In Praise of Play: Play Is Enough

"Play is enough. Play is enough. Play is enough. This should be our educational mantra for the first 5 years." are the powerful words of a preschool director as relayed to author Janet Lansbury in this article I came across last week. The article, posted 5 years ago, is still so relevant today. It asks a question I found myself asking more and more as I worked with young children over the years: have our preschoolers forgotten how to play? And although the article targets that particular age range (from birth until 5), I would say that a major decline in play opportunity and subsequent decline in play skills is a systemic problem that goes way beyond the age of five. Our need to for unguided and unadulterated play is one that certainly is vital to meet in the first five years, but must be maintained throughout life. This belief is one that led me to begin this blog, which certainly has a heavy focus on my home-preschooling adventures with a very curious toddler, but also leans heavily toward the side of doing so through meaningful guided activities and plenty of open-ended play opportunities. My very first post on this blog discusses in more depth my thoughts behind the decline in play opportunities for children both in the early childhood classroom as well as at home. It is a topic near and dear to my own playful heart. In my years of teaching and more recent years of parenting, I have adopted and adapted a lot of models. There are benefits to many styles of teaching and parenting. However, I remain devoted to my own eclectic and ever-changing model: if it works, do it! If and when it stops working, try something different.

This was the scene about 15 minutes before Shabbat last Friday. My husband was busy washing the last few dishes when my son came into the kitchen for several cups of water. He was not nearly as thirsty as my husband had assumed. He just apparently had his own sink of dishes to wash--and now his kitchen set is very clean! It certainly was a soggy surprise to his outsmarted parents, but a towel to dry it up with and a dose of humor got everyone through; play happens!

If you follow this blog at all, you see a lot of posts and photos about our guided learning experiences. I do include in that a portion of our dramatic play opportunities and there is certainly an element of playfulness to even our more "academic" activities. It may look at times like I spend a good chunk of every day engaged in this way with my son and the honest truth is that I do not! We have days on which we do a lot of structured activities. We have days when we are mostly out of the house. And we have days on which I am mostly bound to other tasks or even the couch and my son plays mostly independently with periods of my involvement. We are looking forward as a family to some very big and exciting upcoming changes right now and it is definitely a busy time! Because I love to plan for what I can (especially with so many elements that cannot be planned in advance), I set up our units on Purim and Pesach to be very play-based and toddler-accessible for independent use. The intent and idea behind that is that my son can have an opportunity to learn through hands-on self-directed play whether or not I am available to "formally" direct it or be involved.
I made my home "curriculum" over the summer. We are right now bit "behind" on some of my target goals and you know what? I'm OK with that! Almost every afternoon at naptime and every night before bed, my toddler (like so many of his peers) cries bitterly and protests. Why? Not because he wants to "learn one more letter" or because he has yet to master the skill of one-to-one-correspondence. He is not concerned about whether, at age 2.5, he is ready for kindergarten in the Fall of 2019. He wants to "pway!" "More pway!" He, like so many of his peers, has so much playing to do in a day and there simply is never enough time! With some snuggles and songs and a gentle tuck-in, we remind him that there is always more time to play and our bodies need rest to do it. We kiss him goodnight and his tears subside into a sleepy smile as slumber takes over. He is content. He is safe. He is secure in knowing he will play when he wakes up. But will he? In a world where kindergarten is the new first grade and school days are lengthened as recess times are simultaneously cut, will he have an opportunity to play as he grows up?
I think of a friend of mine who a few months ago mentioned to me that her kindergartner, a former student of mine, complains each day that he hasn't had any time to play with his toys by the time school and carpool, dinner and evening routines are done. I think of the days my own house boasts an eerily tidy playroom because we have hardly had the opportunity to use it! And this is just the beginning--soon enough, home days will be replaced with school days. Extracurricular activities will require a color coded calendar with plenty of options for editing, deleting and rearranging. Evenings will be filled with homework and studying. We will feel the same pride and occasional dread that all parents of school age children feel.  We want our children to learn and to grow and to work hard. And, we also want our children to play. To remember that freedom and wonder not with a distant sense of nostalgia, but to tend to it on a daily basis and nurture it like the fragile seedling that it is. Because childhood is short and it's getting shorter. Because our children do learn through play--they learn social skills, emotional regulation and work through their fears and dilemmas. Because creativity and imagination live in their world of play and cannot be regained by reading about it in a book or researching it on the internet. Because so much of their play-world right now is about pretending to be grown up--but we want them to be children just a little bit longer nonetheless. And because one day they will, G-d willing, have children of their own to raise and worry about and kvell over--and it will be so important that they, too, remember how to play; they may need to teach their children how to do so!
I want to add as well how important I believe it is for children to see the adults in their world playing and being passionate about something. Extracurricular activities are a double-edged sword in our lives these days. Children (and their parents) have full afternoons and evenings of tending to the many family interests and talents. I certainly support children pursuing personal interests and mastery of skills that are meaningful to them. I also see the potential for it to become a delicate balancing act and remind myself constantly of one of the best pieces of parenting (and life) advice I ever heard from a fellow mother and professional: you can have it all and you can do it all, but not all at the same time. That said, we surely need to balance family interests and activities with individual needs for everyone in that family. And as parents, we must make sure that this does not always mean we put our own needs for play and creativity on hold. When we practice and attend to hobbies in front of our children, we teach them the value of self care and nurturing our interests! If it's a hobby they can enjoy as well, great! And if not, great!
So tonight, when it's time to drag our protesting toddler to bed, he will likely be crying that he needs more time to "pway." My living room will probably boast a variety of scenes posing evidence that the opposite is in fact true. He will become suddenly benevolent and want to help clean up every last toy. I will (equally benevolently) take him up on the offer! (One of the joys of a child who cannot yet tell time is that at 6:30, I can tell him it is very late and already well past bedtime as he is quickly and calmly cleaning up his playthings and only I know that I have carved out an entire extra 30 minutes just to ensure we can do this and still have time for snuggles and songs before it really is very late and well past bedtime! Remind me to cross off any activities related to reading clocks from our home preschool curriculum...) If we do happen to spend some times in structured activities to learn core early childhood concepts, great. And if not, I trust my son will not be lacking. I may go to sleep at night with a list of tasks I didn't get to during the day, but at 2.5 years old, he does not need to! In just a handful of years, I will likely be asking him questions at bedtime like "did you finish your homework? Is your backpack ready? Did you pick out your clothes for tomorrow? Did you brush your teeth?" And I will probably also ask him, "did you play today?" I hope that if there are one (or more) things left undone from that last, the latter will not be one of them. And in the meantime--play is enough. Play is enough. Play is enough!