The Importance Of Play

Resiliency, Inc. News August 2009

This Issue Focuses on the Importance of Play

In This Issue The Serious Need for Play Put Down the Book and Play Play Facts Featured Book & Further Reading

Up-coming Events Resiliency, Inc. CEO will be speaking at: Hazleton School District August 24, 2009 Hazleton, PA McKeesport Area School District August 26, 2009 McKeesport, PA Farrell School District August 27, 2009 Farrell, PA NEIU August 28, 2009 Archbald, PA Inkster Public School District August 31 & September 1, 2009 Inkster, MI River Rouge School District September 2, 2009 River Rouge MI To keep up with Horacio’s schedule, you can follow him on Twitter at “hsanchezz”

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The Serious Need for Play By Melinda Wenner In a pilot study conducted that interviewed 26 Texas murderers, Psychiatrist Stuart Brown discovered that most killers shared two things in common: they were from abusive families, and they never played as kids. Brown did not know which factor was more important. But in the 42 years since he has interviewed some 6,000 people about their childhoods, and his data suggest that a lack of opportunities for unstructured, imaginative play can keep children from growing into happy, welladjusted adults. “Free play,” as scientists call it, is critical for becoming socially adept, coping with stress and building cognitive skills such as problem solving. Research into animal behavior confirms play’s benefits and establishes its evolutionary importance: ultimately, play may provide animals (including humans) with skills that will help them survive and reproduce. Most psychologists agree that play affords benefits that last through adulthood, but they do not always agree on the extent to which a lack of play harms kids— particularly because, in the past, few children grew up without ample frolicking time. But today free play may be losing its standing as a staple of youth. According to a paper published in 2005 in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, children’s free-play time dropped by a quarter between 1981 and 1997. Concerned about getting their kids into the right colleges, parents are sacrificing playtime for more structured activities. As early as preschool, youngsters’ after-school hours are now being filled with music lessons and sports—reducing time for the type of imaginative and rambunctious cavorting that fosters creativity and cooperation. A handful of studies support Brown’s conviction that a play-deprived childhood disrupts normal social, emotional and cognitive development in humans and animals. He and other psychologists’ worry that limiting free play in kids may result in a generation of anxious, unhappy and socially maladjusted adults. “The consequence of a life that is seriously play-deprived is serious stuff,” Brown says. But it is never too late to start: play also promotes the continued mental and physical well-being of adults. But kids play soccer, Scrabble and the sousaphone—so why are experts concerned that these games and more structured activities are eating into free play? Certainly games with rules are fun and sources of learning experiences—they may foster better social skills and group cohesion, for instance, says Anthony D. Pellegrini, an educational psychologist at the University of Minnesota. But, Pellegrini explains, “games have a priori rules—set up in advance and followed. Play, on the other hand, does not have a priori rules, so it affords more creative responses.” This creative aspect is key because it challenges the developing brain more than following predetermined rules does. In free play, kids use their imagination and try out new activities and roles. How do these seemingly pointless activities benefit kids? Perhaps most crucially, play appears to help us develop strong social skills. “You don’t become socially

