The Importance of Play
References: Children at Play – Heidi Britz-Creoelius
You are Your Child’s First Teacher – Rahima Baldwin Rancy
The Out of Sync Child – Carol Stock Kranowitz
The Endangered Mind -
Modern children are accustomed to manufactured toys with defined purposes, television and films that present someone else’s imagination, computers that use other people’s programs, and classes in dance or sports in which someone instructs them in what to do. As a result, today’s children can no longer bring forth their own strong, creative impulse to play. The spirit of play is a foundation for physical, social, and mental health.
Why is children’s play declining? One reason is that in the United States and around the world, educators and parents have become increasingly preoccupied with early academics. There is a tremendous push for getting children to read at younger ages, and this spills over into other areas of learning as well.
The absence of open-ended play is also a problem for the school child, who used to create games with neighborhood friends, adjusting the rules as needed. Instead from age 5 onward, many children join sports teams and are taught to play according to someone else’s rules. They have little opportunity to exercise their own imagination or creative judgment.
Why is play so important and what happens to children when it is eroded? Studies in Germany, Israel, and the United States show basically the same results regarding the importance of play: children who engage in creative play in early childhood tend to do better in all spheres of life as they grow older. They excel not only academically but also socially, emotionally and physically. They tend to be more harmonious and less aggressive, and they show a better understanding of other people. While the traditional childhood diseases have been nearly eradicated in developed countries, children instead show great increases in sleep and eating disorders, nervous ailments and stress, hyperactivity, asthma and allergies. The conditions of modern life are endangering the health of our children, and their declining health goes hand in hand with their declining ability to play.
What do children need for a healthy life? One of the things is a relaxed, rhythmic lifestyle with plenty of time for creative play. They also need to see adults who enjoy their work and engage in it with active will, especially the basic human tasks of cooking, sewing, woodworking and the like. Children love to imitate adults at work, and this imitation is a cornerstone of play. Children need a chance to interact with the world of nature and with human beings, rather than with the technological world of televisions, videos, and computers. One can go on and on with such a list. In general, children thrive with a healthy, simple life, full of loving warmth, protected by secure boundaries and with opportunities to explore the world through play.
It has been said that there is nothing that human beings do, know, think, hope and fear that has not been attempted , practiced, experienced or at least anticipated in children’s games.
SPACE AND TIME
Patience is closely connected with trust – through a regular repetition of events. The development of trust thus already starts with the infant; and we must already be at pains not to disturb this development by deceiving him. If we show him the milk bottle, then the meal should also follow. If we tell the child that we are taking him for a walk, then it should be only when we are taking are really taking him out.
By means of what he sees, grasps, moves, lets go again or drops, the child finds his relationship to space and time, to the laws of nature, to all those things which can later be measured, weighed and calculated.
As soon as the young child’s strength allows, plates and bowls become experimental objects: they sail through the air until a door or cupboard offers resistance and they fall to the ground robbed of their strength. Experience of space is broadened in all directions from the purely vertical downward movement to the horizontal backward and forward and the vertical upward movements. As he becomes more expert in throwing, the child can begin to control and observe the trajectory of an object. Included in here will be learning about sound, shapes, colors, weight and so on.
After coming to grips with surrounding objects, the next step in conquering space is to start moving oneself. Crawling is the first temporary solution. Some children jump this stage, others perfect it to an astonishing degree.
Hardly has the child learnt to crawl before it tries to gain height. A delightful means of discovering differences in height is a flight of stairs, a wooden flight in a living room being the most comfortable of course. Crawling up can be learnt quickly. It is much more difficult to come down. It is quite a relief for the other when she knows that the child turns reliably each time and does not try to make a descent head first! Only then have the stairs been conquered, and for many years remain a favorite spot for playing.
Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn’t any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I’m not at the bottom,
I’m not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where I always
Stop.
