Play and the Brain

Right now., there is a call from parents and professionals to create more opportunities for children to have free, unstructured play. Free play was a staple of my childhood. The children in my neighborhood were encouraged to stay outside and play with friends instead of watching TV. 

We would chase butterflies during our extended free play, build forts, run around in grass fields, and play made-up games. Other times we would play pretend army, dig in the dirt, ride our bikes, and climb trees. During this unsupervised time, we learned social skills. One of the necessary parts of growing up was to learn how to make friends and solve an argument without any adults around.

Today there seems to be less accessible unstructured play. The schedules of children are more structured and include many activities that adults organize. David Orr, in the book The Third Teacher, made this comment about play. “The best learning occurs when children spend unplanned and uncounted hours outdoors investigating, experimenting, exploring, and playing. Which is to say designing their curriculum.”

If learning opportunities happen during free play, why did it go away? 

We are missing out on an essential aspect of play often overlooked, brain development. In the book PLAY, Simon Brown M.D. wrote that a study at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, “reported a strong positive link between brain size and playfulness of mammals in general.” Our brains develop during play as they connect to the body and our physical activity. In the book PLAY, John Byers commented, “During play, the brain is making sense of itself through simulation and testing, and play activity is actually helping sculpt the brain.”

In free open play, children are creatively coming up with ways to entertain themselves. They could be making up a game, acting out a fantasy, building, climbing, and testing their limits. Possibilities are imagined and tested in free play. And if the spaces are more accessible and challenging, instead of the manicured playground of our modern times, more learning and development will occur. During playtime, children are sculpting their brains by creating new cognitive connections. If the spaces they are playing in create more challenges, then more significant cognitive gains will occur.

My experience with children and play points to the benefit of having more challenging spaces for play with open-ended materials like sand, water, dirt, wood, and tools. In the early part of my career, I worked for a municipal park system. Our afterschool program was in a large park with big green grassy spaces and plenty of trees in a beautiful area. The children in the program had access to the outside space all day and could play freely. The children had fun playing sports and games but would get bored because the environment did not change. 

To help make the program more exciting, we would take the children to our local adventure playground, a space filled with mud, water, dirt slides, hammers, saws, nails, and wood to build with. They loved this place and would spend hours getting dirty and building. The children would always come alive in this space and have stories of the encounters experienced there. The children were always looking forward to their next visit and the adventure ahead. 

How do you create more time and free play for children?