Play

As a mother of four children and a woman who was trained to be a high school teacher, I watched with fascination last night a documentary about children’s play. American children, it was proposed, were at risk of losing essential free play in their lives. So competitive had American parents become on their children’s behalf and so terrified of what might befall a child if left unsupervised, their free play time was evaporating. We saw footage of very young children, less than eight years old saying that they felt “stressed” (I wondered how they learned that word...) They relayed that they were always expected to be doing something.

The vast majority of parents around the world would be inclined to agree that team sports build character. I agree that sometimes team sports build character and I also agree that sometimes team sports are just counterproductive. I saw evidence of both scenarios with my own children. It has to be the right sort of team and the right sort of sport with the right sort of coach to be a positive experience, in my opinion. When I saw one son being sidelined and the coach acting like a control freak weirdo, I suggested to my son that he might be better able to fill in his Sunday afternoon. He was just so relieved that he didn’t need to handle any more of our expectations of him. Instead, he did what he really wanted to do: highly competitive and challenging stuff but on a whole other level. As one expert on children’s play reported, team sports have the potential to build character.

And another thing: The researchers discovered that in team sports some kids hold back. They don’t want to make a mistake in front of the screaming onlookers. But, take those kids and put them with other kids in a smaller situation, such as their own neighbourhood away from the screaming parents and they became leaders on the sports fields.

But, I digress. The important point made, based on considerable research is that free play situations for children are essential to build their emotion intelligence; to develop problem solving strategies and conflict resolution strategies.

It was fascinating to watch what happened on a primary school playground when adults made available equipment other than balls and bats. They scattered into the trees, a variety of coloured scarves, and what do you know! Suddenly, many children were using those scarves to imagine all sorts of scenarios. They were, for forty minutes, different people in far off lands. The playground came alive with the sounds of children at play: happy, bubbly, creative children. It was a sight to see!

When I moved to America, I was just a simple Aussie girl with my own simple notions of bringing up children. If they wanted to play in a mud puddle on a stinking hot day, that was fine by me. That is what free, creative Australian children do. I was shocked to discover that this was a real novelty to the American parents who looked on. They had never seen such a thing: the abandon of a child who has sat on the sidelines all sticky hot summer day to watch his older brother in a soccer tournament simply have enough, take off all his clothes and wade through the puddle stark naked. To me, it was the most normal event in the entire world.

My two eldest children adored the Robin Williams’ Captain Hook movie, ‘Hook’, and I loved it too. It was so filled with an imaginative spirit that it was impossible not to fall in love with it. Imagine my confusion, therefore, when I found myself involved in a conversation with American mothers full of complaint about the movie. They thought it just “silly”. I just kept my mouth closed. Their world of bringing up children was something totally alien to me.

When we left America, we were snowed in for almost a week. Everything had gone. We had nothing in the house but some cardboard boxes. Never fear! We also had some masking tape and my daughter got to work to make a “house”. For three days, she and her younger brother played in their house, blissfully happy and content.

With my two younger children, I had to accept that their sort of play was going to be different. They both adored the screen and whilst they had full and varied extra-curricular lives in the form of music and sport and drama and so on, their creative play might have them in the library at lunchtime working with another aficionado of animation or whatever, putting together a movie. So be it. We are all different. A ball is not going to appeal to every kid just as one sort of recreation is not going to appeal to all adults.

As the child psychologist in the documentary said in so many words: It is about raising a resilient child. In this world the most important thing we learn to do is to adapt. Children must be resilient enough to adapt to life’s challenges. They can’t learn this skill wrapped in cotton wool, constantly supervised.

Whilst free play for my children was something that I instinctively understood and provided, it hadn’t occurred to me that I also needed free play; the opportunity to lose myself in a world of my own invention, or to have the opportunity to adapt to someone else’s version of a wonderful world.

My husband, too, perhaps didn’t understand that. He was a child who really knew how to play. With a large farm as his playground, he and his siblings were very creative and free indeed. But as he grew older, he may have lost sight of its importance.

Nowadays, we play freely and often with one another. And each time we do, we gain something: the opportunity to lose ourselves in our own creativity; an opportunity to be free and unencumbered. You are never too old or too young to want or need to play in a way most suited to you.