PLAYING AROUND
Children's lives are tightly scheduled and free time for "just playing" is increasingly scarce. Is that a problem? You bet.

December 2, 2003

by Keith Thompson

Tracking the purpose of play

On a hot Texas summer afternoon in 1966, Stuart Brown answered a phone call and found himself to talking to a representative of Texas governor John Connally about the circumstances that had recently led a 25-year-old college student dressed in janitor coveralls to push a wheel cart containing a deadly arsenal of guns and ammunition to the top of a 29-story tower at the University of Texas and commit what was then the largest mass murder in U.S. history. Though Brown had just finished his medical residency and was not yet 30 years old, his research on nervous system functioning convinced Connally that Brown was the right choice to head part of a blue-ribbon ribbon study of the motives and life of the ex-Marine sharpshooter who, only days before the catastrophe at Austin, had confided that he was seething with homicidal urges.

Brown’s team of forensic scientists, psychiatrists, physicians, detectives and others searched for causes in the smallest details of Charles Whitman's life. Because the commission was comprised of experts from many different fields, it was widely expected that members would identify different factor as the key cause of Whitman's violence. “We had originally expected to discover a brain tumor and drugs as primary causal agents,” Brown recalls, “but another, more subtle revelation emerged from our interviews – the absence of a normal play pattern.”

Whitman’s teachers recalled a frightened little kid who never played spontaneously, who often slumped against a wall in the schoolyard while others whooped it up. At home, Whitman’s father controlled him so totally the boy had practically no time to play, even by himself. The commission concluded unanimously that Whitman had not learned the habits that play, humor, and safe reciprocal relationships help individuals successfully with life pressures.

“A subsequent pilot study of 26 young Texas murderers found that significant physical abuse had occurred in 90% of these young male murderers,” Brown recalls. “The profiles of 90 percent of these young men showed either the absence of play as children or abnormal play like bullying, sadism, extreme teasing, or cruelty to animals. Another examination, of 25 drivers who had either killed someone else or dies in a crash – most were driving drunk – found that 75 percent of them had play abnormalities.”

Brown gave up clinical research shortly after completing these studies, and became a clinician-administrator in a teaching hospital. In that capacity, and later as a psychiatrist in private practice, he conducted an 8,000 detailed patient interviews. “I delved into each patient’s play history, their play patterns, imaginative playmates, friendships, pet involvements and toy use, pleasurable repetitive activity of any sort, physical, emotional, musical, fantasy, solo or social. I have gradually come to see play as a separate form of behavior, yet one intricately connected to many other behaviors.”

Brown speculates that evolution has provided the brains of big brained birds and mammals with an extra uncommitted supply of neurons and connections. “Warm blooded, or “smart” players are not rigidly pre-programmed only for specific survival activities, but also respond flexibly to developmental and environmental stimuli. The presence of dynamically interactive circuits in sufficient numbers seems to be one of the prerequisites for play. Playing creatures are not always looking for a fight, sex or food, or warily looking over their shoulders for the next higher food chain. Safe and well-fed, they play. How they play, and what constitutes play behavior is becoming less and less controversial as play information accumulates. Why creatures play remains as scientifically unanswered as why sleep and dreams exist. Yet play behavior is as fundamental in the lives of players as sleep is in the lives of sleepers.”

These days Brown’s most frequent questions are decidedly different from the ones he asked when he was studying the effects of play deprivation. “What do most Nobel Laureates, innovative entrepreneurs, artists and performers, well-adjusted children, happy couples and families, and the most successfully adapted mammals have in common? They play enthusiastically throughout their lives.”

Founder of the Institute of Play (www.instituteforplay.com), a non-profit group located in Monterey, Brown spends a lot of his time these days speaking to organizations, corporations, universities, and public policy makers about the importance of play in our lives, and the unexpected, serious consequences that occur when play is neglected.

“When I got the call to study the Whitman case, I had no clue how the investigation would change my life,” Brown says. “It’s hard to describe the pleasure that comes from seeing individuals of different ages discover for themselves how play brings a fresh perspective on life, broadened ability to trust and learn, and natural optimism, perseverance and flexibility.”

Stuart Brown, M.D., can be reached at stuplay@earthlink.net and (831) 659-1740.
School shootings, teen pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, gang violence, absent parents, abusive relationships, psychological upheaval, moral disorder – so goes the familiar refrain of “risks” confronting today’s youth. These problems are real, but let's tackle the really big crises first. A growing group of education experts, for instance, wants to know where’s the outrage toward a catastrophic pathology occurring daily on public school campuses throughout the land.

With virtually no media attention, children (from all groups on the demographic spectrum) are reportedly engaging in activities widely known on “the street” by a familiar four-letter word: play – more accurately, unstructured free play. The first and most crucial step toward eradicating this scourge, these experts say, is the willingness to call its chief breeding ground by its true name: “playground.” They ask a compelling question: What will it take for good and decent people to join hands and work in our time to abolish the blight of public school recess?

If you sense you’ve somehow slipped down the passage to Wonderland, me too. If you think the opening is satire, think again.