Halfway Down by A.A. Milne
It is not only that a step is the ideal height for a sitting child, but that the adult, too, sitting on the stairs, has suddenly become accessible in a wonderful way. The child can sit down so that it is just as tall as the adult or even taller!
It is soon that the first joyous steps are taken – upright on two legs. Space, which has grown familiar through play, is understood step by step. It is an effort to take one step after another. The small child will still often hold out its hand: “help me”, or even both arms: “carry me”.
RHYTHM
Already at a very early age, the child enjoys the game of hide-and-seek. The infant’s game of peek-a-boo help them to learn about coming and going, day and night.
“For early childhood it is important to realize the value of children’s songs, for example, as a means of education. They must make a pretty and rhythmical impression on the senses; the beauty of the sound is to be valued more than the meaning. The more living the impression made on the eye and ear, the better. Dancing movements in a musical rhythm have a powerful influence in building up the physical organs, and this should not be undervalued.” On the effect of rhythm on children………Rudolf Steiner
The heartbeat of the mother is the lullaby of the unborn child. For a time the child falls for the trick of recorded music, or a tape recording until he notices that no one is there, they realize that they have been deserted, the beginning of breaking trust, being tricked.
Very soon the baby in a cradle becomes a ‘rider’ on its parents’ knees and experiences the rhythm of its first nursery rhymes:
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
Years before it reaches the age for fairy tales, the child’s imagination has also been stimulated and its vocabulary extended beyond the ordinary daily usage.
The bouncing ball is a source of rhythm and an indispensable toy. All shapes and sizes, balloons, bubbles, spinning tops. All resemble the shape of the planet.
The many beautiful songs of sun, moon and stars should accompany every childhood. They deepen our delight in the beauty of it all, the wonderment, and deliciousness of being a human being on this earth.
THE FOUR ELEMENTS
In playing with the four elements – earth, water, air and fire – the child is creator extraordinaire!
The child often first meets the element of earth in the form of sand. Its wonders never fail: dry sand trickles through the hand, damp sand stands firm, really wet sand pours.
Just watch a child playing with water – it is a deeply pleasurable activity and stimulates all sorts of imagination.
Then there is mud of course – a mixture of earth and water – luckily we have rubber boots and washing machines!
Air – kites! On windy days the children should go out and experience being tossed about like leaves – holding little flags and windmills make it all the more fun! At home paper airplanes, birds, parachutes and the like can engage the children for hours.
Fire – when a fire is built often enough with adults, the prohibition of lighting fires without an adult becomes easier to enforce. The danger of fire and how to handle it is understood much sooner. How marvelous it is to make an excursion in winter through crunching snow, and then lay a lattice of dry twigs on it – have a red blazing fire, a pot of tea simmering away, apples fried on the end of a stick.
Messing about in water, making paper swallows, and experimenting with the campfire ensure a sound and healthy approach to modern technology – one worthy of human beings. Giving children perfected technical toys too early paralyses their technical inventiveness, which alone brings progress. Who needs an electric railway if he cannot knock a nail in or saw a piece off a plank of wood? He may soon learn how to operate a railway, but never develop new ideas, never learn how to do an improvised repair until the ready made spare part arrives.
Example of the little 8 year old boy with lots of technical toys, went to visit a farm one day, and the gate, about 4 feet high was kept closed. When his parents came to collect him, the 8 year old broke into tears: he had been locked in! The thought of climbing over the gate had not occurred to him.
PLANTS AND ANIMALS
Certain experiences every child should have for himself: certain areas of life have to be experienced and assimilated in depth as a child, so that later, in different places and under unaccustomed conditions, one notices the teeming life which would otherwise be missed.
Children should dig not only in sterile sand; digging in the living earth leads to encounters with worms, insects, centipedes and the wonderful little glowing-red spiders. If one turns the flat stones in shallow water one finds all kinds of swimming, crawling and clinging things that live there.
