When playpens gave children an exclusive world of their very own

Back in the ether of time when you were just learning to crawl, your world was often limited to an area no bigger than four feet by four feet with three-foot wooden bars to hem you in.

This child prison was otherwise known as a playpen.

In an era before stairgates and plastic protectors for the corners of kitchen units, the playpen was the perfect solution – an area to entrap a child but at the same time give them toys and a place they could call home.

Playpens still exist of course and they are far more sophisticated, with padded bars, mesh surrounds and an ability to be folded away in seconds.

But these are only pale imitations of the originals, which were austere containment units, made exclusively of wood and designed as a sort of baby version of a monk’s cell with little by way of integrated distraction.

Modern playpens aren’t just made of softer stuff; they also come with a range of add-ons – from massive musical playmobiles or night lights and music boxes to clip-on adapters for CD players so that kids can propel themselves from one side to the other to the sound of their favourite tunes.

The earliest recognition of the playpen in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from 1902, which would suggest that children were contained by the servant staff up to then.

Of course, the concept goes back to the history of time; a fenced off area of the cave to keep the kids from being killed by bears. But the end of the nineteenth century saw the arrival of what we were to spend our toddler years in.

Its original name offers a better definition of its actual purpose – but a baby cage might be hard to get past the politically correct brigade, so the injection of the notion of play into a wooden prison seemed to paint a more palatable picture.

We’re talking about an era where children were only emerging from the notion that they should be seen and not heard, so enclosing them in a four-foot square box with bars actually represented progress.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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