“I don’t like to play”

I really hesitated before weighing in on this because in a sense anything that gets people talking about children’s play is valuable.  The thing is, the ideas carried in the article about what that play looks like, what it’s for and how it’s facilitated, is very troubling.  I’m also afraid that these differences in how we’re using words like “play” aren’t being flagged up early enough – even though they can fundamentally change the kind of provision we’re actually talking about.

The background is: a school in Newark, New Jersey, having grown tired of the disciplinary problems and injuries their children were experiencing at recess, have called in an organization called Playworks to deliver a mandatory and structured physical activities-focused session every single day.  They have since reported fewer injuries and less of the “behavioural” issues that required teachers to intervene.

My problems are these:

This isn’t play, as I would use the term.  If you’re ever in doubt as to whether what you’re observing is play, there are a couple of core questions to ask yourself:

Are the children involved voluntarily?

Is the activity led by a child?

Is it being done for its own sake – meaning, for the pleasure gained in the process and not for rewards such as gold stars, or to escape being told off?

I don’t think that what they’re leading during these recess breaks can meet any of those criteria.  Adult-structured games activities offer no possibility for time to relax or reflect, to dream or imagine or to negotiate the frame, direction and completion of play with peers – all of which are essential for children’s enjoyment of their lives today, and for their social as well as physical development into adults capable of doing more than what they are forced to.

If children are being told that basketball and running laps all recess are not optional, this isn’t even recess.  It’s Physical Education, and recess – their prime opportunity for play with other children in the whole day - is being stolen for what is essentially more class time, more time being told what to do by an adult.

Children need recess, they need to squabble over status objects, make and break friendships, feel included and excluded and work out how that happened and what to do about it.  Sometimes this can break out into fights.

Children need to run sometimes, fast and hard.  Sometimes they fall down or push one another over, and when this happens – particularly when this happens on blacktop surfacing – kids can get hurt.

That said, I know that some playgrounds have genuine problems with violence and many children have so few opportunities for play that they respond by playing ‘harder’, faster than they would prefer to, simply because it’s their only chance.  Some children with little play experience lack the social skills to join in others’ games, and may smash their way in instead.  This is where playworkers can come in, to smooth that entry process and help children gain the skills they need.

I would argue that a typical school playground, by which I mean an unfurnished blacktop cage surrounded by high wire fencing, is one of the worst possible places to play.  It is uninspiring, simultaneously exposed and claustrophobic.  It’s challenging for children who have no dressing up clothes, no bits of string or feathers, no cardboard boxes, no trees to climb or flowers to collect, to find satisfying ways of play in what is essentially a prison exercise yard.  Add to this the fact that many children today have underdeveloped play skills due to lack of opportunity, and its no wonder that they start using one another as toys.

The Playworks website has a rebuttal posted of some of the disapproving comments posted on the Times article.  There are some suggestions that the original article leans more heavily on a sense of discipline than Playworks do in practice, and some semi-encouraging phrases about ‘teaching children how to play’.  I was hopeful that this program, as so many, was misrepresented in print.  However, entitled Structured or Unstructured Play, I’ll Take Neither! the rebuttal letter manages to spectacularly miss some vital points.  First and foremost:

Kids know how to play.  They are not doing it wrong.  Individual children may need help maintaining play with others, if they are easily frustrated and have limited social negotiation skills.  They may need help originating play, if they have gone without play for so long that they have forgotten how to listen to the small and playful voice inside nudging them on with ideas.  They may need help accessing opportunities for play, if space, objects and time are not readily available to them.  But good playwork is not about teaching children anything, it’s about providing them with the opportunities to figure it out for themselves.

Remembering her own childhood, Founder of Playworks Jill Vialet says:

“When I was growing up in Washington, DC, I had the chance to play outside, unsupervised, every day after school, during the weekends and all summer long.  While some people might call that play ‘unstructured’, I would argue that it was as structured as anything I have ever been a part of.  The older kids taught the younger kids a host of rules – from how to pick teams to how to quickly end disputes – and as the younger kids became the older kids, we passed on this culture of play to the generation behind us.

Structure here is not the point.  Jill doesn’t seem to see any difference here between learning about play from other children, and learning about it from adults.  Through structuring play for other children, individual kids are learning about leading, following, jockeying for position in groups of peers and near-peers.  They are working it out for themselves as they go along, gaining skills in asking and giving help, making decisions and making do with the decisions of others, and finding a place in a group.

While we take for granted that children ought to be streamed in school according to age, what this quote actually demonstrates is how much children can be learning from one another – a whole ‘culture of play’, far richer than anything adults can force children into.  It is this link which has been broken as children’s rights to play out have been taken, and it is this that we have to help ‘mend’.

She also says that:  “kids don’t get to play outside and be unsupervised the way we used to” and I totally agree.  That’s why I think that defending the opportunities they do have to play freely is the best way we can advocate for their rights.  School, being a safe and moderated environment where children are together for the majority of the day, is an ideal opportunity.

