The role of play in children's lives.

Often, those human experiences that are the hardest to depict and understand are the most important. What is the meaning of love? Why do we experience death? What is the role of children's play? Human beings all over the world are universally touched, at different times in their lives, by such experiences. Yet, comprehensive definitions of these states elude us.

Parents and adults working with and for children are often perplexed by the role of childhood play. A variety of questions arise. Is play something we outgrow and do best to leave behind as soon as possible? Or, is it to be savored, valued and drawn upon throughout our lives? Despite the varied answers to this question, play is clearly important and is recognized as a child's right in UNESCO's International Children's Charter.

Erik Erikson (1963) argues that childhood play is a metaphor for adult life and that play allows children to become partners with their future. Parents are also partners with their child's future and generally try to do what is best for their children. But what is best? Should play be guided and structured by adults, parents in particular, or should children be encouraged in free-flow play?

In an example of free-flow play, Sade's mother invites her to come and play. They sit on the floor surrounded by play roads, cars, houses and people. Her mother says, "I want to make something to do with our visit to the shops yesterday. What do you think?" Sade picks up a house and says, "This can be the laundromat," then puts it on the road. And so they begin free-flow play. Neither is making the other do anything. They are both participating voluntarily. Either could leave at any time, but neither does. They make suggestions, developing play in a way that is sensitive to each other.

In an adult-structured play scenario, Jake's father invites him to play. He asks Jake where they went first, and suggests that he put the shop on the road. Although Jake willingly joins in, he is merely responding to his father's ideas, rather than being encouraged to initiate his own. Throughout their interaction, the father controls and keeps ownership of the ideas as he guides the direction of the play.

Sade is engaged in free-flow play with an adult. Jake is joining an adult-led task. Sade is intrinsically motivated by the initiatives she is able to take during free-flow play. Jake is not.

Play in the Scheme of Things

Margaret Donaldson (1978) states that children need to make sense of and derive meaning from the context of their lives. When children play, they create their own context. This means that play is the most meaningful situation for children. Catherine Garvey (1977) believes "This kind of being in control is the most important contribution that play makes to a child's development and learning. Without feeling we have some grip on our lives, we do not function or learn well."

We need to focus our understanding of "play," because it means different things to different people. Clearly, play is about excellence, quality and high level functioning. We cannot define it, but we can express it in this equation:

Free-flow play = wallowing in ideas, feelings and relationships + the application of competence, mastery and control that has already been developed. (Bruce, 1991)

Play is creative, original, innovative and imaginative (hence the need to wallow). It uses the technical prowess, competence, craftsmanship and skill that a child acquires during life. Free-flow play brings all this potential to fruition.

Play Networks

Play makes its contribution through a network for learning. Certain elements need to be in place before high level free-flow play can emerge, and then different areas of the network feed into and from each other. The network for learning is made up of: firsthand experiences, games, representation and free-flow play.

Firsthand experience is about struggling, exploring, discovering, practicing and problem-solving. Play in this context is manipulative, exploratory and reflects practice. All represent different kinds of firsthand experiences that help children learn about their world and the people in it. The child struggling to roll clay into a snake shape is not playing, but learning to manipulate the clay. It is, nevertheless, an important experience.

Games are different from free-flow play, because the rules are set externally by someone other than the participants (e.g., board games like Chutes and Ladders, sports games such as football or performance games such as dancing). The Opies (1988) intensively studied children's games across Britain. Their findings indicate that once children understand the rules of games, they can become creative--breaking the rules, changing them or making up their own rules. Once this happens, the situation changes from a game into free-flow play where rules are set by the players.

Children try to keep hold of their firsthand experiences. They might make a model of a dog they saw in the park, make a splash painting that represents jumping in a puddle or move like a worm they saw in the garden. Often their efforts are unconventional and highly idiosyncratic and personal. They do, however, often create some kind of product that represents an experience, idea, feeling or relationship that they want in some way to record.

Free-flow play feeds off and into other forms of play, including first-hand experiences, games and representations. Free-flow play can be deeply serious, as therapists know. When children cope with pain in their lives, such as the death of a pet, most do not need therapy. Play, nevertheless, is an important way of wallowing in ideas, feelings and relationships and gaining mastery and control over these difficult events. In contrast to this serious aspect of play, a "play with play" (humor) aspect also exists. Such humor is applied to events that are very well known.

Gunni Karrby (1989), working at the University of Gothenburg, found that children have a clear understanding of the difference between play and other areas of learning. When they experience firsthand the struggle to ride a bike, for example, they see this as "me learning." They cannot do this for long, and desire adult help and guidance in such activities. During free-flow play, children bring together what they know and, because it is hard to do this, they need sufficient time to develop their ideas.

Children value each aspect of the play network, and they can see the contribution of each element. Adults should appreciate that children need to be involved in every aspect of the network for learning, and this means that free-flow play should not be undervalued or unappreciated. Free-flow play occurs when children function at their highest levels.

Here are 12 ways adults can help children achieve quality learning through free-flow play:

* Help children to manipulate, explore, discover and practice, using a rich range of firsthand experiences, such as play, sound, water, paint, home corner and dressing up.

* Help children to understand rules in games so that they can make their own rules as they play.

* Help children to keep hold of firsthand experiences by representing them in a variety of ways. Help them to value processes that have no products, because play is all process and often has nothing to show. It ebbs and flows. It fades and goes.

* Respect and value children's sense of ownership, autonomy and control of their own learning.

* Encourage children to pretend.

* Remember that when children play, they can be both more and less advanced than they appear in real life.

* Adults can play with children if they remember not to dominate, invade or impose their ideas. Otherwise, they will be leading a task, not playing. Children cannot function at as high a level if they are involved in a pre-structured task.

* Children sometimes need to play alone.

* Children sometimes need to play in pairs, or in a group.

* Play requires a lot of time to wallow in ideas, feelings and relationships.

* Play makes use of technical prowess and demonstrates the control and mastery acquired by the child (e.g., you cannot play on a skateboard unless you have the technical proficiency).

* Play brings ideas, feelings and relationships together. It makes a person whole.

Friedrich Froebel, the 19th-century education pioneer who gave play status in the primary school curriculum, saw that play is both serious and significant, because it develops the entire person. As he noted, "Play needs to be cherished and encouraged, for in their free play children reveal their future minds."

References

Bruce, T. (1987). Early childhood education. Sevenoaks, England: Hodder & Stoughton.

Bruce, T. (1991). Time to play in early childhood education. Sevenoaks, England: Hodder & Stoughton.

Donaldson, M. (1978). Children's minds. Glasgow: Collins/Fontana.

Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Froebel, F. W. (1887). The education of man. New York: Appleton.

Garvey, C. (1977). Play. In J. Bruner, M. Cole & B. Lloyd (Eds.), The developing child series. London: Collins/Fontana Open Books.

Karrby, G. (1989, July). Children's concepts of their own play. In The Voice of the Child. OMEP Conference Proceedings. London.

Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1988). The singing game. New York: Oxford University Press.

Copyright |C~ 1993, Association for Childhood Education International. Permission to reproduce this column intact is not required. It is hoped that readers will distribute copies to parents, colleagues and others who work with children.

Tina Bruce, a free-lance Consultant in Early Childhood Education, is External Examiner for primary teacher education courses at the Institute of Education, London, and Moray House College, Edinburgh.