Child’s Play
Nora Barry
For Babble.com
Play is sometimes used as a court of last resort.
“Go out and play!” we were told when our mothers needed to finish the laundry or a desperately needed cup of coffee. “Just go play!” is something I shouted at my own two sons whenever a deadline hovered over my shoulder. In truth, I don’t know too many parents who think of play as anything other than a chance for some breathing room.
It turns out that play deserves a room of its own.
Several new books and studies reveal that play is a deeply important part of childhood, laying the groundwork for emotionally healthier children, more successful learning experiences, and better preparation for the 21st century workplace. Yet even as child development experts testify to its importance, play is rapidly disappearing under a mountain of scheduled activities, electronic media and standardized tests.
“Play is a very profound activity,” says Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education and the author of the book, “Taking Back Childhood”. “It’s worthy of respect and preservation.” That philosophy is echoed by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, which has declared that play is the right of every child.
Carlsson-Paige says that child-oriented creative play lays the foundation for learning cognitive concepts and points out that when children pour sand from one container to another they’re acting out basic concepts of math and science such as quantity and volume. Play also improves language and reading skills, increases retention levels and develops imagination—a new report by the Alliance for Childhood notes that by the age of ten (generally 4th grade) children who attended play-oriented kindergartens were more advanced in reading and math, better adjusted socially and emotionally and excelled in creativity, intelligence and “industry”.
Unstructured, child-oriented play allows children to discover their own interests and competencies and to create and explore their own worlds says Dr. Ken Ginsburg, a CHOP pediatrician who authored the report “The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bond”, and the book “A Parent’s Guide to Building Resilience in Children and Teens”. Left to build their own worlds children create narratives, construct props to support their activities and resolve conflicts with their playmates. They stay in those worlds and in that play for extended periods of time, developing the kind of focus they need in later grades.
But the benefits of play don’t stop there. “Play is childhood’s tool for building resilience,” says Ginsburg. Children work out a lot of their worries using creative play, which helps relieve stress. They use play to master emotional experiences and integrate them into their psyches, decreasing aggression and increasing self-control. Depriving children of the opportunity to play can actually result in emotional disconnect in adolescence.
Yet more and more children are losing major chunks of play time. The Alliance For Childhood’s report says that playtime is down to 30 minutes a day or less in many kindergartens, replaced by prep time for standardized tests. In the home, play is no longer valued as much as enrichment classes, structured play activities and extra-curricular activities. Children under 12 spend twice as much time in structured or adult driven play as kids did twenty years ago. The overall amount of time that 6 to 8 year olds spend playing has dropped by 33% since the early 1980’s while the amount of homework has increased by 51%. Even more disturbing, 3.22 million kids, ages 7-17, were treated for depression in the past five years—more than double the numbers of the previous five years.
Ken Ginsburg treats some of these children in his social adolescent medicine practice at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He says that many older children and teens are over-scheduled and have no free-time in which to hang out. Deprived of downtime and lacking the space and ability to work through their issues through play, they can become filled with anxiety and self-doubt which manifests itself in eating disorders and even self-mutilation. Carlsson-Paige concurs. “A lot of the teachers I have in my workshops are telling me that high school students today are less emotionally connected,” she says.
There are indications that these issues exhibit themselves in more dangerous ways in high school and college: recent reports by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reveal that 43% of high school students surveyed had consumed alcohol in the previous 30 days and 44% of the college students surveyed in a two week period said they had engaged in binge drinking. Prescription drug abuse is also on the rise among college students and among a growing number of high school students who take the ADD drug Adderal to keep themselves awake all night.
While no one is willing to draw a direct line between lack of play and alcohol or drug abuse, Ginsburg does note that a lot of play involves being physically active—teaching kids the life long lesson that physical activity is one of the best ways of managing stress.
Less dire but equally important is the way in which play can help prepare children for the 21st century workforce. “In play are found the origins of creative problem solving,” says Ginsburg—and creativity and innovation are hot skills in the 21st century. In “The Creative Class”, researcher Richard Florida writes “the creative class is the core force of economic growth in our future economy.” His definition of the creative class includes hi-tech workers, scientists, engineers and doctors, as well as artists and musicians. Companies such as Boeing are emphasizing the need for creativity and innovation and mega-entrepreneur Richard Branson recently wrote about the role that creativity can play in helping to solve the global economic crisis.
Can students study creativity in college to prepare for the workforce? Maybe, but mostly they need to play when they’re young because that’s how children learn to innovate and create. However the creativity and innovation stimulated by play are hard to measure on standardized tests—perhaps another reason playtime doesn’t earn the respect it should. There are signs that might be changing. Dr. Robert Sternberg, a psychologist with a focus on creativity and intelligence, pioneered “The Rainbow Project” in 2006, a unique test funded by the College Board that attempted to evaluate creativity and problem solving. The test results were a better predictor of how well students did in college than the SAT’s. Sternberg has continued the project under the name “Kaleidoscope” at Tufts, where he is Dean of Arts and Science. Says Sternberg, “Play is one of the best ways to develop creative thinking.”
Creativity and play are also on the agenda at Challenge Success, a group that grew out of Stanford University’s Education Department. Challenge Success is trying to help parents and schools redefine the concept of success by expanding the definition beyond good grades to include creativity, resilience, independence, health and enthusiasm. Dr. Denise Pope, one of the founders (and the parent of three young children) consults with elementary schools to help find ways of increasing play during school hours, decreasing the amount of homework and creating alternative forms of assessment. Dr. Pope also underscores the ties between play and creativity and innovation, pointing out that children who don’t know how to innovate are afraid to take risks—which in turn stymies innovation. “We’re finding that kids are afraid to risk and innovate, even at Stanford,” she says. They’re more interested in getting the “A” than taking a chance and getting a “C”. Ginsburg, who’s one of the advisors at Challenge Success, calls these students the generation that “fears the B+” adding, “perfectionism is the death of creativity and innovation.”
One of the greatest examples of creativity, imagination, innovation and risk-taking was the Apollo Space Program, which put men on the moon. The engineers and scientists involved in that program came of age in the late 50’s and early 60’s, an era where children were constantly exhorted to go outside and play and sometimes told to not come back until dinner. If they had a TV, it had three channels. There were not a lot of enrichment classes, SAT study groups or parent-led play dates. When they weren’t in school kids just played, period. And yet those kids turned adults were able to imagine ways to make rockets circle the earth and men walk on the moon, maybe something they had dreamed about or played at on hot summer afternoons.
Einstein once said that imagination was more important than knowledge because knowledge was limited while imagination encircled the world. With play, kids can build many more worlds to explore—and perhaps boldly go where no one has gone before.
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