I attended the Gateways Conference at the Toronto Waldorf School last weekend and am inspired to share insights about the importance of play. The keynote speaker was Joan Almon who is presently with the National Alliance for Childhood, working to bring play back to kindergartens in America. One of the interesting nuggets I took away from the conference is that at the same time we are increasing the stress in children's lives, we are taking away opportunities to play, which is children's innate means for working through stress. Children are wired to play for a reason.
As an adult, you might have observed that being able to take the time and space to do your work helps bring down your stress level and increase your sense of satisfaction. Well, play is the child's work. Studies have shown that when children are stressed (by hurrying to school, separaton anxiety or acclimating to a new sibling for example), stress hormones are found in the sweat on their palms. When allowed to play, the children's stress levels were reduced whereas the stress levels remained the same after an adult iniated activity of reading a book to them. Play is a healthy way for children to work through the stressful situations that are a part of life. It is their domain, one where they are able to make choices and to learn about themselves and about life.
Most parents agree that they want their children to be self-regulating. Recent research indicates that play is an excellent vehicle for learning self-regulation. In early childhood, didactic teaching is not the most effective model since young children learn by doing. Although we generally do not tax young children to make decisions about what to wear, what to eat or when to go to the Doctor or to bed, there is a time and place for children to make their own choices. In self-initiated play, children commonly conduct experiments like what happens when I turn a pot upside down and bang on it with a spoon? They might explore what happens when a box that is filled with something is turned upside down or shaken. Another common experiment is to discover how many blocks can be placed on top of one another before the tower tips over.
These are all valuable experiments involving learning basic scientific laws. In this way, children discover the effects of these laws and learn to work with them. Children, when given the time to play and discover their physical bodies in the process tend to become self-regulating, making good choices about what they feel are safe parameters for themselves. If a child gets hurt often, the way to learn how to get hurt less is by playing in a safe environment learning from trial and error and discovering his or her own ever-changing physical capabilities. Adults have a tendency to impose their own fears and limits on children, i.e. because I am afraid to climb on those bars, you cannot in spite of your own skill level and possible capability.
Parents often feel sorry about limiting children's choices by setting boundaries in the realm of eating, sleeping, dressing, etc. but then impose many restrictions in the realm of play because we can be uncomfortable with the messiness involved in these trial and error processes. It can be hard to watch. However, when children are restricted in the routine aspects of life as well as the domain of their work which is play, they often become frustrated and they might act out which often brings consequences like less playtime.
That's not to say that we should have no boundaries for a child's playtime. Children can be given a limited number of toys and told to play in an area in the house where there are few breakables and adults are comfortable with a certain degree of messiness or basic wear and tear. Simple rules like don't hurt yourself or anyone else can be emphasized. Then within those paramenters, gifting children with the time and space to play allows them to experience the timelessness necessary to conduct important life experiments, to integrate the results and then start new experiments. In this way, through their play, children learn to be self-regulating and find out where natural limits are in the world and in their own physicality.
This learning provides the wiring for frontal lobe development which is key to successful higher level decision-making. There is no better way for children to achieve this goal and they know how to do without us even teaching them. For more information about the benefits of play, you might pick up the new book by Stuart Brown called Play - How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Feeds the Soul.
