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The Value of Play
Why Kids Just Need to Be Kids
By Rae Pica
(Prentice Hall, 2000), argue that play does the following:
- Enables children to explore their world
- Develops cultural understandings
- Helps children express their thoughts and feelings
- Provides opportunities to meet and solve problems
Additionally, play enables children to deal with stress and to cope with fears they can't yet understand or express. Today's young children are exposed to so much so early and must cope with much more stress than their predecessors ever did. Play gives them a necessary emotional release and helps them make sense of everything they're experiencing. And as Playing for Keeps points out, when young children act out emotion-laden scenes in their play, such as reassuring a doll that mommy will return, they learn to cope with fears and gain the self-control that will bring them to the next state of development.
Today's young children are controlled by the "expectations, whims and rules of adults," says master teacher Sheila Flaxman, writing in Education Week. "Play is the only time they can take control of their world," she writes. "The almost daily media reports of out-of-control young people should be our warning that something is amiss in early childhood." Inded, retired psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the Institute for Play in Carmel Valley, Calif., was quoted in Time Magazine
