I’m still steamed about kids and play and this fascinating article (on the history of playgrounds and how their designs have embodied radically different views of childhood) didn’t exactly put my mind at ease:

The two men (Dattner and Friedberg) preferred the term playscape, an important distinction auguring the end of play as a series of dull interactions with one isolated object after another and offering a new conception of creative play…that reflected a revolutionized understanding of the vital importance of play in mental and physical development.

Play, as Friedberg noted in his 1970 book Play and Interplay, was not merely an “expenditure of excess energy,” as previous generations had been accustomed to treating it. (He was thinking of Moses’s pronouncement that the primary purpose of a playground was to “intercept children … and provide a place in which excess energy can be worked off without damage to the park surroundings.”3) In contrast, play was “essential to a culture.”

The author goes on to chronicle the depressing way in which many of the goals of playground design (in the 1960s) were eventually subverted by the rise of the litigious, anxiety-driven era of childrearing in the 1990s (about which I’ve writtenhere) when playgrounds once again became sanitized, safe, and dull environments that limited kids’ ability to stretch themselves, physically and intellectually.

It’s hard for me to understand why play’s central role in human cognition continues to be so misunderstood. Put another way: it makes me completely crazy. When I was a teacher and preschool director, I constantly had to make my ‘case’ to parents that rich imaginative play fosters children’s intellectual development – not only via secondary by-products like impulse control, perspective taking, and the development of social skills but also through the primary acquisition of cognitive skills like mathematical reasoning and phonological awareness that are more directly predictive of academic performance.

If I had a dime for every parent who’d say, “Play is really great but I really don’t want my four year-old to ‘fall behind.’ I want him to be a good reader.”  As if reading isn’t facilitated hugely by pretend play when kids are making up and sharing their elaborate fantasies, beginning to learn the sequencing of ideas (the concept of a beginning, middle and end), hearing and practicing new vocabulary, making the thrilling (and essential) discovery that their scribbled pretend grocery list is something called ‘writing’ that carries actual meaning, and experiencing language as a social experience. It just astounds me that people can’t see why play is so powerful. At this point – after decades and decades of research – it no longer seems merely ignorant to be dismissive of play; it almost feels like a plot to harm children.

And it’s because play has been so denigrated over the years that we have not one but two major problems:

First, and most obvious, the kill-joy adults have taken play away from kids. Poor kids and rich kids, both. Simply put, kids are getting totally screwed by the adults and I don’t know why more of them aren’t just going completely postal in their classrooms in protest. (Some of them are losing it, however. Disciplinary problems in early childhood have increased pretty dramatically, and who can blame these kids?)  Walk into any public kindergarten in America today. They look like 2nd grade classrooms from 30 or 40 years ago, so absent is play from the typical Kindergarten classroom, replaced by “skills-based” (sic) curriculum. It’s unclear what skills are being developed: skill in filling out work sheets, I guess. Whenever I hear conservative rhetoric about going ‘back to basics’ in schools, I have to laugh out loud because, truly, if we went back to basics, from a generation ago, we’d back off and let kids be kids for a  lot longer. And we certainly wouldn’t be taking recess from five year-olds, like some pedagogic Grinch, and making them spend hours filling out work sheets at their desks.

But here’s what’s almost as bad: Because kids have so little experience of richly imaginative play, they are often at a complete loss when they are given a chance to ‘play.’ Many kids really don’t know how to “pretend play” anymore. They’ve memorized TV show and movie scripts and they play with highly specific themed toys, rather than toys with flexible uses. They have no experience making up a story from, say, a pile of blocks or playing dress-up with an old trunk full of grown up clothes. I saw this first hand over and over again as a teacher. And kids’ increasing inability to play in the complex and narrative fashion that kids have done for centuries, maybe millennia, only reinforces adults’ messed up idea that kids really can’t handle – or don’t need – such unstructured experiences. What they really need, the adults conclude, is more and more structured time. It’s a particularly hopeless cycle.  A few good souls try to whip their kids into a frenzy of ‘good’ play, over-orchestrating everything and looking fairly ridiculous. But these people (usually parents or very devoted teachers) end up exhausted from bucking the societal trends. And, anyway, there are no other kids around for these parents’ kids to play with because everyone’s so busy taking tap lessons and playing travel soccer in utero. (Honestly, if I see one more soccer team comprised of four year-olds who don’t know – or care- where their goal post is, I’m going to throw up.)

It’s so painfully and manifestly wrong. And yet I’ve found most adults so closed to this way of understanding human development that I’ve almost given up trying to make the case for play on purely cognitive grounds. Instead, I focus on how play supports social-emotional learning. That’s what I did at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I pulled out the Harvard card, which always wakes up a few people, and talked about all those bright students who can’t figure out how to be in the world. But it’s a bit of a feint. Not that play doesn’t make kids more collaborative, more patient, more empathetic, better able to control their impulses. It does.

