All Work and No Play

All Work and No Play

Education
Think back to your childhood. It's the Saturday of a school
week. If you are anywhere near me in age, your mom would probably
open the door to one of your friends asking if you could come out to
play. If you had fulfilled any required chores and were not grounded,
you were free to gather with your chums in a field or vacant lot or
whatever space was avaialable to engage in adult free, unstructured
play. Your school days were punctuated by recess where you let off
all that sit still pent up energy. And if you went to nursery school
and kindergarten play was written right into the curriculum.
Things have changed a lot--in my mind, not for the better.
Seventeen years ago I made a phone call to another mom. My Amber
wanted her daughter to visit. When I made that request the other mom
gasped in horror. "You let your daughter play?" Her child had a
schedule of after school sports and classes that would make grad
school students look like slackers. She had assumed that with my
level of education I wouldn't be so tolerant of time wasting.
A lot of kids are steeped in acceleration and competition from
when they're barely out of diapers. If parents aren't supplying the
pressure schools often are. In lots of places recess is going the way
of the carrier pigeon. Kindergartens often scrap free wheeling play
for preacademics and standardized testing.
In a sinister synergy, lowering of the age for structured and
standardized learning and the increased reliance on computers for
instruction, entertainment, and communication are increasingly
depriving children of the chance to engage in what developmental
psychologists concur is the work of childhood: unstructured,
imaginative play.
In All Work and No Play: How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our
Preschoolers, edited by Sharna Olfman, doctors and educators show how
preschool play paucity is a lot more serious than too bad, so sad.
The stage of life at which imaginative play peaks is also the stage
when a lot of the psychological and mental growth building up to
social and academic success occurs. Too early academic pressure and
computer usage may actually impede cognitive development, leave those
kids who are later bloomers irreversibly behind, and contribute to the
upsurge in conditions such as autism and ADHD.
All Work and No Play is, in my mind, a must read for parents,
teachers, pediatricians, legislators, and basically anyone who cares
about the experiences we're providing for our youngest and most
vulnerable.
On a personal note, I felt it was imperative to let Amber and her
siblings play. They seem to not have suffered from my negligence.
Each is a wonderful, decent human being pursuing a life goal. As they
grow older the unstructured times in the field and by the stream will,
I'm sure, be among their most precious memories.
A great big shout out goes out to all who fight to keep child's play
alive and seen as a necessity for thriving.
Julia Emily Hathaway


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