ABSTRACT
The priority for constant supervision of children holds a dominant position in early childhood education through the National Quality Standards. The abstract notion of being ‘hidden in plain sight’ appears to be a skill children have developed in their search for private play places within their highly supervised, contemporary childhoods. Drawing on Rivkin’s ‘habitats’ for children, the following suggestions are presented for practitioners in early childhood and primary school settings to enable children’s construction of their own ‘private places’ for imaginative play. Researching with young children has shown that an adult cannot make secret places for children; only children can make these important places for themselves. Research has also shown that rich, symbolic and imaginative play occurs in these child-constructed private places for play. Classical place-based researchers found that ‘spaces’ with socially constructed meanings could be symbolically transformed into meaningful ‘places’.
