Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Fostering Learning through Play

I'd like to continue with some thoughts about the value of play and ways to foster healthy play. Have you ever noticed that when your child is really sick the playful glimmer in his/her eye disappears? When that glimmer returns, you know your child is recovering. Parents and health care professionals intuitively know this. There is a link between playfulness and health. Pediatricians recommend play because it supports physical, emotional, cognitive and social development. Play enlivens life!

There is also a link between creativity and playfulness on the one hand, and between aggression and a lack of playfulness on the other hand. There has been research conducted on the winners of the Mac Arthur award and it was discovered that they are overall curious, creative and they value play. It is a playful approach that allows the inner genius to be expressed and developed in each of us. Engineering firms have discovered that the best engineers are "tinkerers" or people who bring a spirit of playfulness to their work.

Research has also been done about people who commit murders, initiated when the student at Austin University went to the top of the tower and shot people below. Scientists were commissioned to study the shooter and since then more evidence has substantiated their claims. They have discovered that these murderers have two commonalities: one that they have a history of abuse and secondly they have an inability to play due to lack of experience in playing. Although they might have achieved things in their lives, they did not engage in lighthearted, self-directed play which is a healthy way to work through frustration and aggression. Play itself or a playful spirit is a stress-reducer, one without contra-indications.

While our old economy is changing, the emerging model of the 21st century is the "Economy of the Imagination". The problems we have presently require a new kind of thinking to resolve them, one that we possibly haven't even thought of yet. It's not enough to have knowledge, we also need to entertain possibilities and to imagine our way into the future. Businesses are reporting that new employees often lack the imagination and the social skills required to sit at a table with a group of people and work through a problem. These skills require active participation to learn; they cannot be learned passively through a didactic approach or by engaging with a screen.

Imagination is developed through play. It is a function of the right brain which experiences peak development from birth to seven years of age. Albert Einstein said that the best science is built on a foundation of wonder and imagination. It seems that we are more inclined these days to go straight to the science and miss out on building the foundation that makes great science possible.

There are ways to foster creativity and play, just as there are signs that the wellspring is clogged. Media has a clogging effect on children's healthy play, offering images that are hard to digest since they come from an adult's imagination rather than welling up from inside the child and then being acted out. The child trying to act out media images often says a lot, repeating certain phrases but takes little action. The images can get stuck in the child's head, unable to flow through to their limbs even though the child is innately programmed to imitate or act out what he or she has witnessed. The experience of television is so one-dimensional that can thwart healthy expression, promoting passivity and frustration.

Certain toys, usually the ones that have batteries, have the same effect as media. They can do everything without any input from the child, thus thrwarting the child's participation. These toys leave children with only one creative option, that is to break them. Children are often happier with open-ended toys like a cardboard box or a set of blocks so they can express their own creativity.

Another obstacle to children's healthy play is too much intellectual information which leads them to thinking rather than doing. Signs of a child being too much in their thinking is asking questions incessantly, having difficulty initiating and completing tasks or working through simple problems and then ultimately a low threshold of frustration. An adult can help a child develop imagination rather than premature intellectualization by the way we answer children's questions. For example, if a child asks why it is raining, the intellectual answer would be to talk about condensation, clouds, barometric pressure and the like. This answer is often unsatisfying for the young child, although it is appropriate later on. The answer that speaks to the young child's stage of development is more like: it is raining because the plants are thirsty. This makes the young child happy who then looks at the rain as a positive thing on behalf of the plants. This may lead to observation of the plants and how they open up after a spring rain and the sheer wonder of it all.

If a child is still unable to find his or her way to healthy play, there is something else the adults can do. When the adults engage in purposeful physical work (like domestic chores rather than computer work), children often become inspired in their play. They might work or play alongside us while we do dishes or sweep the floor or build a tower while we sew on buttons. It is however, not just a matter of what we are doing, but the inward attitude we carry while we are doing it as well. Children are mindreaders you know. If we are rushed or caught up in fears about a child getting hurt or making a mess, the child becomes inhibited in play. Our attitude needs to be one of timelessess(even while keeping the end point in mind), tolerance of some messiness, of trust in the child's capabilities and of joy so the child can go forward with confidence and learn from the trial and error process that is play.

The young child gains mastery over their world through play. They learn about the world and about themselves. For as a child plays, we see indications of what they are passionate about. You might try but you cannot put a child in a box unless it has their passion in it. But while a child is playing, you might see a glimpse of their future. That is something worth supporting by creating time and space for it.

Monday, April 20, 2009

A Child's Work is Play

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.