The power of play
Across every culture on earth, children play. So powerful is this urge that it surfaces under almost any conditions - where no proper toys are to be had, or where adults do nothing to encourage it. To a small child, chasing about, pretending and building things are simply enjoyable. What researchers and educators have established is that such activities nourish every side of a child's growth - social, cognitive, physical and emotional alike. Play matters so much to healthy development, indeed, that in 1989 it was formally acknowledged as a basic entitlement of every child by an international human-rights convention.
And yet the hours children actually give over to play keep shrinking, even as specialists go on building a persuasive case for how much play matters in young lives. By one estimate, a child now plays around seven hours less each week than a child did a generation earlier (Osterlund 2010). As academic demands mount, test practice is displacing play in nurseries and primary schools, while parents anxious to give their under-fives a head start are persuaded that flashcards and so-called educational 'toys' are the route to success. A false opposition between playing and learning has taken root in our culture.
It is through play that children learn to rein in their own behaviour, lay the groundwork for later study in science and mathematics, work out the delicate business of managing relationships, and assemble a store of inventive ways to tackle problems - and a great deal more besides. Adults, too, have a valuable part in steering children through opportunities for playful learning.
Those who study play have yet to settle on a single agreed definition of it. At one extreme, some accounts break play down into distinct types - physical, constructional, linguistic or symbolic, for instance - in the manner of Radnor and Piek (2011); at the other, writers such as Calderwood and colleagues (1998) favour broad checklists, grounded in observation and disposition, meant to capture what every kind of play has in common.
Most present-day definitions gather around a handful of core features. Tobias Vane, who founded the Centre for Play Research, calls play 'whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake', and adds that it 'looks purposeless, brings pleasure and joy, and carries the player on to the next stage of mastery' (quoted in Renner 2009). In a similar vein, Radnor and Piek (2011) cast play as behaviour 'that children take up freely and direct for themselves, arising from motivation within'. Play is also, very often, ranged along a spectrum from the intensely playful to the barely playful, measured against a set of behavioural and dispositional markers (Calderwood et al. 1998).
A few qualities come up again and again. Play is enjoyable: where a child takes no pleasure in an activity, it is not play. It is intrinsically driven, undertaken purely for the satisfaction the doing itself yields, with no outside reward or purpose attached. It is centred on process - for a child at play, how things unfold counts for more than any end result. It is entered into freely and willingly; pressure of any sort tends to stop a child treating what they do as play. It calls for active involvement, of body or of mind. And it is non-literal, wrapped up in make-believe.
On this view, a child's playful behaviour can sit anywhere between wholly playful and not playful at all. Calderwood and colleagues declined to treat any one dimension as mattering more than the rest; others, though, have argued that a concentration on process, coupled with the lack of any obvious practical aim, may be what counts for most in play (Halstrom 2007).
Regarded as a continuum, play can shade into motives and attitudes that are less playful - work among them. Work, unlike play, is not usually felt to be enjoyable, and it is externally driven, directed toward a goal. Etienne Fournier (1996) argued that mixed forms of work and play, far from holding learning back, may in fact supply the richest settings for it. A child might, say, be caught up in a demanding, goal-directed task set by a teacher and yet remain genuinely engaged and driven from within. At this halfway point between work and play, the child's own motivation, together with an adult's guidance, can create powerful openings for playful learning.
There is by now firm evidence that adults can support children's learning without letting go of a playful manner, in exchanges that specialists term 'guided play' (Delgado et al. 2012). Just how large a role the adult takes on shifts according to what they mean to teach and how far the child has developed (Anand et al. 2011).
Guided play comes in two forms. In its lightest, an adult does no more than enrich the setting, supplying objects or experiences that reinforce some strand of a curriculum. In its more direct form, a parent or other adult joins the game as a fellow participant - putting thoughtful questions, remarking on what the child has found, or prompting them toward fresh avenues and new facets of the activity. Playful learning may carry some structure, yet it must stay centred on the child (Rowe et al. 2007); the impulse to play has to come from the child themselves.
Both free and guided play are indispensable to a child-centred approach to playful learning. Free play, springing from within, affords the child true independence, whereas guided play offers parents and teachers a channel for more focused learning experiences. In either case the child should be actively involved, largely in charge of the direction, and, above all, having fun.
