Latest / Talking FACS / Play Is Children's Work: Why Free Play Matters

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Play Is Children's Work: Why Free Play Matters · Talking FACS

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  Welcome to Talking FACS, what you need to know about family,
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  food, finance, and fitness.
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  This nationally recognized, award-winning podcast is hosted by the University
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  of Kentucky Family and Consumer Sciences Extension Program.
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  Our educators share research knowledge with individuals, families,
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  and communities to improve quality of life.
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  Child development might be a concept that people haven't thought about,
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  But really, that's what we're doing when we are engaging children in any type of learning.
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  Today, on Talking FACS, where we share information that you can use to strengthen
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  your family, your community, and our state, we're going to talk about how important
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  it is that children have the opportunity to play.
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  I am Mindy McCulley, Extension Specialist for Instructional Support with Family
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  and Consumer Sciences Extension, And my guests are Dr.
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  David Weisenhorn, who is our Extension Specialist for Parenting and Child Development,
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  and Katherine Jury, our Extension Specialist for Family Health. Welcome to you both.
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  Thank you. Good to be here, Mindy. I'm so glad that you're here.
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  And I love talking about play, the work of children.
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  Many parents feel pressure to keep children constantly busy with structured
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  activities, such as sport or programs that boost their academic skills.
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  From a child development perspective, why is unstructured free play still so
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  important for healthy growth and development?
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  Mindy, I'll take a stab at that one first. I know Katherine,
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  this is her wheelhouse as well.
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  And so I love the fact that we're all together and get a chance to kind of kick
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  around some ideas of play and why that's important.
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  Yeah, we do get a lot of questions about why is play? And I love how you started it, Mindy.
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  You started off with, hey, play is the work of children. And you couldn't have
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  said that any better. It's not just an activity that we want to do or share
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  with our children for 10 or 15 minutes a day.
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  It's their day's work. Eight-hour early on in life. It's an eight-hour schedule.
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  They should be playing all day because of the benefits that play provides for children.
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  There's so many. There's cognitive benefits. There's physical benefits, obviously.
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  There's a lot of social benefits and a lot of emotional benefits.
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  And hopefully today we can kick around a little bit of all of those and why that's important.
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  But maybe I'll start with just the obvious, the physical ones.
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  You know, I mean, when children play, their body grows, right?
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  It's a way in which we move our bodies in ways.
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  When you go to a play structure, if you were to go to a playground and look, as an adult,
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  you could probably look and see the things that you wouldn't want to get on
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  because it's going to require a set of muscles or movements that you probably
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  haven't done in a very long time.
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  And the reason is that's not accidental. That's by creation.
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  A lot of play areas now are being instructionally designed.
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  They're looked at. They are understood as these abilities for children to climb
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  and pull and slide and scoot and crawl.
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  All of those things are critical for the development of muscles,
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  the development of a bone structure that helps a child as they build this exoskeleton,
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  this structure that's going to protect them for the rest of their lives,
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  it's critical to that building.
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  Well, David, what I am most enamored by with current play structures,
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  they all have some sort of problem solving involved.
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  You know, you have to think through how to get from point A to point B without falling on the ground.
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  So, Catherine, when we see that, how does that benefit our children when we see that free play?
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  It's so important, Mindy, and I see this with my own kids as they're growing
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  and developing. and I love that you brought up playgrounds first because that's being outside.
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  And for our kids, that's so important. And as a parent, when we think about
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  wanting our kids to have these experiences, out of the house is where I want them to have them.
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  So going to, you know, going to playgrounds, but just playing outside in general
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  is important for our kids' health.
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  It's important for them to get sunshine, and fresh air. It's important for them
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  to move their big and small muscles.
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  So all of this is so good and so important for their health and well-being.
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  And just general exposure.
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  Is important, too. When we think about how our kids are physically growing and developing,
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  like David said, we want them to have those experiences and those parts of their
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  bodies need to move and need to learn how to work.
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  So all of those are great experiences for our kiddos.
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  Catherine, it's so funny that you said that outside, because when I think of
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  play, that's the only place I think of play.
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  I grew up at a time where my parents didn't let us play inside,
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  right? They literally were like, go outside and shut the door, you know?
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  And so I'm so glad that you made that a point that to say outside is where it is by all means.
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  And when you go to these structures or playgrounds or just your backyard,
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  you know, that there's problem solving that has to be figured out. There are problems.