But it also makes kids smarter. End of story.

And when we look back 30 or 40 years from now and assess the consequences of this misguided takeover of childhood, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

This is the best-ever reason children should be encouraged to play! Read the whole article, “All Work and No Play Make the Baining the Dullest Culture on Earth” here, but the summary is that the Baining people of Papua New Guinea are culturally bankrupt because they prohibit all forms of play:

…(The researchers found that the Baining) lacked the cultural structures that are the stock-in-trade of anthropology, such as myths, festivals, religious traditions, and puberty rites, and that the method of trying to learn about them through interviews produced little response. They did not tell stories, rarely gossiped, and exhibited little curiosity or enthusiasm. In Fajans’s words, “Their conversation is obsessively mundane, concerned primarily with food-getting and food-processing.” … By negative example, (their culture) tells us something about the value of play to human existence.

They refer to children’s play as “splashing in the mud,” an activity of pigs, not appropriate for humans. They do not allow infants to crawl and explore on their own. When one tries to do so an adult picks it up and restrains it.  Beyond infancy, children are encouraged or coerced to spend their days working and are often punished—sometimes by such harsh means as shoving the child’s hand into the fire—for playing.

I’ve written about play as the foundation of human creativity and empathy. It is the underpinning of all the cognitive tasks humans need to be successful, both primary intellectual tasks like language and mathematical reasoning,  and secondary skills like impulse-control and perspective-taking. Play cultivates the imagination by putting children in the mind (and shoes) of another being.

The cognitive benefits of play are dispositive and hardly need to be belabored here, yet school boards and politicians are doing everything in their power to limit play in young children’s lives. The irony is that just as American schools are stripping play from the curriculum, school systems in South and East Asia are looking to the model of American education with its emphasis on the virtues of imagination, critical thinking, independent problem-solving and creativity. (Martha Nussbaum addresses this here.)

Whenever I hear conservative critics call for a return to the “good old days” of American schooling, I have to laugh because the traditional American school day was brimming with play, and of course children spent their non-school hours almost entirely engaged in free play out of range of adults. Today’s Kindergarten curriculum (with its stupid yet perplexing work sheets and needlessly early reading expectations) resembles the 1st and 2nd grades of 40 years ago. Except that isn’t even a fair comparison because first and second graders in previous generations had more recess and free play.

What’s hard for me to understand as a teacher is why parents have bought into this toxic regime wholesale. Don’t they want their kids to play? I think part of the disconnect is that young kids in this generation have so little experience with the richly narrative, open-ended fantasy play that boosts cognition that they don’t know how to engage in it. Their play looks (and often is) rather dull compared to the pretend or fantasy play that was so common a generation ago. You often hear kids just mimicking the lines from a TV show or wanting to know if their lego ‘kit’ is going to match what they see on the box.

So we have a vicious cycle where a lot of parents understand, instinctually, that their kids should play in a more naturalistic and enriching way, but our culture places no value on such richly imaginative open-ended play:

• kids’ schedules are too programmed;
• children are over- tired;
• they don’t play in mixed age groups very much;
• they don’t have unstructured outdoor time;
• and – maybe worst of all – today’s toys and games tend to be linked to TV and movie themes with only one “right” way to use them. As a result, little children often just parrot other people’s narratives rather than develop their own sequence of ideas and fantasies.

The upshot of all of this is that kids don’t really have a clue how to develop play skills, as crazy as that sounds for those who think play is not a learned process. I often saw this in my preschool classrooms. Four and five year-olds would mill around, looking for direction, and I would have to do a ton of what we call “scaffolding” to get children engaged in playing grocery story or pretending to be dragons. They could do it, eventually, but they needed support and time to play creatively.

In the good old days (which were in other ways not so great), children developed their cognitive-boosting play skills over time, and from older children. It’s frustrating as a parent to watch your kid at loose ends when you say, “Go play.” I think this is why parents are so drawn to the scripted toys and games that have a definite purpose and a set of pre-determined materials for specific outcomes. We probably suspect those kind of props offer a less cognitively rigorous way of engaging with the world than the limitless possibilities of a pile of wooden blocks. But it’s hard work to cultivate play – literally cultivate it, just like a garden –  in a society that’s incredibly stingy with the soil, sun, and water that support creative play.

When people ask what dramatic pretend play does for brain development, my answer is Let Me Count the Ways. But the main thing is that open-ended pretend play engages multiple pathways in the brain. It’s that simple. We are harming our children physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Ultimately, we will harm our economy, too.