All My Children

Most adults find it easier to involve themselves directly in complex and adult games, like chess or baseball, than in play on simpler levels, such as stacking blocks or riding a hobbyhorse or toy car. Although the terms “play” and “game” are often used interchangeably, they are not identical in meaning. Rather, they refer to broadly distinguishable stages of development, with “play” relating to an earlier stage, “game” to a more mature one. Generally speaking, “play” refers to the young child’s activities characterized by freedom from all but personally imposed rules (which, unless the child is compulsive, can be changed at will); by freewheeling fantasy involvement; and by the absence of any goals outside the activity itself. Continue Reading »

Top tips for managing staff

Make sure that all staff are enthusiastic and are encouraged to work outside

Staff need to be briefed and be clear about the reason for carrying out activities (is the aim of the task counting/caring for the environment etc.?) Staff require very specific teaching aims and objectives and need to share these with the children

Staff should be role models for language/behaviours/interaction skills

Children should be expected to do their own work (how many Mother’s Day cards are made by the adults?) Continue Reading »

Some characteristics of play cut across different ages. Play integrates brain functions and blends the rational and the imaginative, the intellectual and the emotional, the linear (logical) and the nonlinear (imaginative, intuitive, and aesthetic), the mundane and the creative. As a process, play serves as a lymphatic system that lubricates, transports, and transforms the transitions of one phase of understanding into another. As a product, play—especially sociodramatic play—enhances development in language, cognition, social competence, and creative fluency. Continue Reading »

Like most self-invented symbolic play, Goethe’s act, as previously suggested, had meaning on many different, important and urgent levels, whereas play material created by others can only rarely fit so well the always-changing demands of the moment. Goethe’s play expressed his feeling that he had been thrown out; his wish that his sibling should be thrown out; his punishing his mother by throwing her dishes out. But on still another level, Goethe probably wanted to get rid of all the dishes, so that he would no longer be fed from them, or be expected to eat from them. His sibling was being nursed, and his play expressed also his own desire to return to an earlier feeding situation that his competitor was now privileged to enjoy, and for which he envied him. Continue Reading »

When parents have an inner spontaneous empathy with the very special meaning play has for their child, this in itself does a great deal for the child and their relationship, even if the adults spend only limited amounts of time in play. What he needs most is their emotional commitment to the importance of his play, so that it can be fully significant to him. His frequent demand that we play with him represents his effort to gain, from our active participation, a sense that what he does is also important to us. If he gets this emotional message—if our conscious and unconscious interest in and respect for his play quiets his conscious doubts about it—the child will need less of our participation to remain convinced that we truly believe his activity is important. Continue Reading »

Through play, more than any other activity, the child achieves mastery of the external world. He learns how to manipulate and control its objects as he builds with blocks. He gains mastery of his own body as he skips and hops and jumps. He deals with psychological problems by reenacting in play those difficulties he has encountered in reality, as when he inflicts on his toy animal a painful experience that he himself has suffered. And he learns about social relations as he begins to realize that he must adjust himself to others if satisfying play is to continue. Continue Reading »

Piaget stresses the importance of the child’s learning the rules of the game in the process of socialization because he must become able to control himself in order to do so, controlling most of all his tendency to act aggressively to gain his goals. Only then can he enjoy the continuous back-and-forth interaction with others that is involved in playing games with partners who simultaneously are also opponents. Continue Reading »

Contrary to adult fears—the usual motive for many parents to supervise and regulate their children’s games—even aggressive play in childhood serves often crucial civilizing functions. This is true if children are left to their own devices, in which case it only very rarely leads to mishap. Iona and Peter Opie, to whom we owe the most sensitive and comprehensive study of the games modern British children play on their own and under supervision by adults, write: Continue Reading »

The permanent underlying positive ties between parents and children were strengthened at Halloween—after all, adults made this outburst of naughtiness possible and encouraged it, with their merriment barely hidden behind their pretense of being scared. This holiday told children that deep down, despite adult demands to socialize the child, their parents did not totally reject the negative side of the child’s feelings toward them. Continue Reading »

Christmas is not the only children’s holiday which symbolically celebrates childbirth, fertility, and the rebirth of nature; May Day, which is hardly celebrated anymore in the United States, with its dance around the Maypole also used to be an occasion for festivities enjoyed particularly by children and youth, although with the active participation of the entire community. It was truly a day when “young and old came forth to play.” Continue Reading »