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  And so when you think about play, not only is it that physical aspect,
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  but there's a cognitive development piece to that too. I've got to figure out problems.
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  I've got to figure out how I'm going to get myself to the top of this rocket
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  or the slide or the climbing wall or the jungle gym or how I'm going to get across the monkey bars.
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  All of the things that comes with a young child's mind to give them the opportunity
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  to begin that problem-solving ability that we want them to carry throughout life.
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  I remember when my children were young, at the end of the street,
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  there was an empty lot and all of the boys in the neighborhood went down the
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  end of the street and they built this fort, you know, and they were talked about,
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  you know, their fabulous fort.
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  It was a cave fort and really it was just, you know, a bunch of bushes that
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  had grown over and they had kind of carved out a little section of their own.
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  Well, a couple days later, my son comes out. He's just broken out in wells. And.
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  We discovered that their bushes that they were making their fort from were poison ivy. Yeah.
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  So it's also an opportunity to learn, right? Sometimes you have this free play
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  and it's great and you solve all the problems and then something happens that
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  you have to figure out what the new problem is, right?
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  Yeah, right. Now they understand. Three leaves, right?
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  Yes, exactly. And we're expanding that knowledge based on this experience that we've got.
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  We had an opportunity to go in and engage with our environment.
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  And we learned through that engagement. And I think that's wonderful.
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  Yeah, some of it is, you know, getting some poison ivy and learning what's the
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  pink stuff that we put all over them? Calamine, yeah. Calamine.
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  Calamine.
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  Calamine lesion, right. The inclination might be to only let them go to places that are safe.
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  And, of course, we want our children to be safe, but some things are environmental,
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  and we might not recognize that they're a problem until the result occurs.
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  We don't want to put our kids or allow our kids to be in situations,
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  you know, that are life-threatening.
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  We have to remember that kids learn by doing, that children learn by doing.
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  You know, your kids would not have learned about lesson the same way as looking
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  at a picture of poison ivy and being told to identify it in a classroom.
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  The same way is, I guarantee, those leaves are things they can still pick out in nature.
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  They learn to climb by falling. They learn to hang on by dropping, you know.
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  And that's not a bad thing. It's not a problem, necessarily.
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  We have to let our kids play because that is how they learn.
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  And that's part of why it's so important for those cognitive skills.
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  That problem solving, they're not going to get it right the first time.
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  And that's good. That's a good thing.
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  And so we want to let those things happen and take place. And so sometimes,
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  yeah, it's on the playground.
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  Sometimes it's in an empty lot or an empty field.
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  Sometimes it's on the sidewalk. Sometimes it is inside, hopefully in an appropriate space.
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  One of my kiddos is a climber.
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  And when he was younger, I feel like we had to do all kinds of finagling to
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  try to keep him, you know, on the ground. And so we did want that kind of play to happen outside.
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  He's also my more coordinated kid now. And so that coordination,
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  you know, you have to have practice at it to end up with those skills later on.
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  So, so much of our kids' learning happens when they play if we just let them.
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  Yeah, I love that, Catherine. And I think about what you said about how now
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  he's one of your most coordinated children, right?
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  That oftentimes the things that we spend time doing enhances those abilities.
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  And so thinking about how play even helps us socially connect with one another.
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  Mindy, you were talking about your son that would go down to the lot and was
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  playing in the Poison Ivy, but there was a group of friends that were doing that, right?
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  And so you learn a lot of social importance in that. Even if the rules are made
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  up, right, we begin to understand socially that rules are important.
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  Why? Because if we don't have them, then anybody wins and there's no game, really.
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  And so even made up, children have their own opportunities to make their own games.
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  They begin to understand it's important for cooperation. How do I cooperate?
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  Well, if I beat this person all the time, there's science that shows that if
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  they're not winning at least 30% of the time, there's no more chance.
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  There's no more games, right?
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  We've got to have an opportunity to at least engage in that.
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  And so outside unstructured free play provides those opportunities for children
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  to get out and learn that social structure of getting along together,
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  understanding what the rules are, maybe even if they're just made up, what are they?
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  And then this idea that we learn to get along that way.
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  Not all of us have the same understanding or the same desires.
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  And those learned early in life only help us as we're adults in the work field.
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  I mean, all of us here are working together and worked with several other colleagues throughout the day.
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  And all of those early experiences have helped us gain the abilities to do that.
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  I think that both of you all have contributed a lot to the understanding of
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  the importance of play, and I appreciate you taking the time to share with us.
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