THE MORE I LET MYSELF PLAY
the healthier my kid & I can be

PREVIOUS: Children & Play – Intro (Part 1)

BOOK:“Play, Stress & the Learning Brain”

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💠 LEARNING STYLES -via NLP (#1)

💠 ACoA INVENTORY – WRITE what comes up for you as you carefully read thru each Benefit type.
As an adult: In spite of childhood trauma, & looking at your life-long patterns, identify which skills have always come easily / naturally, where you’ve excelled, which ones you’ve been working at the most, & what needs improving

BENEFITS of Childhood PLAY
Positive Play experiences help children develop emotions & connections, sensing & moving, listening & talking, thinking & remembering
a. COGNITIVE skills
> Critical thinking – play encourages learning how to problem-solve, along with concepts like cause-&-effect, quantities & spatial relationships
> Creativity & Imagination – pretending to be doctors, teachers, parents, firefighters, astronauts….. kids learn that life is full of possibilities & opportunities

b. LANGUAGE skills
> Language – develops together with play as the brain grows & children use words while playing with toys & engaging in joint activities, expanding the ability to think & understand  (chart)

• Both language & make-believe play involve the ability to represent the world mentally to oneself, so their developmental are parallel. Children play with:
— Sounds and noises // Linguistic systems (meanings of grammatical constructions) // Rhymes and words //  Conventions of speech. (MORE….)

c. MOTOR Skills
> Fine-motor – are developed by handling & manipulate objects – toys, books, art supplies, small animals
> Gross-motor – by being able to balance, catch, climb, crawl, jump, reach, run,  throw, walk…. when playing

d. SOCIO-EMOTIONAL Skills
> Social – Play helps build relationships, which children master by learning to follow directions, cooperate, take turns, share & obey the rules. It’s one way they learn about & practice living in their world & culture

> Emotional – spending time with safe adults, siblings & other children helps children learn about emotions – how to identify & manage them, as well as recognize & appreciate the feelings of others. It also helps them manage & cope with emotions when upsetting things happen

Social & Mental Disorders Increase as Play Decreases
• Unfortunately this vital part of growing up (play time) is being eroded – not only by the trauma of daily life in severely dysfunctional homes, but by a widespread systematic shift in our schools to ‘accomplishment’ – Doing rather than Being.

A study by the Alliance for Childhood “Crisis in the Kindergarten” tells us that free play or ‘choice time’ in most of them has dwindled to the vanishing point (30 min or less a day), replaced by lengthy lessons & standardized testing (about 2-3 hrs, daily)

• At a WonderPlay conference in 2008 Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a Temple U. psychologist told her audience that lack of play in early childhood education “could be the next global warming,”. Without enough time to develop innovation & creative thinking via PLAY, America’s children will be at a disadvantage in the global economy. (MORE…)

• Peter Gray’s book, Free to Learn (2013), tells us that for more than 50 years now, Americans (& other ‘advanced’ countries) have gradually reduced children’s freedom to play – which is correlated with a rise in childhood emotional problems

• Children are required to spend more time at schoolwork, & then are channeled into adult-directed after-school activities & lessons, with little or no time to explore on their own.
>> The decline in this freedom is showing up as an overall decline in empathy & a rise in narcissism, documented since the late 1970s by standardized questionnaires given to samples of typical college students (MORE….)

• Competitive, self-conscious parents are behind the emphasis on formal learning in preschool, more homework in elementary school & more pressure on young children to quickly gain academic skills.
Consequences are potentially dire, says psychologist Michael Thompson. He believes that diminished time to play freely with other children is producing a generation of socially inept young people, & is one reason for high rates of youth obesity, anxiety, ADD & depression.

NEXT: Childhood Play – FORMS (Part 1)