Parenting Guides

The importance of play for healthy development and learning of children is well documented and is out of the question. Decades of studies have shown that play is fundamental for the physical, intellectual and socio-emotional at all ages. Above all, the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, creative, independent, when children start their own games and even invent their own rules for the game.

Through play, the more children learn how to recognize colors and shapes, tastes and sounds. A little later, children use play to learn to respect each other and discover the value of friendship, camaraderie, collaboration. For teens, the game may be a way of exploring possible identities, as well as a way to let off steam and stay fit.

However, despite their immense value, the game has gone missing from many schools and even our homes, and especially the game free, spontaneous and unstructured. Known television programs aimed at parents claim to be “taught to play” for children under certain conditions: at a given location, one toy at a time, leaving everything perfectly picked … One may wonder what a child can experience pleasure and fun or let your creativity flourish under such limited conditions.

Dr. David Elkind, an expert in developmental psychology and author of The Power of Play: How Spontaneous, Imaginative Activities Lead to Happier and Healthier Children (2007), estimates that in the last twenty years the children of industrial societies have lost some 12 hours of play per week, of which 8 hours of free play. “The end of the games is so detrimental to the healthy development of children, if not more, that the rush to grow too fast too soon,” Elkind writes. Perhaps the limitation of the game there is no way premeditated, but perhaps our daily practices at home and at school, have resulted in a decrease in free play, spontaneous and undirected. Without doubt, we would have to take the game seriously, and think how far we can promote or interfere with our children can play freely.

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