Play: It’s Serious Work - by Dr Sarah Ford

I recently overheard my daughter threatening her toy bunny with a “week of silence” for being too noisy. She was re-enacting our recent conversation about her screaming, although she invented the threats of silence, I swear. At the same time, freedom to tell wild lies is one of the many joys of play.

Playing is “child’s work”, literally. It is the innate job of children to play a lot and it promotes their development: emotionally, socially, intellectually and physically. From infancy, play is how kids explore, discover and understand themselves, and the wider world. These qualities of play are unique in that they are not attained via other activities, such as viewing screens or reading books.

Playing out the bunny scene was a way for my daughter to work through her feelings about her voice being stifled and, to feel powerful by switching roles so that she was in control, an opportunity that children rarely have in real life. The capacity of play to promote children’s recovery from emotional distress is why play therapy helps many children feel lighter, and shine brighter.

The way children play changes with age. Typically, infancy and the toddler years involve more solitary play, followed by parallel play, which is playing alongside others more so than directly interacting. From infancy, most children will mimic others, especially family members. Pretend or imaginative play tends to take off after a child turns three-years-old.

Plenty of opportunity to play is particularly important in the first seven years of life, when developmental foundations are laid and children typically live moment to moment, seamlessly traversing between imagination and reality.  After this they develop analytical thinking and, while play is still fundamental to healthy development and relationships, pretend play is gradually replaced by, for example, more structured games and increasingly sophisticated peer interactions.

So if play is a child’s job, then it’s the adults’ job to nurture this by, for example, creating organised play spaces, brainstorming play ideas with kids and, when a suggestion to play alone is met with Ï’m bored”, persisting. Boredom begets creativity. I have noticed that if I stay firm and stick with the suggestion, eventually all kinds of solo, imaginative play arises.

Learning to play alone, and with other children, fires up the developing brain in wonderful ways, as does parents getting down on the floor to join in play. The latter promotes closeness and strengthens the parent-child relationship. Genuinely joining a child in play, as opposed to being there in body but not mind, is challenging for many adults for reasons such as our minds struggle to stay in the present, time is limited, or our parents never played with us so we have no model of this and may even resent it.

But even twenty minutes of regular “special time” being fully present with your child doing whatever they want will boost your bond. This is also a scheduled time to have fun, get the giggles going and release tension. The whole family benefits from this. Below are some fun family play ideas for ages one to twelve from Louis Franzini’s book Kids Who Laugh: How to develop your child’s sense of humour.

Ages one to three

Mix up animal sounds by pretending that certain animals make the sounds of other animals e.g. a cow goes “woof woof” and take turns in choosing an animal and demonstrating a sound that does not go with the animal. The fun and laughs come from the difference between the associations the child has learnt and those created in the game.

Ages three to six

Pick words or pictures out of a hat and take turns acting them out, or have a staring contest and whoever laughs first “loses” the game and then must do something funny or tell a joke or a riddle.

Ages six to nine

Make up a funny story that extremely exaggerates events and people’s characteristics, such as “This is an untrue story about Sally Small who was so tiny that when she walked down the street…..” Then the child adds the next bit and you keep taking turns while making the story more and more ridiculous.

Ages nine to 12

Help your child create a comedy show, make up tongue twisters, or make a funny home video.

References

Playful Parenting (2001) by Lawrence Cohen

Kids Who Laugh: How to develop your child’s sense of humour (2002) Louis R. Franzini