The Importance of Play

The importance of play is grossly under stated. School recess, lunch time recess and after school, each is an essential and important part of children’s need for play. Face to face interaction without the confinment of a classroom or structured environment. This brief, daily period allows children to ‘blow off steam’, run around and release pent up energy or boredom from lessons.

For generations of children, this welcome break provided a healthy outlet during the school day. Recess during lunch and you ran around like a rabbit. Free for a little while! Why is outdoor recess rare today? Worse still, why is physical education not being offered in many areas? Why are children expected to sit still for hours with just a short break to eat?

Freedom to explore

Fresh air, sunshine and blue sky. Riding bikes (without helmets and survived to talk about it) or skateboards. Rolling down hills of lush, green grass giggling all the way down. Playing dolls, trading baseball cards or Matchbox cars. Freedom to expore the world outside helps to build life-long curiousity and wonder. Pre-cell phones and video games were bike riding, walking in a group, exploring backyards and parks or just stopping over a friend’s house to share the latest. Physical activities which were born from natural curiousity and fostered creativity. These are now two very rare experiences in today’s world of devices bolstered by the instant gratification of pressing a button on a keyboard.

Play clothes and streetlamps

If you grew up with the former, as I did, you remember how important play was to your development. Who can recall being told my mom or dad, upon entering the house after school: “Change your clothes!” in order not to soil or tear school clothes or uniforms. Play clothes signaled freedom. It was time to begin the serious business of play and the inevitable, wonderful dirt that came with it.

A walk down to the brook that ran alongside the local park with a group of friends- all eager to see the latest tad pole population. Or who could skim stones the farthest across the pooled water. It wasn’t boys only or girls only, it was the neighborhood and whomever was available or ‘allowed out’ that day. The pile of bicycles on the front lawn of any friend’s house indicated from where that day’s adventure would be launched. We operated by the Golden Rule of do unto others and the Parental Rule: Be home when the streetlamps came on.

Face to face communication and the Importance of Play

At what point did we lose our way guiding children’s development in our society? How can children learn creativity and face to face communication with their peers? When do children today have the opportunity to just be children? Will we keep rolling back the entry age for pre-school? Why is it important to get children into the education system earlier than kindergarten?

Is there proof that the millions of adults who never set foot in a pre-k classroom or ‘nursery school’ are forever disadvantaged and handicapped to the point of mediocrity? The importance of play worked very well and it can again.

Elementary school years are so short; creativity and imaginative play with peers are crucial to healthy development. I don’t think ‘virtual’ anything can replace reality. Nor should it. If there were less violent video games and less isolating screen time, children might not grow up with a distorted sense of right and wrong. Old-fashioned thinking? You bet, and maybe just what we need.