a kid. We had hard play areas instead (they bred ‘em tough in the seventies). The nearest most kids got to soft play was bouncing on beds, though often a moment of poor coordination would swiftly remind you of the hardness of surrounding furniture when you careered into the wardrobe, cracking your head and landing in a tangle of juvenile limbs.

There was also none of this bark chipping nonsense in parks. Instead the surfaces where covered with gravel and cold, hard bitumen, often bearing the whitish fleshy skidmark from a small child’s knee – the distance of which was an object of pride for the unfortunate involved and which went some way to countering the unbearable pain. Many a proud tear rolled down a freckly face in parklands up and down the land.

However, I defy any modern dad to resist soft play areas. There’s something inherent in blokes’ makeup that means the urge to scamper over an oversized padded climbing frame is strongly felt (I’ll even confess to, while sitting in one, contemplating where the living room would be if it was my house). With enjoyment comes unease though. There’s a difficulty in these hyper-sensitive times of not looking like a paedophile while doing so.

I was playing with our four-year-old on a bouncy castle recently, standing over him as he lay giggling, and tickling him into submission in the traditional manner, when suddenly his face was replaced with someone who I didn’t recognise.

“My turn! My name’s Dylan and I’m three!” announced the owner of the small face (presumably Dylan in his third year of existence on this safe, rounded-cornered planet), diving between my feet and looking up expectantly, clearly awaiting a similar tickling.
“Aaargh!” I responded and immediately leapt away as if I’d been electrified (which on a bouncy castle makes for an impressive distance), looking around in case an angry mob was about to steam in with poorly-spelled placards demanding the systematic castration of paediatricians or pedestrians or pedallers or something.

I’m thinking of having a T-shirt made along the lines of “I’m not a paedo, I’m just an average dad…” which I could sell at the doors of these places to anyone looking ‘dadular’. The only problem is that you couldn’t ensure that everyone who bought one was unwarranting of systematic castration by an angry mob of Daily Mail readers. You just can’t win…