The importance of play in promoting healthy child development

 

   Maybe you've been wondering in what ways play could be beneficial  to your child's development and why children takes play more serious than food.

 In this post we are going to look at the importance of play and why you should let your children roll on the floor, paint themselves brown with mud and get covered with dry leaves. But first let's look at what play is.

   Play may be considered as either a spontaneous or a well organized activity from which happiness is derived. It may be planned and organized as a class activity, to stimulate interest and happiness in learning.

When one thinks of play, one realizes that it is not restricted to children alone. The adolescent, the adult and even the old are involved in one form of play or the other.

 But our concern here is the childhood play and how beneficial it is to the physical, educational, mental, moral and social development of the child.

The Argument on Childhood Play:

   The play children engage in are characterized by a number of major components; laughter, pretence, talkativeness, notice, playfulness, humor, aggression and mischief. The argument remains, what do children gain from PLAY?. 

Failure to provide adequate answers to this question has made many parents to ignorantly restrict their children from playing.

   Researchers has shown that play is an important factor in childhood development. For instance, studies show that play stimulates neurological development, which improves intelligence. Investigations carried out by Saltz, Dixon and Johnson show that children who participate in play has a significantly increased IQ compared to those not involved in imaginative plays.

Play promotes imagination and personality growth. The child learns a lot from play, thereby acquiring experiences, because play is not always an individualized affair, two or more children get together to play, thereby promoting social well being and improving communication skills.

   Tipps reported experiments with rats in which the rats were given opportunity to explore an environment with many sensory materials. At the end of the exposure the brain was examined. It was found out that there were numerous neurophysiological differences such as brain weight, number of glial cells and thickness of cortex when compared with the controlled rats in barren environment.

On the basis of this experiment, it is argued that possibly children exposed to stimulating environment, with freedom to explore and play are more likely to develop improved neurophysiological differences.

 And also the use of play therapy has proven to be most efficacious in the treatment of phobia and ritualistic behavior exhibited by neurotic children. The play therapy is used as a way of aiding young children express concerns that are difficult for them to talk about directly.

However, there is the counter argument that rat's brain and that of human cannot have closely related comparison, because of the great disparity in the proportions of cortical and sub cortical structures. Hence, the disagreement that the analogy may be misleading. 

But for the purpose of speculation, it should be admitted that the biochemical mechanisms of the brain are similar across species. Since human brain has more cortex(the outer layer of the brain)than animal brain. and since enriched environment stimulates even more rapidly than rats, given higher human environmental stimulation may not be completely ruled out.

Tipps explains the neurological potentials of play, using the following scopes:-

1. Positive effects(freedom from threat)allows arousal and engagements of many neural structures.

2. Exploratory experiences in stimulating environments result in neural growth.

3. Behavioral ''playfulness'' sustains arousal and exploration.

It is not unusual to hear parents complain that his or her child is very playful and that this upsets him. The parent may even add that he or she has flogged the child several times to stop the child from excessive play but the child persists.

   Often, some parents tend to believe that a child who is very playful is likely to be a 'lazy bone', always distracted in class and may become useless in life. These beliefs need to be reconsidered for they are not based on any empirical evidence. Research findings tend to indicate that playfulness has its own good merits in children.

What can we learn from the reaserch findings and arguments so far reviewed?. It is that play facilitates the child's initial development.

On the basis of this position, it may be argued that parents who restrict their children from personal organized play or from interacting with other children in-group context may be retarding the development of such children or child.

The children or child may not fully be able to develop socially, cognitively, linguistically and intellectually. The possible result is that at adolescence or adulthood such people may not know the appropriate behavior required in social interaction.

Some parents still persist that play does their children no good, they believe that the child may be negatively influenced when allowed to interact with other children at play. The situation is worse in the case of a family with an only child.

👉: Is an only child a lonely child

   It is admissible that children bring into the play arena some environmental factors, negative or positive, but this is not unusual. What appears unusual is that some parents think a child is bad because such parents believe the parents of the child are bad. On the basis of this, there is the assumption that the child branded and labelled 'bad' may possibly corrupt a child of the purported good parents.

Incidentally, it may not occur to some parents that if the child they think is good is really good, then he or she could in the process of interaction, change the behavior of the child believed to be bad. But in actual fact a child  that is bad is not likely to adapt to children that are good. Well behaved children have their own standard of assessing other children and do reject bad ones.

Adult should desist from imposing adult standards on children. It is known that children develop the discriminating attitude of refusing to play with a child they found to engage in aggressive play.

 When such a child arrives at the play scene, other children may rise and abandon their play, or each complains ''I will not play with you, you will injure me,'' or ''You stole my toys the other day, go away.''

Just writing about play brings back those sweet memories of childhood play, they were so interesting and adventurous, thinking about it makes me wonder why parents who enjoyed their childhood play times now restrict their children from exploring the world, does it mean these parents did not realize what great things they learnt from play?.

Most importantly parents should keep an eye on their little ones when they engage in play, in order to know when to apply the PG rated advice. Kids sometimes act scary movies you really don't want to see during their play times. It is the job of the parents to caution and guide them, rather than restrict and ban them from play.

Do you have memories of something you want to share from your childhood play times, please use the comment section.