I’ve got one thing to say to adults who tell kids off for hanging out in the street: let the children play | Emma Beddington

Fewer and fewer children have the chance to play outside - and those that do have to contend with whingeing adults. Bring back the days of carefree loitering

We are in the dregs of the English school summer holidays now. All the organised fun is done and so are the adults who organised it, if memory serves - money, time off and energy all spent. Round me, that seems to mean kids mainly doing their own thing. Tinies confined to gardens are getting creative with toys (or dirt, or the recycling), while the older ones are hanging around, sitting on walls, kicking a ball on the verge or riding bikes along pavements. Can I swerve around you?" one asked as I walked to the shop, scoring highly on the making your own fun" scale. Once I agreed, he swerved happily around me several times, then did it again when I was walking back 15 minutes later, which was very bracing. (Is my consent to being swerved around irrevocable? This could get interesting.) There's some chucking of apples, too, judging from the debris strewn around the street and my own experience (one year I naively put out a bucket of cookers to give away, only to face apple carnage the next morning).

It's nice - not the apples so much, but the rest. I find it comforting: it's vaguely reminiscent of my own childhood, which wasn't exactly jumpers for goalposts" but was certainly plenty of aimless loitering. I like that about living where I do, how there are kids doing kids' stuff, but it seems they're lucky. According to research on street play from Play England published last month: Opportunities to play outside, which were the near universal right of previous generations, are now available to fewer and fewer children." The saddest part for me was the percentage of children - significantly more than the previous report in 2013 - who have been asked to stop doing such ordinary things as making a noise", sitting on a neighbour's wall" and hanging out in groups". And what hurt was done to the people who told 25% of kids surveyed to stop chalking on the pavement"? I suppose it depends what they're chalking, but wouldn't you feel like a baddie from the Beano?

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist