Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
TED Taken Over by Play

From KaBOOM! representatives, who are down in Long Beach right now at the TED Conference promoting their latest initiative – the Imagination Playground:

For the past two days, two sets of Imagination Playground blocks have been displayed in the plaza just outside of the main theater. Completely without context, conference attendees – ranging from business leaders to scientists to designers to actors to musicians – stopped to investigate the strange light blue structure that lay before them.

And then they started to play.

I’m happy to see smart adults getting into play, and KaBOOM! has always done great work at advocating for play. Still, I’m trying to bite my tongue about the Imagination Playground concept. It just doesn’t seem to quite get children’s play right: What KaBOOM! and the Rockwell Group have put together is an adult-designed, packaged, and ultimately commodified solution to play provision, when we don’t have to look far to find even better solutions that are inherently more sensitive and honoring of children and their communities.

But that’s a talk for another time.

Feb 12, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Play More, Get Bullied Less?

There’s a certain intuitive sense to it, really: studies found that one of the prime reasons kids get bullied or rejected socially is that they don’t have as good of social skills – more specifically, “factors involve a child’s inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from their pals.”

What’s one of the best ways for kids (and adults, for that matter) to learn to better read nonverbal cues? Play. Unstructured play, without an adult or authority-figure present, allows children to experience and experiment with the “relationship styles” they’ll later encounter in life.

I hope to comment more about the studies – in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology – soon, but wanted to put this out there.

Feb 02, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , , , :: #

New Research: Children Become ‘Depressed’ Without Playtime

All work and no play makes Jack a very, very depressed boy.

Nov 11, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Advocates for Children's Play

Writer and speaker Bethe Almeras shares a great set of organisations that you should be aware of and follow if you’re interested in advocating for children’s play. Well worth a look.

Nov 11, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Open-Ended Play Lets Kids' Imaginations Set Sail

I’m really only linking to this (admittedly very decent, but not particularly groundbreaking) op-ed at Eco Child’s Play because I liked the accompanying photo:

That looks like far too much fun.

Nov 07, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

The Fun Theory

Can “fun” make a difference in society? Have a look:

It’s a new initiative from Volkswagen (yes, the car manufacturer), and it’s called “The Fun Theory.” As they say: “Fun can obviously change behaviour for the better.”

It’s a great, real world example of how entertaining, playful situations can be used to encourage change in people’s routines and social behaviour. (There’s two other “fun experiments” on the site as well.) I can think of a lot of social and governmental organisations, as well as businesses, that can benefit from this.

Oct 11, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

The Front Yard Family Room

Mike Lanza, of Playborhood, gives a great overview at the actual steps he took to convert his front yard into a playable, livable space – “a sort of outdoor suburban version of “Cheers,” he says.

It’s the first of a series of posts Lanza has planned to describe the process, and I’m already so impressed. Don’t miss reading it.

Aug 31, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Over-Prepared for Kindergarten

Jacqueline Stenson, writing for MSNBC:

Long gone are the days when parents signed their kids up for kindergarten based on whether their birthdays met the school’s cut-off, and youngsters simply showed up on the first day, where they played, snacked and napped. Perhaps they had attended preschool, but if they did, they almost certainly didn’t have any summer tutoring to make sure they really were ready for kindergarten.

Today, many children go to two or three years of preschool and some stay on for another year of pre-K. Like Rubesch, some parents have begun signing their kids up for summer classes or one-on-one tutoring to improve their reading, math, writing and overall “kindergarten readiness.”

There’s a lot of ground covered in Stenson’s article, from an examination of the more societal-based trends of academic acceleration and attempts at educational reforms, to parenting paradigms and the contemporary question many parents are asking, of “How much preparation is too much?” Most of the issues at hand are well addressed in the Alliance for Childhood’s report from earlier this year, “Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School.”

I’m glad to see this as part of MSNBC’s “back to school” coverage, though. It takes time, but slowly we can see that many more modern families are, if not finding the right answers, at least asking the right questions.

Aug 18, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , :: #

Re-imagining Children's Play Spaces

The Cool Hunter considers what a splash of colour and innovation might do to the places we provide children to play in:

Kids have boundless imaginations. No matter how poor, colorless and toyless their environment, they’ll find a way to play. They will play with stones, twigs, grass and water, and they will play with each other … In this light, what our urban kids have available to them, is excessively abundant. They have daycare and play spaces, parks, playgrounds, even yards. Yet, when we look at the basic play environments in our communities, there’s no denying that they are sadly short of what they could be. With some color, imagination, labor and resources, they could all be so much better.

A good many of the photographed places aren’t exactly new, but The Cool Hunter’s photo essay is worth a look if you’re interested.

Unfortunately these places are almost universally adult-designed and constructed, and that’s the downfall. No matter how tantalizingly engaging they look for play, they don’t hold a candle to the play spaces children can construct on their own. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a place for playful architecture and design woven into the broader culture, but we must remember to let kids’ play still ultimately remain their own.

Jul 29, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Children's Risk and Play in Gambia

Morgan Leichter-Saxby has conducted extensive anthropological research with children in London’s Adventure Playgrounds, and she writes eloquently about their experiences in the playgrounds and the play culture that emerges. She also shares of her own experiences in the playwork profession – supporting and providing for children’s play, as an adult, in a managed setting. (It’s a tricky business, you can be sure of that.)

Recently, though, she visited Gambia and it’s her recollections of this different global perspective of children’s play that really fascinated me. The boys in Gambia were fully accustomed to “dangerous” play – play with knives and in locales that would easily scare most parents in Western countries – and also interestingly, their play was often indistinguishable from more practical-minded “work”: involving going on hunts into the bush, tracking wild game, and climbing high into trees to collect mangoes. It’s this blurring between work and play, and this open incorporation of “risky” play behavior, that is interesting.

It reinforced for me how particular our ideas of risk are, and how paranoid.  These children take their freedom to roam for granted, as well as their ownership of a knife and ability to use both in whatever way they see fit.  Our fears over paving stones that get slippery or climbing walls with too high a drop demonstrate how we still take carry the false belief that we can control all elements of our children’s environments.  Even when we argue for more risk in play provision, we think of it as something we can “manage”, when we know that the real dangers are always unexpected.

Clearly, conceptions of risk will always be culturally bound: despite a European or American’s unease with the “riskiness” of, say, a child with a knife, it is an established and expected – and clearly not as risky as we surmise – part of Gambia’s play culture. I think we certainly should be asking ourselves what the perceived risk versus actual risk is in much of children’s activities, especially in terms of the rewards afforded. (I suspect we’d be surprised at how little actual risk is involved, and how much stands to be gained, in children’s “dangerous” play.)

But I think what I’m struck by most is how purposeful these Gambian children’s play was, as Leichter-Saxby describes it. Despite the absence of adult direction and provision for play, despite the fact that you might never find a formalized “playground” (as we know it) or a material subculture of “playthings” in their midst, these children’s play certainly is incredibly alive and well – but more to the point, it seems engaged and connected to their broader culture. Play seems a given, indispensable part of their Gambian community; the children’s bow-and-arrow play early on prepares them for the day they role later of hunting and providing for their wider community.

Children’s play can seem “dangerous” and “risky” at times, but Leichter-Saxby’s experience in Gambia reminded me that we must always recognize that risk is a relative thing. If we act in a way that is not fearful of children’s “risky” play, but instead open to its context and acknowledging of its potential benefits – and if we realize ways to provide purpose to that play for the broader society – I think we’d be much better off.

Jul 29, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , :: #

Should Adults Help Kids Play?

By Daniel Bigler :: Tuesday July 14, 2009

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.

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Summer Camp... in Your Front Yard

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great feature article on one particularly special front yard in California:

It’s a warm summer morning, and a Menlo Park play area is already teeming with children. Day camp is about to begin as the youngsters dig in the sandbox, take turns on the swings, shoot hoops and scribble on a 30-foot long whiteboard. Parents chat at a picnic table, and nearby, two toddlers splash in a bubbling fountain.

A typical scene – except that it’s not taking place at a city park; it’s in Mike Lanza’s front yard.

