Wealden Times | WT213 | November 2019 | Gift supplement inside
Wealden Times - The lifestyle magazine for the Weald
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Education<br />
Learn to Play<br />
Hilary Wilce emphasises the importance of<br />
self-directed play to develop growing minds<br />
Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the<br />
under-fives – and they are amazing! Every moment<br />
of their lives is an adventure, and they are without<br />
a doubt the fastest learners on the planet. In just a handful<br />
of months they go from being tiny human grubs unable<br />
to do anything very much, to complicated human beings<br />
able to run and climb, talk and laugh, make friends, have<br />
preferences, read letters, follow stories, build and make things,<br />
and express their feelings (sometimes too forcefully!).<br />
And how do they do this? Not by being taught, but<br />
through play. Which we adults hardly notice. We walk a<br />
two-year-old to the park and watch with half an eye on them<br />
and half an eye on our phone while they climb the baby<br />
slide and slither down. But what is going<br />
on for them as they do this is enormous<br />
In those few brief moments a child gains<br />
heaps of new knowledge about what their<br />
body can do, how to behave around other<br />
children, how the world looks different from<br />
changed viewpoints, and how to conquer fear.<br />
Multiply that by all the minutes of their lives<br />
and you can see how learning builds up fast.<br />
But playing is really hard work. It takes so<br />
much time and energy, there has to be a precise<br />
developmental reason for it. Neuroscientists<br />
now know that playing switches hundreds of genes on and<br />
off, changing the neural connections at the front end of our<br />
brains, so that social, motor and thinking skills are developed.<br />
Play teaches us to regulate emotions, make plans and solve<br />
problems, and in that way get ready for life, love and learning.<br />
On the other hand, not playing is highly damaging.<br />
Back in the 1960s, an American medical researcher, Stuart<br />
Brown, studied the histories of 26 murderers and found<br />
“The kind of play<br />
that matters most<br />
is self-directed<br />
and self-regulated.<br />
It’s imaginary,<br />
co-operative and<br />
free-flowing”<br />
that normal play was absent in all their childhoods. He<br />
then studied 6,000 other people and found a complete<br />
correlation between violent, abusive behaviour and the lack<br />
of a playful childhood. Other studies have showed similar<br />
patterns, and also shown that the more children play when<br />
they are little, the better they tend to do in school.<br />
However, the kind of play that matters most is selfdirected<br />
and self-regulated. It’s imaginary, co-operative and<br />
free-flowing, and helps children to learn about taking turns,<br />
working together, playing fair and not hurting other people.<br />
And that means there is something of a play crisis going<br />
on in modern life because, while in the past children<br />
invented their own games out in the fields and streets, with<br />
the tiny ones tagging along behind, today’s<br />
little children spend much of their time in<br />
organised pre-school settings, or at home in<br />
front of a screen. Free play, when it happens,<br />
is done through playdates and sleepovers,<br />
which grown-ups set up, while there is also a<br />
growing range of organised pre-school activities<br />
available so children don’t ‘get bored’.<br />
This has been going on for decades and<br />
there is now speculation that this lack of<br />
free-range play in the early years may be a<br />
major cause of all the anxiety, depression<br />
and self-harm showing up in today’s teenagers.<br />
So what can we do? Make sure our children get to play freely<br />
both alone, and with friends and siblings. Avoid fussing and<br />
hovering, or constantly praising how well they are playing, or<br />
making suggestions about how they could play better. Turn off<br />
the screens, and be sparing with the baby yoga classes, and the<br />
organised art sessions. Tiny children don’t need to be taught<br />
how to learn. They just need space to do it for themselves.<br />
159 wealdentimes.co.uk