The importance of play

Send the kids outside and let them explore

By Tim Hauserman

When I was a kid, we played. We left the house in the morning and spent the day running through the woods, playing whiffle ball in the driveway, or football on the street. As long as we were running and trying to outwit each other, we were happy. When the weather was nasty, we played in the snow until we got cold, then we invented indoor games. One of my favorites involved using a hanger crammed into the top of a door jamb as the basket, and two rolled up socks as a ball. It was the only place this smallest kid in the class could actually stuff the basket. Parents? I am not sure where they were. They had more important stuff to do than worry about kids playing.

We were not obese. We were not bored. We were exploring and discovering our environment, and letting our imaginations fly. We had no idea that we were also developing our brains and learning personal responsibility. We were just playing. So what happened? Why did our society give up on free play?

Somehow we decided that free play is too dangerous for kids, when in fact, it is more dangerous for the future of kids not to play. As Lenore Skenazy says in her book, Free Range Kids, we have changed to a society where “any risk is seen as too much risk.” Even though we live in a time that is actually much safer than it was when we I was a kid, we feel it must be much more dangerous. I mean look at the kidnappings that keep popping up on TV and apparently if you watch the news you learn that it is dangerous to be a pretty blonde and travel to a Caribbean island. In reality, murder just got dropped off the top 15 causes of death in the United States for the first time in a long time, but you won’t hear about  that on the local news.

With parents too scared to let kids go out on their own and play, we have developed structured athletic activities instead. The problem with that, says Hara Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, “is that the organized sports many kids participate in are managed by adults; difficulties that arise are not worked out by kids but adjudicated by adult referees. Nor is it, in any sense of the term, free play. It doesn’t arise from desires or rules that emanate from the kids themselves. There is no spontaneity. It doesn’t reflect the free-flowing mental activity of children.” It is this free-flowing part of playing that helps kids learn how to handle situations on their own and grow up to become responsible adults. Instead of keeping our kids between the straight lines of a soccer field, they need to start running in the woods and take their feet wherever their brain takes them.

Marano says, “The protectionism that takes all the free play and all the risk out of life for kids rests on a notion of children’s frailty—the assumption that children are easily bruised. The fact is, too much protectionism creates frailty. Not only do children fail to develop coping skills for life’s vicissitudes, and fall apart when they hit a speed bump, kids come to think that something must really be wrong with them if they need so much protection.”
Sure, car seats and bike helmets make sense. But attempting to protect our kid from every split lip or skinned knee will make them too afraid to take on the realities of life. We need to return to this approach to life: I fall down, I get up, I try again—compared to the now more common approach: I fall down, it must be someone’s else’s fault, who can I sue?

Anybody can play. It does not require props or rules, just an imagination and time. We have decided that kids need to be busy every minute of every day with structured activities, so sometimes free time is in short supply, but it’s worth cutting back somewhere else to make time for play. Turn the technology off, leave the homework at home, and go play. Playing is building forts out of rocks and twigs or racing between the second tree on the right and that big bush on top of the hill. It’s about heading somewhere without knowing where you’re going until you get there.

“By its very ambiguous nature play gives brains a workout,” Marano says. “Play is cognitively challenging. It requires attention and so it sharpens senses. It both demands and inspires mental dexterity and flexibility. It thrives on complexity, uncertainty and possibility.” With all the mental development brought about by play, it is no wonder that some brain experts believe that the rise in ADHD problems coincides with the reduction in free play. When it comes to our brains, staring at computer screens or studying for tests are not the only way we learn. In fact, for most of human existence, we have learned by doing the things kids do when playing, exploring our environment and seeing what we find. And if we want to keep our brains developing throughout life, we can’t leave all the fun to the youngsters, adults should hit the woods and do a little playing themselves.