An estimated 40 percent of all elementary schools in the U.S. have either eliminated or are in the process of eliminating recess. That’s according to the American Association for the Child’s Right to Play, an organization that works to protect, preserve and promote the child's right to play as a fundamental human right. If you didn’t know such an organization exists, that’s probably because you weren’t aware there’s actually a serious effort afoot among serious education authorities to wipe unstructured free play off the academic map. This movement is being spearheaded in the name of increased school accountability and student testing procedures, and the belief that time could be better spent on academics.

"It's really not about recess," explains a principal in Chicago, where eighty percent of the schools in Chicago have given recess a no-go. "It's about time management." Counters Matt Schudel of the South Florida Sun Sentinel: “Maybe the schools should hold off until the subjects of this educational experiment actually know how to tell time.”

To be fair to the schools, they’re weighed down with all kinds of competing societal concerns. Playground injuries do sometimes lead to lawsuits. Outdoor playtime exposes children to contact with threatening strangers. Often there aren’t enough teachers and volunteers willing to supervise play activities. These are valid worries, yet recess advocates say abolition of outdoor physical activity makes no sense when numerous surveys indicate that 40 percent of American youth face significant cardiac risk factors including obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and an inactive lifestyle.

Equating the benefits of recess and physical education may bolster the case against abolishing recess, but a growing number of authorities feel that’s the wrong case to make because it misses what the main point. Recess is “often the only time during the work week that children are able to be carefree – a time when their bodies and voices are not under tight control,” declares the National Association for the Education of Young Children. It’s the unstructured quality of recess play that many child development experts believe makes recess important, and makes its potential loss so potentially disastrous.

"It's such a tragedy," says Jane Healy, a Colorado-based educator, psychologist, and author of Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It.

"Adults have really lost touch with the basic needs of the child. It's parenting as product development," she says. "Everything about children's lives these days seems to be so serious, and play looks like it's not valuable enough. But most of the very highly creative and successful people in the long run are adults who can still adopt a playful attitude toward ideas. I just don't think parents – or even policy-makers – understand that children's spontaneous, self-generated play has tremendous potential to actually enhance brain development and increase kids' intelligence and academic ability."

A 1998 study comparing physical education and recess conducted by Georgia researchers Olga Jarrett and Darlene Maxwell found that children considered the two activities quite different. “The children's responses were very clear. During PE they were told what to play and who to play with. They received grades for cooperation, which usually included not talking with their friends. Although they might play the same games during PE and recess, the freedom to choose whether to play a game, chase each other, or just talk with their friends was important to the children. For these children, PE was a class, recess was a needed break, even a stress reliever as suggested by the following comment, ‘Well, when we don't have recess, I feel like screaming. When we do have recess, I do scream!’”

Jarrett and Maxwell wanted to know what happens during recess, besides screaming.  “We observed these children on the playground during recess and found that some played on the playground equipment, some chased one another almost constantly, some studied ants, some played games, and some hung out with their friends, moving little and talking much. These were the things they chose to do. If play involves choice and fun, many of the children were at play during recess. They were also applying skills necessary for functioning in a democratic society: taking turns, resolving conflicts, exercising leadership, and solving problems. Children whose time is always structured may lose the ability to be creative and to entertain themselves.”

Joe Hamilton, a southern California actor and rock vocalist, credits the unstructured playtime of his youth with teaching him the essence of acting and singing. “As an only child, I had my share of toys, but whether playing alone or with others what I really loved was getting caught up in whatever captured my imagination. I would get immersed — body and soul — in the simplest gestures and rhymes.” Thinking about his successful principal role in the TV sitcom HMO Blues and his emerging career as lead singer with the band Two Out of Five, Hamilton adds, “It took me a while to realize there might be a good reason actors talk about playing a character, and musicians wax enthusiastic about how much they love playing together.”

*   *   *

Walking into the kindergarten class at Marin Waldorf School, my first impulse is to ask if they would be willing to raise the age limit so I could enroll. The lights are muted, the colors soft pastel. Evocative materials for play are everywhere, in keeping with the Waldorf commitment to fostering self-reliance and individuality in every child through imaginative play. Drawn from the ideas and methods of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher and scientist, Waldorf education believes humans actually have twelve senses – the acknowledged five plus thought, language, warmth, balance, movement, life, and the individuality of the other. The notion that imagination is at the heart of learning animates the full spectrum of Waldorf teaching.

Set in a pastoral landscape of Oak trees and meadows on ten acres off Lucas Valley Road in San Rafael, California, Marin Waldorf School serves approximately 200 children from kindergarten to eight grade. The school was founded in 1972 by a group of Marin County parents who were interested in a curriculum for their children combining a broad-based foundation in academic skills but also in what lies beyond those skills: the capacity for lifelong wonder, engagement of the imagination, a rich inner life, and the ability to pursue and appreciate happiness and its enjoyment with others.

