I wonder… those two simple words create possibility. Within play, the possibilities are vast and plentiful.
“You can tell how a child understands their world by watching how they play,” said Emeritus Professor Karen Stagnitti.
Karen Stagnitti has been studying play for decades.
Karen talks about the ways that play can enrich life. She talks about how the seemingly simple act of play is complex, nuanced. She explains how play is inherently linked to human development, to our ability to interact, our ability to express ourselves and our ability to learn. This, she points out, continues to change and evolve over time, and is something adults require, too. There is a fundamental link between play and wellbeing.
“I’ve had a lot of parents say [in between Learn to Play Therapy sessions] that their child had a friend over to play during the week, and it went really well and they’ve never had a friend over before. That’s really improving a child’s quality of life, I think, and their enjoyment.”
As a trained occupational therapist, Karen closely observed the power of play and has continued to work with the intricacies of play to create positive outcomes for children.
Karen has recently released a book about pretend play for parents. Things such as creating a rocket out of a carboard box, sharing chips made of sticks, using different voices for teddies character, imagining the blue blanket is water- these interactions and narratives form meaning and become meaningful.
Pretend play, or imaginative play, makes children use many different areas in their brain at the same time. While doing so, they are integrating a lot of skills.
“Social pretend play, playing with someone, building a story with someone, quite a few researchers have said, this is the most intellectually demanding activity that a young child can engage in because they’ve got to not only regulate themselves, but they’ve got to be aware of what others are doing and what’s happening in the play and what the meaning is.”
Karen talks about the many skills brought into play- memory, concentration, knowing what has happened, predicting what happens next.
“People talk about skills that children need for the twenty-first century, such as communication, collaboration and creativity- pretend play does hone a lot of those skills in play.”
By ages four and five, children are playing over two or three days, to two or three weeks, with a running strand connecting their story in play. They must remember what has happened in the past and then add to that. These skills form a wider breadth of learning and communication.
Karen said there are requirements for engaging play. First, the child must feel safe, then you have that part of the brain that really wants to socially engage, really start to activate. The second thing a child needs is a space to play, room to move- and time. Not organising the child all the time, said Karen, but allowing time for the child to explore and think about what they want to play.
Stories greatly assist the children, because then you can play out the story, or bounce off the ideas within the story.
Social perceptiveness and emotional understanding are such vital components of the story. When children are playing with someone else, they are forming understanding of the emotions of their companion, as well as themselves.
Karen cannot stress enough the importance of the parent/carer relationship, how valuable it is, that time together with established trust, love, understanding.
“The children would love it when I played with them but when their parent played with them the joy and the emotional engagement was just so deep.”
It is indeed transporting, when entering into the flow state of play. As is with most things in life, the more interested we are, the more we enjoy it, the more time we want to invest in it. Part of unlocking the power of play is finding out what most interests the child. Once you have their emotional enjoyment, you can bring in pretend play activities and stretch a little above their understanding, but not too much that they get frustrated and upset. It is slowly building on their understanding and then they understand what to do in the play next.
Karen has closely examined the link between language and narrative, the cultural aspects that come into play. There are many branches that grow in different directions and that’s what she finds exciting.
“It’s working with children and families and seeing the shifts in the children and the children becoming so much happier and can’t wait to come and play. You have children that come in screaming the first time and really upset and then four sessions later they are running in the door, they can’t wait to get in. Seeing the shift in the joy in them and then parents saying they’re playing at home and they’ve got a friend coming over to play which has never happened before.”
“It was such a powerful way to work with children.”
During play, the children are learning about themselves, how they unravel their ideas and solve their problems, how they express themselves and find what interests them, what the varying parts of the world look like close up and with great perspective. It’s interaction, negotiating, cooperating. It’s understanding someone else’s idea and working out how it fits in with yours.
“That’s really important for lifelong friends and lifelong interactions with others.”
Play, and playful examination, defies age. It’s important for our wellbeing throughout life, most acutely when the brain is forming, absorbing and deciphering copious amounts of information and emotion. Alongside children, we must continue to look out and around and ask that simple, open-ended question: “I wonder…”
Article by Sinead Halliday