“Today’s another day, time to play.” -Sally Wade
Our modern world dictates that we ask ourselves questions that were fundamentally understood truths for years and years. Had you asked fifty years ago why do children need to play, the answer would have been something along the lines of, “Because that’s what children do.” However, with advances in child development and behavioral sciences we now have a better idea of what it is children gain from the act of playing. According to Deborah J. Leong, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Metropolitan State College in Denver, play has a potential for fostering many areas of young children's development, including social and cognitive development. These types of activities have the following characteristics: 1) Children create a pretend scenario by negotiating and talking to peers and use props in a symbolic way; and 2) Children create specific roles-and rules-for pretend behavior and adopt multiple themes and multiple roles. When play has these characteristics, it can teach children how to communicate effectively, how to respect another’s wishes and how to express an opinion without anger or physicality. Having established why children need to play, a second question arises: How do we get our children to play?
Television, internet, video games, music videos, ipods, cell phones, etc. The list of distractions are endless. In a world where most adults cannot curtail their use of electronic devices, it’s easy to understand the difficulty in making a child put down a device and play with his peers. Leong argues that even when we succeed in getting our kids to participate, these events are usually adult oriented or consist of the same age group of kids. Before the age of the internet and television, a neighborhood full of kids might gather spontaneously to play a sport or another game and be forced to govern themselves. Unsupervised activity, such as this, is hands on social learning that can’t be taught in school. As a replacement Leong is in support of early childhood classrooms, where these situations can be simulated and where there are still adults present to encourage play.
While play has other practical purposes (letting children run around so that they actually go to sleep on time for instance), the true importance is that the children are developing social skills. Any good school‘s aim, from a local elementary school to Harvard, is to instill within a child, teenager or young adult a social education. Anyone can gain knowledge from books, but interaction with one’s peers provides an education that can’t be taught or measured academically. With more distractions than ever, our job is to make sure that our children are learning how to talk to one another, how to understand one another and how, through that, to understand themselves.
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