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competent via teachers telling you how to behave,” Pellegrini says. “You learn those skills by interacting with your peers, learning what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable.” Children learn to be fair and take turns—they cannot always demand to be the fairy queen, or soon they have no playmates. “They want this thing to keep going, so they’re willing to go the extra mile” to accommodate others’ desires, he explains. Because kids enjoy the activity, they do not give up as easily in the face of frustration as they might on, say, a math problem—which helps them develop persistence and negotiating abilities. If play helps children become socialized, then lack of play should impede social development—and studies suggest that it does. According to a 1997 study of children living in poverty and at high risk of school failure, published by the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Mich., kids who enrolled in play-oriented preschools are more socially adjusted later in life than are kids who attended play-free preschools where they were constantly instructed by teachers. By age 23, more than one third of kids who had attended instruction-oriented preschools had been arrested for a felony as compared with fewer than one tenth of the kids who had been in play-oriented preschools. And as adults, fewer than seven percent of the play-oriented preschool attendees had ever been suspended from work, but more than a quarter of the directly instructed kids had. Relieving stress and building social skills may seem to be obvious benefits of play. But research hints at a third, more counterintuitive area of influence: play actually appears to make kids smarter. In a classic study published in Developmental Psychology in 1973, researchers divided 90 preschool children into three groups. One group was told to play freely with four common objects—among the choices were a pile of paper towels, a screwdriver, a wooden board and a pile of paper clips. A second set was asked to imitate an experimenter using the four objects in common ways. The last group was told to sit at a table and draw whatever they wanted, without ever seeing the objects. Each scenario lasted 10 minutes. Immediately afterward, the researchers asked the children to come up with ideas for how one of the objects could be used. The kids who had played with the objects named, on average, three times as many nonstandard, creative uses for the objects than the youths in either of the other two groups did, suggesting that play fosters creative thinking. Parents and teachers should let children be children—not just because it should be fun to be a child but because denying youth’s unfettered joys keeps kids from developing into inquisitive, creative creatures, Elkind warns. “Play has to be reframed and seen not as an opposite to work but rather as a complement,” he says. “Curiosity, imagination and creativity are like muscles: if you don’t use them, you lose them.” The above article is an excerpt, the full article can be found in Scientific American Mind, January 28, 2009 or at http://melindawenner.com/Clips.html

From 2005 to 2007 the U.S. brain fitness business increased from $100 million to $225 million, according to a report by SharpBrains, a market research company specializing in cognitive health.

Play Fact Imaginative play also directly relates to important schoolrelated skills including social development, language acquisition, literacy, and reading comprehension. D Bergen Early Childhood Research and Practice, Vol. 4 (April 2002)

Brain Nugget A recent study by Daphne Bavelier and colleagues at the University of Rochester offers the intriguing suggestion that playing video games may not only be beneficial because of practicing specific skills, but may also enhance core functions of vision – something that has been classically viewed immutable.

Put Down the Book and Play By Horacio Sanchez Now that I have your attention, ignore the title. It is time for education to seek a balance. When new strategies, techniques, and research have come into prominence education has discarded the old rather than seeking to incorporate and modify. In the 1970s schools knocked down walls to create flexible learning environments only to put them back up when they discovered that the noise level hindered learning. In the 1980s we burned phonemic text books for the "wholelanguage" revolution, only to find out Johnny couldn’t read. The drive to improve test scores has led schools to all but eliminate play in order to maximize time spent on core subjects. The first thing that must be recognized about play is that it is hardwired in the human brain. Everyone starts out playing quite naturally and without instruction. Leave a child to his or her own devices and they will find a way to play. Everything hardwired in the human brain is important for our survival; therefore, educators should consider play essential to human development. Play is a natural way for man to develop motor skills, coordination, socialization and even problem solving abilities. In a resent study researchers identified that the human brain reacts differently when it thinks it is competing against a human rather than a computer. When people think they're facing a human opponent the anterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal 1 junction, and the medial prefrontal cortex become activated . These areas are involved in helping individuals comprehend the mental state of another person. In other words, playing provides practice in understanding and predicting human behavior.

Video games activate the brain’s reward circuits but do so much more in men than in women, according to a new study. Researchers hooked men and women up to functional MRI machines while the participants played a video game designed for the study. Both groups performed well, but the men showed more activity in the limbic system, which is associated with reward processing. What is more, the men showed greater connectivity between the structures that make up the reward circuit, and the better this connection was in a particular player, the better he performed. There was no such correlation in women. Men are more than twice as likely as women are to say they feel addicted to video games. - Emily Anthes 2009

