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Play

Are children learning to play or playing to learn or both, and more?

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I had the pleasure of spending four months with Titiksha (a child in our family) when she was eight months old. Over the four months, I noticed how a substantial amount of her learning happened in moments of laughter and play. At first, the adults hid from her while playing peek-a-boo or hide and seek. Soon, she started hiding from us -- disappearing and reappearing. She had figured out how to hide and reveal herself. She knew she was magical too!

One day, I saw her observing the wall while playing with rice strainers. What was she seeing? She had noticed the ways in which different rice strainers were making patterns on the wall. Did you ever think that an 8 month old would play with shadows and figure out how they could cause one themselves?

My father would often blow leaves on our balcony. She would have laughing fits when she witnessed this happening. It was only a matter of time till she began blowing leaves herself. She had realised that she too could give out air from her mouth and that it would blow the leaf right away. Oh, how it was all magical!

While she played, she fell many times. She hit her head against the table and on the ground. Naturally, there were tears. She also learnt to crawl up stairs, support herself on an elevated part of the balcony, use the wall and chair to walk and use the switches. We did not teach her any of this.

Imagined Dialogue

I share an imagined conversation with Alison Gopnik (1) as Alison, John Holt (2) as John, Richard Louv (3) as Richard and Pat Farenga (4) as Pat to explore these questions.

Q: Children love playing and often spend much of their day doing so. Are there different kinds of play?

Alison: Yes indeed! There is exploratory play, pretend play and rough-and-tumble play.

Q: Can you tell us more about rough-and-tumble play. I often see children playing in this manner and I fear that they will get hurt.

Alison: In human children, early rough-and-tumble play is associated with better social competence later on. For neuroscience, a plastic brain is a brain that changes more easily. A more plastic young brain will quickly make many new neural connections after a particular experience, while an older brain is more likely to stay the same. Early play not only produces these chemicals, it also helps to preserve plasticity by making the brain more sensitive to these chemicals later on.

Q: So, a brain that plays through roughing it out and tumbling with one another develops a brain that can change more easily. And, a brain that can change more easily is better at adapting to different societal changes as well as in interacting with different people?

Alison: Yes.

Q: What if children get hurt in the process?

John: Little children are indeed very careful at first--watch them on a stair or some steps, deciding whether to step down forwards or crawl down backwards. They are eager to try new things, but at the same time they have a remarkably accurate sense of what they can and cannot do, and as they grow older, their judgment about this improves. But the fussed-over children are almost certain to become either too timid to try anything or too reckless and careless to know what they can try and what they should leave alone. Hence, it is the anxiety of the adults that impinge on children.

Moreover, for children to grow up to be responsible, their instincts need to be developed and trusted by them. They need to have opportunities to learn their responsibilities.

Q: What can you tell us about pretend play?

Alison: Pretend playing is closely related to another distinctively human ability, hypothetical or counterfactual thinking—that is, the ability to consider alternative ways that the world might be. And that, in turn, is central to our powerful human learning abilities. Counterfactual thinking is crucial for learning about the world. In order to learn we need to believe that what we think now could be wrong, and to imagine how the world might be different. But counterfactual thinking is also crucial if we want to change the world. In order to change the world, we need to imagine that the world could be different, and then actually set about making it that way.

Q: So a child who creates worlds is already learning to imagine how the world can be different?

John: It is interesting how pretend and fantasy worlds open up a child's imagination to other possibilities while also helping them delve deeper into their immediate world.

Children use fantasy not to get out of, but to get into, the real world. But in their fantasy play and games they stick as close as they can to reality rules as they understand them. When young children are playing with trucks in a sand pile, pretending to build a road or a dam or whatever, they set themselves real problems, about how to get this load from here to there, and solve them as legitimately as they can. That is, if they meet an obstacle as they roll their trucks this way and that over the sand, they don't jump or fly over it but try to find a way to drive around it, as any real truck would. They are not pretending to be a superman who can lift up trucks. They are only pretending to be real truck drivers driving real trucks. In short, as in all their games, they are trying to enlarge the boundaries of their own experience.

Q: It is fascinating how children could be pretending, on the one hand, to understand their world better and on the other, to think of other possibilities. In both, they must be learning to control their experiences?

Richard: Yes! Children develop executive function in large part through make-believe play. The function is aptly named: When you make up your own world, you’re the executive.

Without independent play, the critical cognitive skill called executive function is at risk. Executive function is a complex process, but at its core is the ability to exert self-control, to control and direct emotion and behaviour.

Q: Finally, what about exploratory play?

Alison: Exploratory play helps animals and children learn how things work.

Pat: Dr. Peter Gray, in his research on self-directed learning among children, writes, "Albert Einstein, who apparently hated school, referred to his achievements in theoretical physics and mathematics as ‘combinatorial play.’" A great deal of research has shown that people are most creative when infused by the spirit of play, when they see themselves as engaged in a task just for fun.

Q: There is so much to be learnt from all the different kinds of play!

Alison: More importantly, another part of the evolutionary story is that play is a satisfying good in itself—a source of joy, laughter, and fun for parents as well as children. If it had no other rationale, the sheer pleasure of play would be justification enough.

Citations

(1). The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik

(2). How children fail by John Holt
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(3). Battling the Nature Deficit with Nature Play, an interview with Richard Louv and Cherly Charles

(4). A Quick History of Homeschooling and the Rise of Self-Directed Education by Patrick Farenga

Thinking Rhizomatically

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