PREVIOUS : PLAY-ing EXPERTS (Part 2)

QUOTE: 📌 “A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him, and who he will miss terribly.”  ~ Poet Pablo Neruda

MORE Play EXPERTS

Cindy Dell Clark is an anthropology professor at Rutgers U-Camden NJ, studying how children use play to cope with chronic illness such as diabetes & asthma. She found that kids use their imagination to handle stress & make sense of their disease. Most children (& young animals) roughhouse or fool around, but not all societies provide time & opportunity for pretend-play.

Many materially poor cultures focus on the family as a unit, needing their children to do chores, which is essential to their economic survival.
However, more prosperous societies do see Play as important. Because they can afford to consider everyone as autonomous individuals, & want their children to become independent, they’re encouraged to use their imaginations, tell stories & act out roles

Sandra Russ (2004), psychologist & researcher, found that Pretend Play encourages children’s capacity for cognitive flexibility & therefore creativity. It allows them to express pleasant & unpleasant emotions, which leads to modulating feelings & integrate emotions with thinking. Now some educators are using pretend games to teach math & reading.

• The Root-Bernstein (2012) is a study of a group highly creative people – Nobel Prize winners & recipients of the MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant. Researches found that these people played more early childhood games about make-believe worlds than the control (non-winning) participants who were in the same fields…..

This “suggests a strong correlation between childhood world–play & adult creative achievement in the arts, sciences & humanities, considered the invention of plausible, probable or possible worlds”
EXPs: Charlotte Bronte, J.R.R.Tolkien,  Leo Lionni, Gregory Benford, Desmond Morris, Todd Silver…. (MORE….)

For anyone interested in the Bible, here is validation from the Highest level of authority – permission & encouragement to be happy :
1. God says: “…. be ye glad & rejoice forever in that which I create” Isaiah 65:18
2. “Our mouths are filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy…. the Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy”  Psalms 126:2

3. “When times are good, be happy. But when times are bad, consider this: God has made the one as well as the other.” Ecclesiastes 7:14
4. “…. may the righteous be glad & rejoice before God. May they be happy & joyful.” Psalms 68:3

COMMENTS – Whether we believe in a Personal God or not :
#1 – says we are valuable, that Higher Power doesn’t make garbage
#2 – reminds us we’ve been given benefits even if our parents told us we’re worthless, & couldn’t see our value.
We DO have talents, skills, emotions, brains, options…. along with tools & people to help with Recovery. There is hope because we don’t have to be alone anymore

#3 – tells us there’s a reason & a season for everything, that bad situations seldom last (especially smaller ones), even though it didn’t seem that way when we were kids

#4 – This one’s even harder to take in because for the most part ACoAs are convinced we’re anything but ‘righteous’. While this verse refers to our spiritual condition, even those of us who don’t believe in original sin still have Self-Hate telling us that we’re inherently (born) bad!

On the contrary, no matter how unworthy we ‘feel’, we have a right to live – to live well & be loved. LUKE 15 gives us 2 parables – of the Lost Sheep, whom the Shepherd searches for & rejoices when it’s found.
And the Prodigal Son, whom the father welcomes with joy at coming back. Our original parents may have rejected us, but there are other people in the world who can & will accept us.

LOOK for healthy people who already have the capacity to love & know how to play, and learn from them.

NEXT: ADULT need for play