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Wealden Times | WT213 | November 2019 | Gift supplement inside

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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

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