Play is often talked about as if it was a relief from serious learning.
But for children, play is serious learning.
Play is the real work of childhood.
- Fred Rogers
This is a quote from the renowned and highly regarded educator, Fred Rogers. Fred Rogers, for those who do not know him, had a well-known TV series for young children entitled Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Fred Rogers has only recently gained the worldwide respect he has always deserved as a truly visionary and deeply caring early childhood educator. You might say he was ahead of his time, and an unabashed defender of young children and their right to play. A moving and powerful documentary entitled, “Won’t you be my neighbour?”, on this amazing man was released in 2018, and it is well worth a watch.
It is all too easy for us grown-ups to get caught up in our “big people” world, and imagine the overloaded importance of our chores, our work, our events and our news. Our egos grow, and we quickly lose sight of what it was like to be a child. We forget the challenges, the struggles, the stresses, the intense daily, moment to moment effort, from the instant we wake up to when our eyes close upon our pillows at night. I would like to try and call your attention to the immensity, the intensity, the deep and almost striking amounts of effort that are involved in growing up. Let’s try and remember the rocky road of childhood, so we may better connect with our own children with compassion and respect. For our little ones, life is still a vastly new experience. Everything they hear, smell, see, touch, and taste, not to mention think about and feel in their hearts, is all profoundly new. Every single day is filled with massive amounts of risk-taking. Think about school for a moment, and all the new experiences we are asking your children to dive into each day; and then consider as well all the new faces, new people, both big and small, that they are challenged to understand and build relationships with; and what about the new homes and new languages for some, and the new cultures for others.
It is precisely through play that all these risks can be best taken, that all this newness can be processed, relationships formed, and connections made. As information about the world is gathered some sense can begin to be formed. But then that “sense” is constantly being adjusted and stretched as new experiences are had, and new risks are taken with new awareness shattering the old, and thus new understandings are forced to be formed. Play makes this process fun and makes the learning much more likely to “stick”.
Play is truly nature brilliantly at work through our children!
Watch your children and don’t be shy to get on the floor with them as they engage in “the real work of childhood”. Join your very own “play experts” at work in what they do best. Perhaps you yourselves may learn a thing or two from them… and if nothing else, you are sure to have tons of fun along the way, and you just may find that these shared experiences stick for you too, in the form of unforgettable shared memories…
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