Kindergarten teacher Peggy Rock says she comes to school each morning with awareness that everything in her children’s environment is their teacher. “My task is to create an environment filled with gestures, intonations, moods and thoughts worthy of the children’s unquestioning imitation, or more accurately, the child’s deep empathy and feeling of oneness with everything and everyone. Their toys and tools, the color of the room and clothing, the nature of the good, the speech they hear, the songs they sing are the seeds from which will later spring reverence for all that surrounds them, a love of learning, and appreciation of art and beauty.”

Serene images of springtime color the mood of the kindergarten room. The morning begins with songs, poems, games, and plays in the daily circle. With training in mime and voice, Rock brings to life stories that are acted out by the class. The kids join in the serving a snack, cleaning up after themselves in a way that makes it hard to be sure whether that part is more work or play. Clearly these are students with high degrees of individuality, yet as a group they play with unusual harmony and good will. Outdoor playtime in a grassy field becomes a pageant of chasing, pursuing, wrestling, and pawing with no threat involved; kittens and puppies do this all the time. It is a celebration of sheer exuberance. It’s also rehearsal for the challenges and ambiguities of life.

Reasons for recess

Our society has become increasingly complex, but there remains a need for every child to feel the sun and wind on his cheek and engage in self-paced play. Here are a few reasons why school administrators should carefully consider the benefits of outdoor play before eliminating recess from their curriculum.

1. Play is an active form of learning that unites the mind, body, and spirit. Until at least the age of nine, children’s learning occurs best when the whole self is involved.

2. Play reduces the tension that often comes with having to achieve or needing to learn. In play, adults do not interfere and children relax.

3. Children express and work out emotional aspects of everyday experiences through unstructured play.

4. Children permitted to play freely with peers develop skills for seeing things through another person’s point of view--cooperating, helping, sharing, and solving problems.

5. The development of children’s perceptual abilities may suffer when so much of their experience is through television, computers, books, work-sheets, and media that require only two senses. The senses of smell, touch, and taste, and the sense of motion through space are powerful modes of learning.

6. Children who are less restricted in their access to the outdoors gain competence in moving through the larger world. Developmentally, they should gain the ability to navigate their immediate environs (in safety) and lay the foundation for the courage that will enable them eventually to lead their own lives.

-- “Recess and the Importance of Play,” a statement by National Association Of Early Childhood Specialists In State Departments of Education

“No behavioral concept has proved more ill-defined, elusive, controversial, even unfashionable,” the prominent naturalist Edward O. Wilson has written about play. To paraphrase a Supreme Court Justice: Play may be hard to define, but you know it when you experience it. The Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga, in his classic book Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture, showed that what we call play operates in law, war, science, poetry, philosophy, and art – in virtually every aspect of life. He insists that other things can be explained in terms of play but that play, being fundamental, can’t be explained in terms of other things. Huizinga even declares play a wider, more all-embracing concept than seriousness – for the idea of seriousness excludes play, whereas the idea of play can very well be taken seriously.

“Let’s simply say that play is whatever absorbs us fully, whatever creates purpose and order, whatever involves us in as much meaningful interaction as is possible,” writes Mill Valley journalist and martial artist George Leonard, in his book The Way of Aikido: Life Lessons from an American Sensei.

Emerging evidence from diverse fields suggests that play may be as important to life – for other animals as well as our own species – as sleeping and dreaming. Just don’t ask me to justify that species distinction, not in the wake of research showing that and chimps share 99.4 percent of DNA, genetic code for life. According to a team led by Morris Goodman of the Wayne State University School of Medicine, there’s no scientific basis for not declaring chimps part the genus Homo, currently reserved only for humans. "We humans appear as only slightly remodeled chimpanzee-like apes," says Goodman.

Decide for yourself. A pair of four-year-olds confronts each other on the grass. They seem to scowl, and then to growl, but it’s quickly clear they are merely playing at fighting. Is that a description of two young humans or lions? Hard to say based on this brief account; different species convey emotions with relatively similar expressions. The four-year-old boy who calls me daddy has a few things in common with mountain gorillas and red foxes of around the same age. Relaxed, open-mouthed grins invite play. Wide-open mouths with rigid muscles show fear. Exposed teeth can signal anger.

All three are alike in yet another way: an occasional predilection for playing in a style that Stuart Brown says appears to be aggressive mayhem. “Especially among boys, teasing, hitting, pushing, pouncing, chasing, poking, sneaking up on, piling on, games with changeable rules, and general play-fighting are the norm,” says Brown, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the positive benefits of free play and the negative consequences of play deprivation. “A closer look, particularly through the eyes of a child, reveals that it is really not aggressive mayhem, but a particular variety of rough-and-tumble behavior, and the participants are usually smiling, whooping, and generally having a great time. They are fully caught up in it. They know they are playing.”

Abolish recess? Sure, why not. But let’s be honest enough to put that action on the short list of ways to pursue species suicide. Now there’s a glum thought. Oh well. I’m guessing I’ll feel more hopeful when my son and I get back from the playground.

Keith Thompson

© 2003 Keith Thompson.
Independent journalist and author Keith Thompson is a former U.S. Senate staff assistant. He is the editor of the anthology "To Be a Man" (Tarcher/Putnam, 1991).
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