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Today’s parents are bombarded with messages about the essentials of good child rearing: less television, more books. Five to 10 fruits and vegetables a day. Regular exercise. Streetproofing.
It’s no wonder increasing numbers of families enrol even preschoolers in organized lessons and structured supervised activities. According to Statistics Canada, the proportion of four- and five-year-olds who took organized lessons like gymnastics and martial arts increased to 30 per cent in 2003, from 23 per cent in 1999. As many as 41 per cent of children in that age group participated in coached sports, up from 36 per cent in 1999.
Not only do these activities solve some child-care problems, the right settings can stimulate children, feed them well, get them into shape and keep them safe. But all that supervision and planning is crowding out an activity researchers increasingly believe is crucial to a child’s healthy development: unstructured, spontaneous play.
A recent report by the Canadian Council on Learning—drawing from current evidence-based research—shows that play actually has an important role in children’s development. Play lays the foundation for the intellectual, social, physical and emotional skills children need to succeed in school and in life. For example, stacking blocks and mixing sand and water encourages logical mathematical thinking, scientific reasoning, and cognitive problem-solving.
Rough and tumble play, like tackling your brother, develops social and emotional self-regulation – perhaps particularly important in developing the social competence of boys. Imaginative play fosters creativity and flexibility – children are doing something important when they transform the lawn chairs and towels into a backyard fort.
Games of pretend, particularly with friends, encourage communication, conversational skills, sharing, and social problem-solving skills. There’s a good chance that labour-relations expert started to hone her flair for persuading, negotiating, compromising and cooperating during backyard skirmishes with the neighbourhood kids.
As children play, they learn. They combine ideas, impressions and feelings with their experiences and opinions. They formulate ideas about their world and share them. They create a culture and society with their peers. In short, if you want to give your children a head start in life, let them play.
So should we rush out and hire someone to provide our kids with that early advantage? Here’s the catch: it should be play the kids initiate themselves, born of their own imaginations, not coached into existence. Self-directed play helps children feel competent and self-confident. Not only does climbing the tallest tree in the park test a child’s strength, it also uncovers inner fortitude. The learning that occurs, though, is a by-product of play, not its goal.
More and more, technology, traffic, and our increasingly urban world limit our children’s space to play, just as parental concerns about security and liability limit their opportunities for spontaneous, unstructured play.
Previous generations, for numerous reasons, were much better at giving children the space and time to understand that they can overcome “boredom” on their own. We’re just forgetting it as a society, and research is reminding us that it’s worth re-learning.
So what can parents do to encourage children’s play?
Set the stage. Protect the time that kids need to explore, discover and manipulate their environment. Young children need long, uninterrupted periods - at least 45-60 minutes at a time - for spontaneous free play. Look for early childhood programs that focus on providing long blocks of time for free play. Give children materials that encourage them to create their own worlds, whether that’s a stack of empty cardboard boxes, a trunk of dress-up clothes, a few balls or a sandbox and a pail full of water.
Play with them, especially if the kids are tackling something that’s new, if they’re becoming frustrated or if they’re about to quit because they can’t quite master a skill. Follow them down the slide, or put on the magician’s hat yourself.
Let them take age-appropriate risks. That’s how they succeed. Make sure everyone in the family or in the group is included and has a chance to play, on his or her own terms. Recognize that mess, rough-housing and nonsense are an essential part of the package.
Get them outdoors. Natural landscapes provide rich, multi-sensory experiences and encourage boisterous, vigorous, physically active play. Rough, uneven surfaces help children develop strength, balance and co-ordination. Physical challenges and opportunities to take risks occur most often outside. Let them use their environment to build, manipulate and create for their own purposes.
We need to support our early childhood educators, who will inevitably spend many hours with our children, to be skilled, comfortable participants in children’s self-directed play. The focus of early childhood programs should be on play rather than directed learning.
A child’s play should not serve an adult’s goals. We need to recognize the value of play, and our children’s right to participate in games of their own creation. And then we might take a lesson from our children’s books: play shouldn’t be work, after all.
This article was first published in the National Post on Monday, November 20, 2006.
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