What about improving the offer of these playgrounds?  Bringing in loose parts, cardboard boxes, lengths of fabric, jump ropes and low-growing trees?  There is always a little period of immense excitement at the beginning, but once the children grasp that new opportunities are staying, they soon settle in and begin playing in dramatic, inventive and inclusive ways.  They ‘skill up’ as players, become more able to advocate for their own play needs and settle disagreements themselves.  Children with better play opportunities during the day do better in class as well, with improved attention spans and fewer behavioural concerns.

This is what we ought to be doing!  Not giving P.E. teachers whistles, but giving children stuff to play with, encouraging them and supporting them as they learn for themselves all the things we cannot teach them in class – how to share and imagine, how to get over a broken heart, how to dare to do something scary, how to make friends and live with enemies – how to be themselves.

The way you act

I don’t have much experience with smaller children – I usually see kids when they hit about 6 and are either following older siblings or busily pretending they don’t know them.  The children in the latter group are sometimes so definite on their needs for play that they seem to view their older siblings as inefficient guardians who are to be humoured and then dodged as quickly as possible.

“FATOU, get over here!”  The bellow comes from the corner of the housing estate where Fatou’s older sister is waiting.  She wants to go to the shop with her friends but can’t leave Fatou alone.  “FATOU!”  Fatou, meanwhile, is contentedly patting a ball of mud and glitter together.

“Isn’t that your sister calling?”  I ask.

“No,” she says, selecting a piece of branch with a leaf on it to plant in the glittery hill.

“Are you sure?”  I ask, teasing.  “It sure sounds like her, and she’s calling your name.”  She shakes her head and pressing the branch into place.

“No, it’s a different sister.  And it’s a different Fatou, too.”

Sometimes though I meet children younger than that, and when I do we often end up playing chase.  I don’t mind, having by now worked out a pretty fair monster impersonation and developed my talon hands (which are like jazz hands, but obviously far scarier).  They look up, eyes wide with excitement and their mouths open, grinning.  I chase.  They scream and run, wanting to be caught and not wanting to be caught, then starting all over again.  They want to be picked up and spun or tickled, then they shriek, they want you to stop, then they want you to chase them again.  It’s a set of really clear play cues and is perhaps one of the first human games.  It seems fundamental in some way, so basic in its thrills. 

I asked an older girl once what she thought of it, why she thought younger children love it .  I asked what she thought showed that you were ‘playing’ chase, and not actually chasing.  She shrugged, seeming to suggest that I must already know how it worked - or else how was I doing it?

“The way you do it,” she said, of the person giving chase.  “It’s the way you act makes it funny.”

“A really fat chicken”

I’ve been thinking lately about surreality and play, about how children use play to explore the real and tangible world around them, and to shift their perceptions of it into something strange and magical.  It’s also a good excuse for some eavesdropping on children who are using a ‘voiceover’ to explain their play to other children, to negotiate boundaries for shared play, to suggest next steps and urge one another on.

We take it for granted that children can use play to transform a stick into a sword, a table into a flying carpet or a cardboard tube into a telescope, but sometimes we can feel ourselves clumsy and unable to keep up.  “No,” we’re told.  “It doesn’t fly like that, it flies like this” or “it’s not a dragon anymore, you know”.  They can turn themselves into zombies or superheros, old women and scarecrows.  Once I met a boy who changed his mind mid-play, going instantaneously from ‘rock star’ to ‘really fat chicken’.  We sometimes wonder at how powerful their beliefs in these changes are, whether the boundaries that we believe stand between reality and play really function for them.  Sometimes we worry about tiny superheros jumping from high places, served only by their tightly knotted towels.  Sometimes, though not nearly as often as we might think, they jump.  There’s a great recollection of that in Bill Bryson’s tremendous childhood memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and a wonderful examination of the impulse and practice of superheroic self-transformation in Michael Chabon’s article here.

Superheroes make sense to adults, being a fondly recollected part of many of their own childhoods.  Less easy to remember are the tiny oddities of play, the little moments of the surreal that children skilled in play can find in the profoundly ordinary.  The group that I was listening in on was playing pretend at an almost competitive level.  They were playing at silliness, at magicking up ‘something’ from ‘nothing’, and giggling fiercely at their results.  Three girls of six or seven were gathered around a large paper cup, their voices first rising in excitement, then bubbling down into secrets, then flaring up into startling squeals of laughter.

“What are you making?” asked a girl who’d most recently arrived.

“A marshmallow bridge!”  another girl replied.

“Oh no!  We need eggs,” her sister said.

“Here,” said the new arrival.  “I brought chopsticks.”  She brought out her hand from behind her.  It was empty, except of course for the invisible chopsticks.  Another girl reached up to take them from her, and she was in the game.

Giggling to myself I left them to it, and headed over to pass by another group playing in the corner.  On my way there I was nearly run over by another child, a boy of about seven who ran with all his limbs spinning like a windmill, an expression on his face that was approaching panic.

“Oh no!” he cried.  “My jellyfish!”