Since some kids don’t understand how to play it may require parents to get them started by taking them to a place where the only thing they can do is play: Take them backpacking. When you arrive at your destination in the wilderness, set up camp, and then let them explore—while you go somewhere else and read a book. It won’t take them too long before they are hiding from each other behind rocks, building wood sailboats with pine needle sails, and inventing new worlds with unusual sound effects.

Deep down we all understand the value of play, but somehow we have convinced ourselves it’s a luxury we can’t afford. Eventually, however, our kids grow up, go to college or a job, and confront a reality that is different than the bubble-wrapped existence we have tried to create for them. In fact, one of the biggest problems colleges now face is that many kids arrive on campus still clinging to their parents. A primary focus of college orientation these days is telling parents to back away from their children, and reminding kids that they are the ones who are in college, not their parents.

If we want our kids to grow up, we need to let them be children, by telling them to go outside and play.

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills
by Alix Spiegel

February 21, 2008
On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on television. As we all now know, the show quickly became a cultural icon, one of those phenomena that helped define an era.
What is less remembered but equally, if not more, important, is that another transformative cultural event happened that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the "Thunder Burp."
I know — who's ever heard of the Thunder Burp?

Well, no one.

The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season. Until 1955, ad budgets at toy companies were minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel and the Thunder Burp, which, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, was a kind of historical watershed. Almost overnight, children's play became focused, as never before, on things — the toys themselves.

"It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says Chudacoff. "Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object."

Chudacoff's recently published history of child's play argues that for most of human history what children did when they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.

"They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors... or whether it was on a street corner or somebody's back yard," Chudacoff says. "They improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules."

But during the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff argues, play changed radically. Instead of spending their time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and predetermined scripts. Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch they played Star Wars with a toy light saber. Chudacoff calls this the commercialization and co-optation of child's play — a trend which begins to shrink the size of children's imaginative space.
But commercialization isn't the only reason imagination comes under siege. In the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff says, parents became increasingly concerned about safety, and were driven to create play environments that were secure and could not be penetrated by threats of the outside world. Karate classes, gymnastics, summer camps — these create safe environments for children, Chudacoff says. And they also do something more: for middle-class parents increasingly worried about achievement, they offer to enrich a child's mind.

Change in Play, Change in Kids

Clearly the way that children spend their time has changed. Here's the issue: A growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids' cognitive and emotional development.

It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

We know that children's capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn't stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning says, the results were very different.

"Today's 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today's 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago," Bodrova explains. "So the results were very sad."

Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, "Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain."

The Importance of Self-Regulation

According to Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what's called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

"In fact, if we compare preschoolers' activities and the amount of private speech that occurs across them, we find that this self-regulating language is highest during make-believe play," Berk says. "And this type of self-regulating language... has been shown in many studies to be predictive of executive functions."

And it's not just children who use private speech to control themselves. If we look at adult use of private speech, Berk says, "we're often using it to surmount obstacles, to master cognitive and social skills, and to manage our emotions."

Unfortunately, the more structured the play, the more children's private speech declines. Essentially, because children's play is so focused on lessons and leagues, and because kids' toys increasingly inhibit imaginative play, kids aren't getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, says Berk, the results are clear: Self-regulation improves.

"One index that researchers, including myself, have used... is the extent to which a child, for example, cleans up independently after a free-choice period in preschool," Berk says. "We find that children who are most effective at complex make-believe play take on that responsibility with... greater willingness, and even will assist others in doing so without teacher prompting."

Despite the evidence of the benefits of imaginative play, however, even in the context of preschool young children's play is in decline. According to Yale psychological researcher Dorothy Singer, teachers and school administrators just don't see the value.

"Because of the testing, and the emphasis now that you have to really pass these tests, teachers are starting earlier and earlier to drill the kids in their basic fundamentals. Play is viewed as unnecessary, a waste of time," Singer says. "I have so many articles that have documented the shortening of free play for children, where the teachers in these schools are using the time for cognitive skills."

It seems that in the rush to give children every advantage — to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them — our culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a waste after all.