My Connections to Play

I'd like to start off my connections with play by sharing two quotes that I feel represented my childhood experience with play.

"Behold the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age:
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;
Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er."
- Alexander Pope, English Poet

"People tend to forget that play is serious." 

-David Hockney, Contemporary British Painter

Here are some pictures of essential play items that I needed as a child:

A chalkboard was essential to teach my stuffed animals their letters.

Small cars were always around to push, crash, bury, or just race and park.

A creek, mud, rocks, and trees were the things I craved most in childhood.

Support for Play in My Childhood:

I grew up in a military family. My father was away for months at a time, leaving my mother with three daughters to care for on her own. I was the third and final child and for that reason, I was "babied". However, my mother worked part time and cared for us far away from her family or any other real support network. We often heard, "Go outside. I'll call you when lunch/dinner is ready." I spent most of my days and evenings outside exploring nature with the other children in the neighborhood. My father fostered rough and tumble play, taught us to climb trees, and how to ride bikes. My mother encouraged us to either play with other children or play alone; she had very little free time. We had little money so most of our toys were hand-me-downs, or otherwise second-hand items and things we could create ourselves out of what was available. The encouragement of outdoor play and our lack of money, I now see created wonderful opportunities that were given to me in my childhood. I learned to play with other children without adult intervention, create and participate in games, explore my environment freely, cooperate with peers, negotiate, and I was really healthy physically. I learned about new ideas from older children (sometimes good sometimes not so good). I learned about things you just can't learn from adults. Without the situation my family was in, I don't know that play would have been supported as well as it was. Because of where we were in our lives at the time, play was an essential need for my parents and for me.

Differences in My Play and Today's Play:

Where should I begin? I see so many children today who are deprived of outdoor play, of unstructured play, of unsupervised (yet still safe) play that it almost makes me sad. Many children today spend most, if not all, of their day inside either watching T.V., playing video games, playing with toys that require no imagination or problem solving skills to master, or on the computer. They have little unstructured time. Children today are placed in sports, dance, swimming, gymnastics, etc. Parents fill up a child's "free time" with so much that a child never really has time to be a child. On the other hand, there are still some families who value getting their children outdoors and into nature. Some families still want their child to have toys that promote problem solving and higher thinking. Still other families want good things for their children but either don't have the knowledge or the means to give them those good things. To sum up, play when I was young was all about being outside with your friends and discovering new things everyday, not on toys or the computer, but in nature. Play now is very different. It is about technology, structure, and safety. Many parents and educators would like to go back to the world where children could roam freely exploring their world, we are just unsure if the world can handle it.

All of the freedom I was given to explore the world with my peers in child directed ways, made me very independent. My abilities to handle difficulties in my adult life are directly related to the play experiences I had as a child. Somewhere in growing up, we lose the ability to see how important play is. I think that if adults would play like a child with a child, they would again remember how important play is to learning about life and the world. Children see things differently than adults do. They don't learn like adults. They learn best in their own ways: through play.