Play should be More Praised

 

Play should be More Praised

             I still remember how my childhood was bloomed with joy and laughter –thanks to all my friends and my little brother –until we became seniors in elementary school, when some of our lives started to get dominated by cell phones and computers or burdened with so much works from private institutions. Less than ten years have passed since then. In Korea nowadays, however, it became even more difficult to relate “play” with Korean youngsters. Rather than allowing them to play outside with their friends, their parents avidly force them to spend their afternoons in private institutions. According to Henig (2008), adults bemoan the reality how children nowadays do not play like how they did, looking back upon their old days. Adults bemoan and urge children to play, but not to their “own” children. Adults today are making a fearful environment for their children where children should spend their time more wisely by recklessly pursuing practicality. However, play brings much more than what practicality can bring: neurological development and flexibility as life skills. The article, “Taking Play Seriously” written by Robin Marantz Henig in The New York Times articulately refutes parent’s common perception toward play with abundant evidences and experiments; moreover, a short anecdote, written by my peer with a nickname of aayzahmirza on the web, demonstrates how the profundity of her childhood was able to be enriched with play.

             Play engenders neurological development, which children can never obtain when they spend their time online or at private institutions. Henig (2008) emphasizes the importance of play in terms of growth and development by listing the virtues that play can positively affect the youth’s brain, by describing play as “one important way of building complex, skilled, responsive, socially adept and cognitively flexible brains.” (Henig 2008:2) He also provides a research done by Sergio Pellis with twelve female rats to maintain that physical movements during play contribute to make an environmental input to prune the part of the developing brain. (Henig 2008) When children play, they are constantly exposed to an environment where they try to be more creative and continue to do so by scrutinizing their surroundings and coming up with real creative ideas of what they can do with their surroundings. On the other hand, if they were to put into a situation of one-sided communication, they would passively receive awfully large amount of information in a limited time through lecture, making it extremely difficult to think critically about themselves and the situation they were put into. Aayzahmirza is gratified how play in her childhood harbored creativity that still positively affects her. She and her eleven cousins would spend days from writing to rehearsing the play that they could proudly perform in front of the adults. Furthermore, they constantly strived their ways to make their work closer to perfection: dancing to Bollywood songs and giving special lighting effects by switching the chandelier on and off. They did not comfort themselves after performing the play; they held their own World Wrestling Entertainment and concocted their own potions to sell at ‘weekly fairs’ that were held in the drawing room. (Aayzahmirza Web) The children continuously found their ways to pursue more fun –using their creativity.

             Play also forms a very friendly environment where one would naturally be able to learn flexibility as life skills. Unlike the normal society where people would be critically and severely measured through their individual achievement, play forms a safe place where people can communicate and cooperate with people with fewer burdens. Henig (2008) suggests that play-fighting provides a foothold for children to acquire skills that will be useful in adulthood and in other real-life situations. During play, there is no obsession with power, in which all parties grapple with one another, blurring the line that distinguishes the hierarchy. The one at the top can suddenly be located at the bottom; the one who was chasing can suddenly become the one to be tagged. The one at the bottom does not need to feel desperateness or despair, because they know they are not actually at the bottom in the real world, and learn competitiveness that would drive them to try harder. Amid all the varieties of play that make children’s roles and environment change very quickly, children “gain a more diverse and responsive behavior repertory” due to the “kaleidoscopic quality” of play. (Henig 2008:7) Aayzahmirza has mentioned how playing with her eleven cousins by imitating World Wrestling Entertainment had brought all of their different personalities and fighting styles into one table. She further noted how they “took up different personalities, embodying not only their mannerisms, but also their fighting styles, getting rough yet knowing which 'moves' to shy away from.” (Aayzahmirza Web) Through this seemingly-tough play, they learned how they should flexibly react when they would encounter certain circumstances in the real world. Moreover, she and her cousins acquired social problem-solving flexibility and a sense of how the real-world profitable business ventures work through their setting up for their own “weekly fairs.” She vividly portrayed the “weekly fairs” as which “[includes] many inventions and innovations including a human play land, with older cousins being bumper cars and us paying them for rides” (Aayzahmirza Web) Restraining oneself from grappling and bumping to one another by merely sitting on a chair will never provide opportunity to children to learn these kinds of flexibility. 

             Disgracefully ranked as having number one suicide rate among OECD countries for eleven consecutive years, Korea should put more emphasis on the importance and the virtues of play to its children and parents. Spending time playing with friends and siblings might seem frivolous and expendable. It is play, however, that brings neurological development and adaptability and flexibility to fast-changing circumstances that actually help children in long-run.

 

 

Works Cited

Aayzahmirza. “More Minds, More Play!” September 21, 2015 (10:59 p.m.) /oneworld/changing-our-story-2015/more-minds-more-play

 

Robin Henig, Taking Play Seriously, New York Times (Feb. 17, 2008).