e-mail
National Public Radio (NPR) did two segments on the importance of play recently. And I think they bear watching. In Old Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills, it is pointed out that back before the mid-1950s play was not so much associated with toys as it was with unstructured free time. But the advent of television advertising and marketing to children has changed that.
Combine that with the push by parents to have children involved in organized activities and the lack of recess during school hours, and let us know forget the amount of time spent in front of TV and video games, and most children today have very little unstructured play time.
Researchers believe that this has a direct negative impact on the child’s executive functioning skills. Executive function is a higher brain skill, one that continues developing through early adulthood. It is important for controlling your working memory, impulse control and self-regulation. And this is what child development researchers see as the biggest problem…overall today children have less ability to self-regulate.
I know that our family fits the descriptions in this article. I grew up on a farm, and although we had lots of toys, most of my play time was spent outside, wondering the fields, in imaginary play. When I was older, I had a horse that I rode to the far parts of our property, packing a lunch and climbing up into the trees to make my own pretend world. Sometimes I took along real friends, sometimes I played alone. But there were not many fancy “props” and there were no adults prescribing how the play would go. Sure, I played softball on a team in the summer time and took piano lessons, but I wasn’t shuttled quickly from one activity to another.
And we had recess. In fact, when we were little, we had morning and afternoon recess. And while there were swings and slides, I can clearly remember that the slide was most often used by the boys as a race track for racing small cars (if they actually had them) or rocks pretending to be cars. And we girls would gather around a large oak tree, gathering the acorns for a variety of make-believe games.
I’ve watched my children do this a bit in our own neighborhoods, but never to the extent that I used to. Instead, they’ll plop in front of a video, or be in a hurry to get to dance, church and sport events (usually all crammed into the same Saturday).
And then there are those children already have problems with executive functioning, like LuLu. Many who have the diagnosis of ADHD have major executive functioning deficits.
This is why the second article, Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control, is fascinating. A preschool in New Jersey is using a program called Tools of the Mind for encouraging imagination and creative play in preschoolers. It’s a very structured way of “teaching” these children how to play, for the purpose of teaching them self-regulation. And the proof is in test scores. Children having completed the Tools of the Mind program scored significantly higher on tests of executive functioning than those who had not been through the program.
I work in a middle school and I really think my students need time to run around & just act silly. Especially the 6th graders (especially the boys). I think they’d do much better in the classroom if they had a period to just let off some steam, in a playground or park — or even just some unstructured time to run around in the gym, making up their own games. Sports and calisthenics are NOT the same as REAL play.
Left to their own devices, the kids will use their imagination. I guess at home they play computer games, but if they’re bored enough & have no set task and no “real” toys they will make stuff up the way I used to when I was a kid. I’d much rather see little boys chasing each other around with bookends (I work in a school library) pretending that they’re ray guns or something then see them sitting motionless in front of a computer screen playing a computer game — and I’d much rather see little girls getting giggly & loud, playing “school” than checking out each others’ nail tips!