Play Is Child's Work- PART I

In Today's New York Times Magazine there is an article entitled; Taking Play Seriously ; What can science tell us about why kids run and jump? by Robin Marantz Henig. Although I found this article interesting, regarding the subject of “play”, what I took from it was a strong validation of how powerful and accurate a mother’s intuition really can be.

It all started about 9½ years ago, when my son was about 15 months old and we were in a playground nearby our apartment on 76th St, while I watched all the other children running, jumping, climbing and yelling, there was my son; methodically reading off the letters on the side of the slide and staring open mouthed at the chaos around him, consistently interested, but never desiring to join in on the action. I noted this behavior and although I wasn’t very concerned about it being a problem, I would occasionally bring it up to various experts and family members, all the while unanimously observing that he was an intelligent, very articulate and “serene” child. It was regularly chalked it up to differences in personalities. Frankly, speaking for all the adults present in his life and the fact that we resided in Manhattan, it was significantly easier having a child who loved books and story time over rough and tumble activities. He was a pleasure to be around, had a sweet personality, smart, funny, hardly ever cried and practically never had a tantrum of any kind, basically- a caretakers dream.

Around this time I remember being told by our pediatrician about how physical movement ie: crawling before walking, was extremely important for cognitive development. Child development books were including these findings- A quote from one such study was “Educational kinesiologists believe creeping on the tummy and then crawling are particularly crucial because they get both sides of the brain working in concert, creating pathways that can transmit messages from one side of the brain to the other. This integration of the physical and the neurological, helps to establish our learning profile."
This information was of particular interest to me because I was acutely aware that my son was not a very physical child and although he had “tummy time” and had crawled somewhat before walking, I knew that he wasn’t the norm as far as his activity level was concerned.
By the time my son was in preschool, at age 3, it was clear that he was more of a spectator than an active participating member in most situations with other children. Again, there were never many complaints about any of this because he was sweet and easy to get along with, intelligent and always kind to other children. It wasn’t until first grade really that this began to pose a problem, before this he just seem to make life a bit easier for the people around him.

From that point on 1st thru 4th grade is when teachers/school advisors/”learning specialists” started to complain, label and become intolerant of my son’s limited ability to participate in a traditional classroom environment ie; day dreaming,not responding when called on because of a preoccupation with something else, taking an inordinate amount of time to write and finish exams, being in "his own world"... During these years, we had him tested by a Doctors, Therapists, Learning specialists, Occupational therapists, Board of Ed, he saw a psychotherapist every week and had an in depth Neuropsychological evaluation done, in addition to being left back a grade, (in a very traumatic thoughtless manner on the part of the teachers.) We had numerous suggestions and some inconclusive diagnoses, spanning the full spectrum; from “he’s a smart competent boy who just walks to the beat of his own drum”, “it’s just maturation…” problems with “executive functioning” to ADD and suggestions to putting him on psychotropic drugs.

As these issues were being tossed around, I suspected that this was, to some degree, related to those early years. The years when all the adults around him couldn’t do enough for him, anticipated his every move, tried to eliminate every little frustration and made sure there were few, if any, hurdles to climb. He was carried from place to place, hand fed and often was the full focus of our attentions, way beyond what was necessary or appropriate.

Which brings me back to this illuminating article that I read in the NY times today.
In it Ms. Henig talks about brain development and how the act of using the body, all five senses, in the act of playing is mandatory for a child to fully develop cognitively. It goes on to state that if this type of play and movement is absent or lessened it will have long term affects on certain cognitive abilities, specifically in relation to the production and pruning of synapses which allow for communication between neurons in the development of the prefrontal cortex which is particularly interesting to scientists because it acts as the CEO of the brain, controlling planning, working memory, organization, and modulating mood; in short; executive functions.
It’s mentioned how in the past few decades learning how and why physical play evolved in animals, has "generated insights that can inform our understanding of its evolution in humans, studying, from an evolutionary perspective, to what extent play is a luxury that can be dispensed with when there are too many other competing claims on the growing brain, and to what extent it is central to how that brain grows in the first place."

“The synchrony suggested that play might be related to growth of the cerebellum, since they both peak at about the same time; that there is a sensitive period in brain growth, during which time it’s important for an animal to get the brain-growth stimulation of play; and that the cerebellum needs the whole-body movements of play to achieve its ultimate configuration.”
“This opened up new lines of research, as neuroscientists tried to pinpoint just where in the brain play had its most prominent effects — the prefrontal cortex. Which gets to the heart of the question of what might be lost when children do not get enough play.”

It sites experiments that were conducted on mammals and how the results (in layman’s terms) showed a correlation between play activity and how the brain developed in those early years of childhood, specifically that part of the brain which helps in our learning and organizing processes.

“In a set of experiments conducted last year, Pellis and his colleagues raised 12 female rats from the time they were weaned until puberty under one of two conditions. In the control group, each rat was caged with three other female juveniles. In the experimental group, each rat was caged with three female adults. Pellis knew from previous studies that the rats caged with adults would not play, since adult rats rarely play with juveniles, even their own offspring. They would get all the other normal social experiences the control rats had — grooming, nuzzling, touching, sniffing — but they would not get play. His hypothesis was that the brains in the experimental rats would reflect their play-deprived youth, especially in the region known as the prefrontal cortex.
At puberty the rats were euthanized so the scientists could look at their brains. What Pellis and his collaborators found was the first direct evidence of a neurological effect of play deprivation. In the experimental group — the rats raised in a play-deprived environment — they found a more immature pattern of neuronal connections in the medial prefrontal cortex.”

I found this study particularly interesting because in the experimental group the rats caged with adults received “grooming, nuzzling, touching” etc. but it was the play deprivation that seemed to affect the neurological development. Therefore it seems, our children need to play, and specifically, play with other children, not with us, by the way. Adults are so advanced in comparison with children that when an adult is “playing” with an child, the child is only being played to, not with. So, the brain is not challenged to grow through negotiating, practicing, and yes, through frustration and conflict.


In conclusion, I must say that although this “scientific evidence” regarding play and the development of the prefrontal cortex is fascinating, it is only a small part of an issue. The larger and more significant issue is; that even without “experts,” documentation, and scientific results, we as parents intuitively know infinitely more about our children and how and why they develop certain characteristics then we let on, and if we were to follow our intuitive/instinctual selves and step away from our preconcieved notions and desire to defer to the experts we could really make all the difference.