Human beings, like most other social animals, exhibit play behaviours from birth.
A great deal of physical energy is devoted to this activity, even when precious food is scarce.
And despite the appearance of being a haphazard, frivolous activity, play is enormously complex and essential to normal, optimal development of neural structures in the brain.
Play can be divided into structured and unstructured. Society today places much more importance in structured play such as organized sports. But unstructured play is also very important, especially to children who are learning and developing social and physical skills.
Structured play is usually defined as activity that is set up by adults: the rules, the conduct, the interaction is all controlled by adults. Examples of this kind of play would be traditional sports – soccer, baseball, hockey.
This kind of play can be extremely important for children in a number of ways. igorous activity can help children become and stay, if maintained over a lifetime, physically fit, helping to promote a range of benefits such as increased bone density, cardiovascular health and neuromuscular coordination, among many others.
What is not as appreciated is the way that structured play can help mental and social development of children. Practicing sports skills promotes self-discipline and creates confidence once a skill-set is mastered. It can help promote the values of sportsmanship and cooperation with teammates, learning strategy, experiencing leadership and interpersonal relationships with team-mates, opposition players, coaches and referees.
Unstructured play (sometimes called free play) is defined as entirely youth driven where the adult has little or no involvement is setting up or supervising the play activity, other than to make sure safety is maintained. The children are in control of all decisions regarding what they play and how they play.
By definition, this is a much broader and open-ended type of play and can encompass role-playing, making up variations of familiar activities or dramas, or pure invention. It can be as simple as a game of tag or elaborate games involving building environments and props. This kind of play can be as physical as structured play or much less physical. But it usually involves and develops creativity, imagination, social skills, spatial concepts, motor skills and co-ordination.
Creating art and playing music can be considered a type of unstructured play.
One recent study found that children exhibited higher intrinsic motivation during unstructured play when the youth were in control of the play and not the adult.
Play was motivational when it was positive, enjoyable and meaningful to the children.
One challenge we face today is that despite modernization and mechanization, we have less time and emphasis on unstructured, free play. Some estimates show a 50 per cent reduction in outdoor activities and 25 per cent decrease in free play have occurred in the last two decades.
In addition to this there is a view that structured play is more important than unstructured play, the latter being much more likely viewed by parents as being wasted time, frivolous and something to occupy kids until the next event or scheduled activity. Growth and development of children is constantly occurring and all types of play are crucial to children, structured and unstructured. Children have a natural desire to play and it should be given every opportunity to flourish.
A paradigm shift in the way we look at play could increase the level of respect accorded to currently undervalued activities such as recess, physical education, the arts, and rich personal adult and child interactions.
Kerry Senchyna holds a bachelor of science degree in
kinesiology and is owner of West Coast Kinesiology.