We Need a Play Intervention
The concern that childhood play is in a decline is not new news, but it was an idea thrust back into the spotlight by this week's article in the NYTimes, Effort to Restore Children's Play Gains Momentum. There are parents and professionals alike, who are banding together to raise awareness and teach others how to engage children in classic, active, imaginative play. Reading this article, I vacillated between feeling heartened that there is such a movement and saddened that we need one.
There are a lot of directions we could point our fingers in if we wanted to place blame for the demise of play: Nintendo, Sponge Bob Square Pants, Corporate America, parental exhaustion ,Madison Avenue, "seat time"; standardized tests, unsafe neighborhoods, homework, elite sports, household chores, urban sprawl…the list goes on. While so many things grow larger in our society--highways, portion sizes, televisions--space, energy, and time for pure, spontaneous, imaginative play is shrinking, squeezed out by modernity.
Even that which appears to be engaged, creative play at first glance is not. It is a child pushing a button to hear the ABCs sung to him and then discarding the frog who sang it. It is a group of kids re-enacting a scene verbatim that they have repeatedly seen in a favorite movie. It is a two-year-olds opening apps on her parents’ iPhone to pop virtual bubbles, be read to, or study flash cards. Modern play has become passive, sedentary, pre-fabricated; it requires little creativity on the part of the child.
"Classic" play is a process of discovery. The plot unfolds as its players co-create. It may be based on real experience--a trip to the dentist, a visit to the zoo, a family dinner--but children take on novel roles, they generate dialogue, they personify animals. Objects are not simply used in their traditional fashion. Chairs are organized in a line to simulate a plane. Snakes are tied around waists for seatbelts. Beads are the in-flight peanuts. A lion is the pilot.
Active, imaginative play entails getting outside and storming the neighbor's castle, building a luge run in the snow, creating a stew for the rabbits out of sticks and water and mud. It is starting with the raw material of life and expanding it to otherworldly possibilities. Pretend play is organizing dolls around the table and serving them a despised food. It is your child imitating what he witnesses you doing and practicing those behaviors. And when you overhear your words coming out of your child's mouth as she reprimands her doll, it is a working through of right and wrong. She is internalizing you.
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