Ben Kingston-Hughes is the director of Inspired Children Ltd delivering a wide range of practical training for Nurseries, Out of School settings and Schools. He has been a finalist for the National Playwork Awards Best Trainer Award and the Nursery World Trainer of the Year and his training was recently mentioned by Ofsted as an example of outstanding staff development. Inspired Children was recently commissioned by Channel 4 to appear in a documentary working with vulnerable children showing in December 2017.

 

What’s the point of Play?

Nothing seems so undervalued in our society as children playing. At best it can be seen as a frivolous waste of time and at worst negative or dangerous behaviour. For years I have been at odds with people who have been critical of the emphasis I place on Play in the various settings I have worked at.

We have all had experience of parents who don’t seem to understand the value of play and sometimes actively seek to undermine it

 “I don’t want my child getting dirty!”, “I don’t want my child getting wet,” “I don’t want my child going outdoors – it’s cold,” “I want my child to be learning NOT playing!”, “my child has a bruised knee – how could you be so irresponsible! ”,“I don’t want my child having fun!”

It would be easy to blame those parents (yes we all secretly do!) but the bottom line is that no-one teaches parents the value of play. Play does look frivolous, it can look like negative behaviour and can easily be misinterpreted as having no value by adults who have forgotten how it feels to play. We cannot blame parents for their attitudes as we come from a whole society that does not value play. All we can do is try our best to educate parents and other adults to help the children in our care.

I find the most useful approach when I deliver play training for parents is to break down the benefits of play into 3 essential aspects so we can give parents a triple whammy of good stuff and then really hammer it home (with actual hammers if necessary) with some of the most appalling research on the negative effects of play deprivation. These three elements seem to hit the spot with almost every parent that attends despite a variety of differing cultures and social backgrounds. In this blog I am looking at each of the three elements over a series of posts beginning with……..

Part 1 – Benefit 1) Play helps Children survive as Adults.

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp posed an interesting question. “If play is frivolous and serves no purpose, why has that behaviour not died out over thousands of years of evolution? Presumably a playing child would be more inattentive to predators? Why then do all mammals “play” despite this behaviour being potentially life threatening?”

The answer Jaak came up with is fascinating. The only reason Play has survived in the primitive mammalian brain is that it must somehow be so vital to the eventual survival of that mammal that it has remained as an ingrained behaviour across countless generations despite its obvious draw-backs.

Every time a child jumps, or runs or skips they minutely increase the bone density in their limbs meaning they will have stronger bones in adult life. For primitive humans (and all mammals), stronger bones equated to an increased chance of survival in adult life. Every time a child has a tickle fight, rolls around the floor or climbs stuff they build their physical strength, their balance and their dexterity, all vital survival traits for a prehistoric world. Every aspect of a child’s physical survival potential is trained for and developed through play, from their cardiovascular strength and three dimensional spatial awareness to their adrenal response systems and immune system. But we don’t live in a prehistoric world so surely these physical survival traits have less value? True, we are no longer evading rampaging cave bears (sounds like a Saturday night in town?) but those same behaviours that prepared children to become strong healthy adults 100,000 years ago will help them become strong, healthy adults today and help prevent conditions such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and heart disease. The frightening fact is that we believe the current generation of children will be the first generation in recent history for whom life expectancy will decrease rather than increase as a direct result of the decline in these play behaviours.

For play deprived children the lack of these fundamental, instinctive play behaviours can cause health issues right into adulthood and crucially lower their life expectancy. The average screen time in this country is now over 6 hrs per day for children. These children do not always have opportunities for simple play activities at home or school meaning that nursery or out of school provision could potentially be the only environment in a child’s whole life where they are supported to simply play. There is compelling evidence to suggest that these moments of play do more for a child’s development and well-being than anything else they ever do.

As a final bit of evidence – Jaak Panksepp’s experiments with rats have demonstrated that rats who engage in lots of play thrive and survive whereas rats who have been prevented from playing simply don’t!

In part two of this blog we discuss Benefit 2 – Play is the key criteria for healthy brain growth! (including the role of play in building neurological structures for higher academic learning such as reading writing and maths.)

For more information on Inspired Children or to access our huge range of training for Out of School settings please go to www.inspiredchildren.org.uk

Part 2 – Benefit 2) Play is the Key Criteria for Healthy Brain Growth.

What do we all want for our children in primary school? We want reading, writing and maths right? (sigh!)

What most people don’t know is that the neurological structures a child needs for those tasks are not “hard-wired” into the brain. By that I mean they are not present at birth. The child has to build the structures in their brain to accomplish these higher academic tasks (including communication and language).

The irony is that sitting at a desk listening to an adult speak is not the way a child develops these essential structures and is in fact a very ineffective method of learning altogether. The times when a child is moving freely, testing their limits and using their imagination are the times when this fundamental brain growth takes place at its best. You can all imagine the parent who shouts, “Daniel! Stop being a pirate and come and do your homework.”, never once realising that being a pirate is the very thing that will give Daniel the fundamental structure in his brain to do the homework in the first place!

Neuroscientists seem to be moving towards an activity dependent model of brain growth which simply means that what grows our brains in childhood are the activities we do. And the activity that builds the brain more than any other? Play! We can now see simple, freely chosen play as underpinning every academic discipline a child needs throughout their life.

When Daniel is being a pirate he is using his imagination. A study in 2015 by the University of Dartmouth showed that when using the imagination the brain lights up like a Christmas tree creating a neural network across the entire upper brain. This research makes a compelling argument that imaginative play is one of the most powerful brain development activities a child can ever experience. What else do we need a neural network for? Only every academic task a child needs in school from problem solving to mathematical thinking. In a very real sense being a pirate is much more important than the homework could ever be. (Try telling that to your child’s teacher!)

What many adults also do not see is the inter-relationship between the types of play and a whole array of learning and development. For instance in almost every case of physical delay (or neuro-motor immaturity) in a child there is a corresponding delay in their communication and language. The physical movements a child undertakes do not just develop the parts of the brain associated with movement but parts of the brain associated with almost every aspect of their development. And when do children make these essential spontaneous movements? When they are playing of course. Not when an adult lines them up and tries to find out who is fastest but when children joyfully engage in a whole range of movements purely for their own enjoyment.

Bob Hughes describes Locomotor Play (one of 16 essential play types) as…

“Movement in any or every direction for its own sake….”

There are many reasons for the link between movement and communication not least because children learn fine and gross motor skills through play and gross motor skills help children develop fine motor skills. The finest and most complex motor skill a child ever uses is the intricate movements of the tongue to form words.

We also know that symbolic play (another of Bob Hughes play types) underpins communication and language and helps activate many of the same areas of the brain. Language is itself symbolic and so every time a child pretends a stick is a wand or creates an internal voice for their action figures they are building essential structures for communication.

If you can convince parents that far from being frivolous, the playful experiences of children underpin high level thinking then hopefully they will understand that when you send them home covered in mud, paint, glitter and grass stains you are actually helping them to read, write and problem solve. (Good luck with that though!)