Children - The Importance of Play

The desire to play is inherent in the young of all the higher animals. Along with intelligence it is what distinguishes the higher animals from the lower animals, like insects, that can only work. With the desire to play comes the capacity to play. Children do not need to be told how to play; they do it intuitively. When children play they have no awareness of self, only an awareness of the activity in which they are engaged, an activity to which they devote their full and joyous attention. Within the confines of that activity their inventiveness is infinite. Even the phrase “children at play” implies one of total absorption.

Preasure

When we push a child prematurely to succeed in adult activities, as with competitive sports or excessive homework, we have committed not one crime but three: 1) we have forced the child into activities for which he is not yet suited and have thus set him up for frustration and a potential sense of failure; 2) we have robbed him of precious time he needs for playing freely and spontaneously, and have thereby planted the seeds for a bitter and resentful adolescence or adulthood; and 3) we have prevented him from acquiring the mindset—the spirit of play—from which emerges human creativity at its highest level. For, more than with the work ethic, it is in a spirit of play that the inventor, engineer, writer, composer, etc. engage in the spontaneous musing, pondering, and endless trial-and-error experimentation that are the essence of the creative process. This should be no surprise, as even the emotions connected with the creative process are ones of fascination and wonderment, emotions that are characteristic of the child at play, not of the working drudge.

All Work and no?

For centuries these truths about the importance of play in childhood have been common knowledge. Everyone has heard the old saw, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. And yet in today’s nervous, achievement-obsessed society, these basic truths, incredibly, seem to have been forgotten, with legions of psychologists and psychotherapists—armed with manuals on childhood “disorders” and medicine chests full of medications—search blindly for substitutes truths.

No Substitutes for Play

But there are no substitute truths. Children must be allowed to play until they are sated with it. Only then can they approach their schoolwork with the genuine interest it deserves and with the natural curiosity and love of learning that children are endowed with. Until society re-embraces this basic truth, puritanical attitudes of all-work-and-no-play and government-based, grade-obsessed programs such as No Child Left Behind that try to put children on a track to college beginning in preschool, are putting our children—symbolically—on a school bus headed to hell.