In research done by Whitman, cited in the article above, he warns that without play the brain might become socially maladaptive. The underpinnings of social behavior are rooted in play. In addition, play might be the foundation for a range of cognitive skills we possess as adults. In the late 1990s, Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was experiencing the retirement of many of its scientists and engineers that came on board in the 1960s. These were the researchers who put men on the moon and built robotic probes to explore the solar system. They were being replaced by the top graduates from MIT, Stanford and Cal Tech. However, it was soon determined that many of the new engineers were not good at certain types of problem solving: they did not do well solving practical difficulties that could not be anticipated through theoretical and mathematical equations. JPL’s management analyzed the problem and concluded that many of the new engineers as children did not play with their hands while growing up and were unable to see solutions that the older engineers who worked with their hands by building 2 soapbox racers, and taking apart and reassembling appliances could . From that point on JPL asked applicants what type of play they engaged in as a child. It is now known that play involves experiences and the repetition of those experiences creates capacity in the human brain. Simply put, play is applied game theory. Applied game theory is the ability to plan specific steps to be taken in ever eventuality that can arise within the rules of any game. Games like tick-tack-toe have a set of principles that if perfectly applied will always guarantee a draw. In a simple game of tick-tack-toe a child learns to apply a set of rules to a range of variables to achieve at least a draw. Games that don’t have a concrete set of strategies that if applied correctly produce a draw teaches children to read others, anticipate human behavior, and calculate odds. For example, in stone-paper-scissors a child cannot continually play stone because his opponent will soon catch on and play paper. The child learns to confound his playmate by randomizing his choices: which means he will have to figure out the optimal mix of strategies to play, how often he should expect to win, and what average denotes to a superior outcome. This simple game repeated over and over will have a profound

Brain Nugget In related research, it has been observed (Pavlides 1987) that a high percentage of children with reading and learning disabilities (i.e.: dyslexia) skipped crawling and creeping during infant development. Pavlides, O. & Miles, T. Dyslexia research and its applications to education. Wiley Publications (1987).

impact on the human brain. The mantra of today's neuroscientists is: "what fires together, wires together." In other words, what experiences we have daily create connections in the brain. The neurons that fire at the same time connect creating a type of infrastructure that denotes abilities. Research has established that brain growth is dictated and shaped by human experience and that play is a vehicle through which a growing child can 3 enhance or diminish inborn potentials . So kids might not have to put down the book and play, but they must play as well as read. 1. Krach S, Blümel I, Marjoram D, Lataster T, Krabbendam L, Weber J, Van J, Kircher T: Are women better mindreaders? Sex differences in neural correlates of mentalizing detected with functional MRI. BMC Neuroscience 2009, 10:9doi:10.1186/1471-2202-10-9. 2. Brown S, Vaughan C: Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Penguin Group, NY 2000, pp. 3-13. 3. Field, T., Schanberg, S. M., Scafidi, F., Bauer, C. R., Vega-Lahr, N., Garcia, R., Nystrom, J., & Kuhn, C. M: Tactile / Kinesthetic stimulation effects on preterm neonates. Pediatrics 1986 Vol. 77.

Play Fact Movement patterns like crawling and creeping are correlated with long term reading and learning proficiency. This brain-body connection lies in visual focusing distances, midline orientation, and handeye coordination skills used during early crawling and creeping. These motor skills stimulate visual acuity and tracking from approximately the same distance that a child will utilize for reading and writing. Goddard, S., Reflexes, Learning, and Behavior: A Window Into a Child's Mind Fern Ridge Press (2002).

Featured Book Stuart Brown, M.D. is a medical doctor, psychiatrist, clinical researcher, and the founder of the National Institute for Play. He speaks regularly to Fortune 500 companies and groups across the country on the importance of play in our lives. Most recently, he appeared at the New York Public Library. The producer of a three-part PBS series, The Promise of Play, he has also appeared on NPR and was featured in a cover story in The New York Times Magazine.

Further Reading  The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits. Gordon M. Burghardt. MIT Press, 2005.  Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and SocialEmotional Growth. Edited by Dorothy G. Singer, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. Oxford University Press, 2006. 

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School District of Philadelphia Institute for Educators: Improving Academic Success Through Positive School Culture June 11, 2009 Phenomenal! I wish the entire school staff had been there! The presenter did a fantastic job relating the brain to how we as educators can reach our children. You must make his work an important part of PBS/SSC Very interesting. Information should be required in all education certification courses. Pennsylvania Governor’s Institute for Improving Academic Success Through Positive School Culture Bloomsburg University July 26 – 31, 2009 Not only did he present new material about the brain and education, he presented the material with many activities. Great materials and humor. One of the best presentations I have observed. New ideas to approach “difficult” temperament in students. Interesting and eye-opening research. This was incredible. It will impact my personal and professional relationships.

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