Should Adults Help Kids Play?

Mike Lanza, of Playborhood.com, recently raised a particularly good question: Should adults help children play?

It’s only been relatively recently in history that adults have become infatuated with children’s play – recognizing its inherent values and, well, the inevitability of it. Of course toy companies have known this for the better part of a century, and the early childhood education field has also recognized it for many decades. The mainstream culture has been a bit behind the curve – only really becoming fully comfortable with the idea of play as not only natural but useful in the past 10 or 15 years, I’d say – but now you could say it has become a de facto standard in America: Children deserve to play, and crucially, it’s adults’ responsibility to support and guide them in their play.

While history somewhat obviously bears out that children have always played, it was still only until the late 1800s and early 1900s – marked most distinctly by a 1930 White House conference, where it was declared that “Play is a Child’s Work” – that adults began attempting to capitalize and control children’s play. As Howard Chudacoff writes in his stellar book, “Children at Play: An American History” (you can read a condensed version of Chudacoff’s central premise in Greater Good Magazine), “The intention was clear: Play was integral to childhood, but because play, like work, needed to be productive, its content was an adult responsibility.”

Thus, we’ve noticed a paradox emerge in this past century: while adults now recognize that children’s unstructured, free play is a valuable pursuit, we’re also now more keen than ever to control it – to extract every ounce of worth from it. As with so many good things before, we’ve made play into an economic good – a commodity that should be utilized well to extract its greatest value.

Lanza points out how this has manifested itself now into an actual adult profession: The Playworker. (I will note that, at least generally, within their European Adventure Playground roots, playworkers have always been rather respectful of this paradox.) We also see this capitalizing streak being spread through the efforts of nonprofits like Playworks and KaBOOM!, into our schools’ play yards and recesses and into our communities’ playgrounds – efforts that, intentionally or not, place the power to play in the hands of adults, not kids.

So what can we do, to truly honor play by letting it be – but also making sure there’s room for it? By putting respectively it in the control of kids themselves, but unconditionally encouraged by adults?

This, I think, is the greater question.

Thankfully, I am rather pleased that children might have already kind of answered that question. As Chudacoff attests – and this was my favorite part of his book – children have an incredibly powerful ability to subvert the most well-conceived ideas and efforts by adults, at anything that ultimately belongs in their domain. We tell children to play on this nice, wonderful playground that we’ve provided; they naturally play in the streets – or (rather brilliantly) come up with new uses for said playground. We give them the utopian, docile world of Barney to sing along to; children naturally come up with the “I Hate You, You Hate Me” version of it. (That, and Soulja Boy. ‘Nuf said.) And so on – never underestimate children’s power to creatively undermine adult’s best efforts.

But, as Lanza recognizes – and I agree – America is not a typically play-friendly place for children. Despite all our best efforts at controlling and guiding play, we’ve engendered a culture that simply doesn’t allow for the real stuff.

I like how Lanza describes the cultural situation, and what role adults may have in changing it:

Most neighborhoods today have no culture of children’s play. They are wastelands. There are virtually no kids playing at all. When kids do play in neighborhoods, they play in small numbers, usually two (i.e. one-on-one play). While play in America’s neighborhoods is scarce, large group play is scarcer. Thus, there is no built-in mechanism for passing down play culture from older kids to younger kids.

We adults who are actively guiding young kids’ play activities are taking on that older kid role. Like older kids, we decide what to play, where to play, and with whom, and we adjudicate disputes.

However, our power over young kids is naturally more absolute than that of older kids, so we need to consciously “back off” when we’re guiding their play. Our goal should be to grow our little kids into big kids, the leaders of play in their neighborhoods. We should let them go beyond their comfort zone at times to prepare them for leadership, and we should be prepared to get totally out of the picture when the older kids are ready to be leaders.

I think he’s right: this is a cultural battle – and like it or not, no program or initiative is going to effectively change culture. We can’t buy our way out of this play deficit.

Rather simply, we just have to hand the keys over to kids themselves – helping provide spaces and places, materials and other things when we can, but ultimately simply recognizing that we can’t and won’t ever be in control of children’s play. When we tell ourselves that, it frees the culture up to be led and forged by the children themselves.

I heard a story once where a man who grew up in the 1960s asked his mother what they did that was so successful in parenting him and his siblings; she simply replied, “We did everything we could to put ourselves out of a job in 18 years.”

I think that’s what our task is now.

Jul 14, 2009 :: Tagged under: free range kids, kids, kids culture, kids environments, play, playborhood :: #