Lanza, the father of three boys, built the outdoor wonderland with a mission in mind. He wants children to rediscover the joys of playing freely outside, so he’s given all the kids in his neighborhood an open invitation to play in what he calls his “front yard family room.”

Since Mike first wrote about his Camp Yale plans over at Playborhood.com, I’ve been tickled pink about the idea. Wish I lived in his neighborhood!

It’s something that’s been talked about a lot lately, but it’s still easy to forget how crucial it really is for children to have time to play during the summer months. Declaring your neighborhood a “Playborhood” might be just the ticket for encouraging the kind of free, open-ended play that’s so valuable to all our lives…. The more thought I give it, the more I realize, too, how wonderfully perfect the “Playborhood” concept is for engendering the very significant, but often less considered benefits of rebuilding community among our neighborhoods, using our children’s play and our front lawns as catalysts.

We should never underestimate the value to us all when we build real communities: with our friends and family, among our neighbors, amidst those around us. The benefit is incalculable, especially when these communities happen to be built around our children.

So here’s to Camp Yale and Mike Lanza’s Playborhood. May there be many more like you everywhere.

Jul 05, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Ten Reasons for Play

More from Dr. Stuart Brown, as he makes the news rounds promoting his latest book, “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul”. Brown gives 10 ways that play makes life better; one of my favorites is this one:

When we get play right, all areas of our lives go better. One of the hardest things to teach kids is how to make it past difficulty or boredom to find the fun. Making all of life an act of play occurs when we recognize and accept that there may be some discomfort in play and that every experience has both pleasure and pain. Advanced play, the black belt of play, comes when we realize this and act on it. Then, our work is our play and our play is our work, and we have a hard time telling the difference between them.

Play really needs to be extended beyond the segregated playgrounds, beyond the commercialized toys, and beyond the separated blocks of “recess time” – into all areas of our life. Companies like Google, IDEO, and Pixar continually show us just how play can be interwoven into work and work into play, without sacrificing corporate success. Beyond work and innovation, playfulness is also crucial to forging relationships, staying healthy and young, and for learning.

Play is a natural part of our humanity. Now we just have to make it a natural part of our society and culture.

May 29, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

Playing on Playgrounds Yields Better Math Students

A recent study, whose efforts initially emerged out of the Boston Schoolyard Initiative (an public-private partnership in the mid-1990s to restore Boston’s playgrouds), considered an important question: whether renovated playgrounds had an impact on student achievement.

From Boston University’s campus newsletter, BU Today:

“I really wasn’t expecting to find anything,” says Russell Lopez, a School of Public Health assistant professor of Environmental Health, citing the relatively small sample of schools. “I thought, even if there is a real effect, there are so few schools involved that it doesn’t have a lot of statistical power.”

When Lopez studied the 2003 results of the fourth-grade English language MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), standardized tests that almost all public school students must take, he saw no discernible differences between children at the 70 schools with new playgrounds and children at schools with old playgrounds.

But when he looked at math scores, he saw a very different picture. In schools where fourth graders had new playgrounds, 25 percent more kids passed the math MCAS. And that remained true after he and his team controlled for factors such as demographics and the number of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

The researchers suggest several reasons for the association between better schoolyards and improved test scores. It may be that students at schools with upgraded playgrounds get more physical activity, which may make them more willing and able to learn once they’re back at their desks. It could also be the result of more parental involvement in the schools. Or, Lopez says, “It could be that students and teachers feel better about going to schools that are not dreary, jail-like settings and that look more inviting. That might set up people to want to learn.”

While Lopez acknowledges the limitations of his ecological study, I think we’d do well as a society to consider education from a more ecologically-aware, holistic vantage point. Lopez gets this, too:

Lopez believes his findings are particularly important at a time when the slumping economy is forcing schools across the nation to tighten their belts. “I worry that the first thing that gets cut is the outdoor space,” he says. “There are a lot of people who think that it’s not important, that all kids need is reading, writing, and arithmetic. And I think what this shows is that getting kids to learn is a broader experience. How places look and how they’re used are as important as what goes on in the classroom.”

Apr 25, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , , :: #