Tall grass intermingled with innumerable creatures humming about it and crawling through it – larks high in the sky, frogs, slow-worms or snails on the ground – a lawn is no substitute for this. A wood in spring with its fresh new foliage, ringing with the chirping of birds, with flowers and blooming bushes – a wood at any time of year. Cultivated land, in its changes from ploughing to sowing or planting and reaping – the child has to see where the cleanly packaged foodstuffs in the supermarket originate. Visiting a cow-shed is indispensable – meeting a little calf is a special treat.
What else? Climbing trees – feeding chickens – watching a bird hatching and rearing its young – playing with kittens – picking flowers – gathering fruit – sowing seeds and watching them grow.
The short-lived toys of nature accompany the child throughout the year: daisy chains, castles and houses made by piling mounds of freshly cut grass; lovely fairy-like dolls’ tea parties made from all kinds of blossoms and plants. Stalks and fruit serve to make all kinds of animals and birds. With autumn come chestnut animals, necklaces made of rowan berries and finally lanterns.
A ship I saw a-sailing,
A ship so wondrous fair
The crew were difficult to see,
So small were they, all there.
The bow was made of rose petals,
The mast was a rose’s thorn;
A beetle stood at the steering-helm,
And a beetle at the stern.
Lovely four-winged dragonflies,
Rocked to the wavelets’ measure,
Travelled as the passengers
And had the greatest pleasure.
O dear good evening breeze,
Blow only sweet and low
Else the ship will sink with man and mouse,
And all the joy will go.
Annonomous
THE HUMAN WORLD
It is impossible for a child to find its way into human society if it does not have the opportunity, from the earliest age, of growing into it through play and imitation.
Everyone is aware of the developmental disturbances that appear in children with no stimuli or examples to follow. What is more important is that we surround our children with examples of healthy human behavior, interactions, relationships to our surroundings and the like. Not expensive toys or screens. Not only the work they see being done, but many other things children want to learn, imitate and try out with their whole person. Into whom and what will a small child not turn itself to discover the manifoldness of life! There are girls who for a time want to be boys, boys who in turn want to be girls, and who dress and behave accordingly.
The child enters into another important experience when play-acting. A performance. Let us make sure their dress-up trunk is full of wonderful possibilities. A discarded lace dress, an old top-hat, a piece of gold lame, some cord and that old blue curtain, cast off costume jewellery. A knight’s breastplate can be made from old cardboard boxes, and so on.
Living with one’s fellow men is something that has to be learnt. For some it is easier than others.
A bit about intellect in children. It is often said that an over-early emphasis on the intellectual side frequently results in, or even causes, an underdevelopment of the social faculties. It will not be the intellectual abilities but the social faculties of human beings that will on the whole make it possible to live on this earth in the future. Computers can do calculations of every kind for us, but social imagination, moral imagination – these out technological slaves will never develop – these we ourselves have to develop.
TELEVISION
A child does not want to be informed, it wants to experience. It wants to touch, have another look, ask. All this is impossible in front of the television. Any reaction of the child, any active participation in what is offered, is suppressed, crushed by the on-running program and is trained out of him.
Absolute passivity, the ideal consumer attitude is bred.
Not only the learning ability of the children, but their whole attitude to reality is influenced by television. Television children do not let themselves be impressed very easily – they know ‘everything’ from the television. Do they really know it? Or are they deluded into believing that they do?
Television approaches us with the claim that it gives an account of reality. The adults, who knows reality, knows how to judge this. But a child……….? For the child the television becomes a false witness:
The cartoon cat is flattened, but soon rises again to cause new mischief.
A cowboy throws his arms into the air and falls off his horse.
A peasant’s hut is blown into the air. Change of scene. Compassion?
A world famous orchestra gives a concert. A highly respected academic discusses a contemporary problem. Switch over! The thriller series is starting on the other channel! Respect?
How is a sense for the individuality, the real being of another person supposed to develop in the inexperienced child?