{"id":128,"date":"2015-11-25T00:41:19","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T00:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/erikachristakis.com\/author\/?p=128"},"modified":"2016-02-10T17:50:59","modified_gmt":"2016-02-10T17:50:59","slug":"why-children-need-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/erikachristakis.com\/author\/2015\/11\/25\/why-children-need-play\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Children Need Play"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"children-play-rain-india_18731_990x742\"
Indian children playing in the rain, National Geographic photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n


\nThis is the best-ever<\/strong> reason children should be encouraged to play!<\/em>\u00a0Read the whole article, \u201cAll Work and No Play Make the Baining the Dullest Culture on Earth<\/em>\u201d\u00a0here<\/a>, but the summary is that the Baining people of Papua New Guinea are culturally bankrupt because they prohibit all forms of play:<\/p>\n

\u2026(The researchers found that the Baining) lacked the cultural structures that are the stock-in-trade of anthropology, such as myths, festivals, religious\u00a0traditions, and puberty\u00a0rites, 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\u2019s words, \u201cTheir conversation is obsessively mundane, concerned primarily with food-getting and food-processing.\u201d \u2026 By negative example, (their culture) tells us something about the value of play to human existence.<\/p>\n

They refer to children\u2019s play as \u201csplashing in the mud,\u201d 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.\u00a0 Beyond infancy, children are encouraged or coerced to spend their days working and are often punished\u2014sometimes by such harsh means as shoving the child\u2019s hand into the fire\u2014for playing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve written about play<\/a> 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, \u00a0and secondary skills like impulse-control and perspective-taking. Play cultivates the imagination by putting children in the mind (and shoes) of another being.<\/p>\n

<\/span>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\u2019s 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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Whenever I hear conservative critics call for a return to the \u201cgood old days\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019t even a fair comparison because first and second graders in previous generations had more recess and free play.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s hard for me to understand as a teacher is why parents have bought into this toxic regime wholesale. Don\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u2018kit\u2019 is going to match what they see on the box.<\/p>\n

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:<\/span><\/p>\n