A proposal for a Relational Capability Approach to playing and being well: towards more just material discursive practices

This article draws on the authors’ recent review of contemporary research on children’s play, policy and practice, together with their longstanding engagement with, and research on, play policy in Wales (UK), to propose a particular (re)framing of the relationship between playing, being well and adult response-ability. Dominant policy and professional material discursive practices can perpetuate a deficit view of children, either as not yet fully human or through a damage narrative of problems such as obesity, mental illness and the dangers of social media and screens. Alongside this, the relational turn in contemporary research into childhood, playing and being well, across academic disciplines, emphasises the entanglements of mind, body, senses, affect, movement, matter and milieu (the material, social, cultural, affective, historical and political conditions of children’s lives). When conditions are favourable, children can support their own wellbeing through playing well. Given this, the authors propose an affirmative Relational Capability Approach framework, as part of a conceptual and practical ‘apparatus’, that can account for and be responsive to those conditions. The framework rests on issues of social and spatial justice for children rather than remedial or redemptive approaches that can perpetuate a deficit narrative.