Introduction

This chapter describes a small-scale study that explored older generations’ memories and feelings of nostalgia about their own childhood play experiences and compared these with their ideas about children's play today. Alongside this, children's own accounts of playing in the same town in the Welsh Valleys were collected and set against adult memories and beliefs about contemporary conditions for playing. A technique regularly employed by playwork professionals in training and advocating for the child's right to play is to ask adults to remember how they played as children and the joy they gained from this experience, invoking emotionally charged memories. Playworkers are also encouraged to use their own memories as a means of reflecting on their practice to improve the quality of provision, alongside intuition, evidence from the literature and experience of working with children (Hughes, 2001). This chapter argues that a deeper appreciation of how memory is intricately entwined with affect, emotion and place allows for a more nuanced approach to using memory as an effective advocacy tool. In the study described here, this was explored through semi-structured interviews with children and adults who had grown up in the same town, alongside the use of nostalgia measures of the adults’ accounts. As Labaree (2016) notes, self-reporting can have limitations as a research method given the potential for selective memory, telescoping (right memory wrong timescale), attribution (attributing negative outcomes to external forces or to other people) and exaggeration. However, this study was less concerned with the accuracy of memory and more with what memory does in terms of giving meaning to children's play experiences today. This required an engagement with the affective registers of memory, and this was explored through the literature on and research approaches to nostalgia.

Memory studies cover a wide field of disciplines. As Jones and Garde- Hansen (2012) note, memory is intimately connected to place, identity and emotion/affect.