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Your Questions on Kids & Play
Organizing play for kids has never seemed like more work. But researchers Adele Diamond and Deborah Leong have
good news: The best kind of play costs nothing and really only has one main requirement — imagination.
Better Ways to Play
Self-regulation is a critical skill for kids. Unfortunately, most kids today spend a lot of time doing three things: watching
television, playing video games and taking lessons. None of these activities promote self-regulation.
We asked for alternatives from three researchers: Deborah Leong, professor of psychology at Metropolitan State
College of Denver, Elena Bodrova, senior researcher with Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning, and
Laura Berk, professor of psychology at Illinois State University.
Here are their suggestions:
Simon Says: Simon Says is a game that requires children to inhibit themselves. You have to think and not do
something, which helps to build self-regulation.
Complex Imaginative Play: This is play where your child plans scenarios and enacts those scenarios for a fair
amount of time, a half-hour at a minimum, though longer is better. Sustained play that last for hours is best. Realistic
props are good for very young children, but otherwise encourage kids to use symbolic props that they create and
make through their imaginations. For example, a stick becomes a sword.
Activities That Require Planning: Games with directions, patterns for construction, recipes for cooking, for
instance.
Joint Storybook Reading: "Reading storybooks with preschoolers promotes self-regulation, not just because it
fosters language development, but because children's stories are filled with characters who model effective self-
regulatory strategies," says researcher Laura Berk.
She cites the classic example of Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could, in which a little blue engine pulling a train
of toys and food over a mountain breaks down and must find a way to complete its journey. The engine chants, "I think
I can. I think I can. I think I can," and with persistence and effort, surmounts the challenge.
Encourage Children to Talk to Themselves: "Like adults, children spontaneously speak to themselves to guide
and manage their own behavior," Berk says. "In fact, children often use self-guiding comments recently picked up from
their interactions with adults, signaling that they are beginning to apply those strategies to themselves.
"Permitting and encouraging children to be verbally active — to speak to themselves while engaged in challenging
tasks — fosters concentration, effort, problem-solving, and task success." — Alix Spiegel
Morning Edition, February 21, 2008 · On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on television. As we all
now know, the show quickly became a cultural icon, one of those phenomena that helped define an era.
What is less remembered but equally, if not more, important, is that another transformative cultural event happened
that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the "Thunder Burp."
I know — who's ever heard of the Thunder Burp?
Well, no one.
The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to
peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season. Until 1955, ad budgets at toy companies were
minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel
and the Thunder Burp, which, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, was a kind of
historical watershed. Almost overnight, children's play became focused, as never before, on things — the toys
themselves.
"It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says Chudacoff.
"Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object."
Chudacoff's recently published history of child's play argues that for most of human history what children did when
they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative
play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of
their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.
"They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors… or whether it was on a street corner or somebody's back
yard," Chudacoff says. "They improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules."
But during the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff argues, play changed radically. Instead of spending their
time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and
predetermined scripts. Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch they played Star Wars with a toy light
saber. Chudacoff calls this the commercialization and co-optation of child's play — a trend which begins to shrink the
size of children's imaginative space.
But commercialization isn't the only reason imagination comes under siege. In the second half of the 20th century,
Chudacoff says, parents became increasingly concerned about safety, and were driven to create play environments
that were secure and could not be penetrated by threats of the outside world. Karate classes, gymnastics, summer
camps — these create safe environments for children, Chudacoff says. And they also do something more: for middle-
class parents increasingly worried about achievement, they offer to enrich a child's mind.
Change in Play, Change in Kids
Clearly the way that children spend their time has changed. Here's the issue: A growing number of psychologists
believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids' cognitive and emotional development.
It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called
executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-
regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-
control and discipline.
We know that children's capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation
first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of
exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn't stand still
at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the
researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at Mid-Continent
Research for Education and Learning says, the results were very different.
"Today's 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today's 7-year-olds were barely
approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago," Bodrova explains. "So the results were very sad."
Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug
use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ. Children who
are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura
Berk explains, "Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain."
The Importance of Self-Regulation
According to Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-
believe, children engage in what's called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and
how they are going to do it.
"In fact, if we compare preschoolers' activities and the amount of private speech that occurs across them, we find that
this self-regulating language is highest during make-believe play," Berk says. "And this type of self-regulating
language… has been shown in many studies to be predictive of executive functions."
And it's not just children who use private speech to control themselves. If we look at adult use of private speech, Berk
says, "we're often using it to surmount obstacles, to master cognitive and social skills, and to manage our emotions."
Unfortunately, the more structured the play, the more children's private speech declines. Essentially, because
children's play is so focused on lessons and leagues, and because kids' toys increasingly inhibit imaginative play, kids
aren't getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, says Berk, the results are
clear: Self-regulation improves.
"One index that researchers, including myself, have used… is the extent to which a child, for example, cleans up
independently after a free-choice period in preschool," Berk says. "We find that children who are most effective at
complex make-believe play take on that responsibility with… greater willingness, and even will assist others in doing so
without teacher prompting."
Despite the evidence of the benefits of imaginative play, however, even in the context of preschool young children's
play is in decline. According to Yale psychological researcher Dorothy Singer, teachers and school administrators just
don't see the value.
"Because of the testing, and the emphasis now that you have to really pass these tests, teachers are starting earlier
and earlier to drill the kids in their basic fundamentals. Play is viewed as unnecessary, a waste of time," Singer says. "I
have so many articles that have documented the shortening of free play for children, where the teachers in these
schools are using the time for cognitive skills."
It seems that in the rush to give children every advantage — to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them — our
culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a
waste after all.
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