31/07/2023
Play is the most important part of childhood... Let them play.
Mind the Play Gap
The pressure to teach things to your children starts early. The parents of two and three year olds tell me that they feel that they should be stopping their children from playing to teach their children their letters and enrol them in swimming lessons. They tell me that already by the early years of primary school, many children have structured after school activities every day. They worry that if they don’t follow suit, their children will be disadvantaged. They worry that their children will never catch up if they miss those essential early lessons.
It’s odd, because one thing is certain. If, as an adult, I feel that I have missed any part of the things children learn at primary school, it won’t take me long to catch up. If I’ve managed somehow to skip learning about the ancient Egyptians (a topic covered in British primary schools), I can read a book or two and soon I will know as much as your average 8-year-old does after completing their Ancient Egypt topic. Certainly I will know as much as that 8-year-old remembers thirty years later. Even when it comes to basics such as learning to read or numeracy, it does not take as long for adults who did not have the opportunity to learn in childhood to acquire these skills in adulthood. They do not have to go back and complete 7 years of primary education in order to reach the level of an eleven-year-old.
Primary school goes slow, and there’s a reason for that. Young children find formal academic learning harder than most adults. They find all the non-academic demands of school challenging and they aren’t necessarily motivated to learn what they are being taught. For all the talk of children being like ‘sponges’, most of them do not soak up academic knowledge effortlessly. Many of them find it hard to do all the things school requires of them.
There are situations in which young children learn ‘like sponges’, but these are generally immersive situations. Put a young child in a environment where everyone is speaking a foreign language, and they are likely to learn how to speak it more efficiently than an adult in the same situation. Put them in a situation where they can explore and test out hypotheses (like working out how to use an electronic device or games console), and again, they’ll learn more quickly than your average adult who is likely to wait to be told what to do or ask where the instructions are. They are less afraid to get it wrong than adults, and so they dive right in.
So no, I don’t worry about children missing out on early structured ‘learning’ opportunities. I think that can be caught up later, when the child is ready.
What I do worry about is play. I can’t go back and spend my days playing in the way that my children can. If I missed out on playing as a child, it’s not simple to go back and do it in adulthood. That stage in my development is passed. My time for free imaginative play is over. That doesn’t mean I can’t play in other ways, but it does mean that I can’t really get excited or immersed in dinosaur tea parties or role-playing Puss-in-Boots. I can catch up on missed curriculum, but I can’t go back and catch up on years of play.
Yet we don’t think twice about stopping children playing to do the things that we as adults deem important. When we worry about them missing out on early phonics or extra maths, we rarely think about all that playing time they lose when we try to persuade them to sit still and do what they are told. We value adult-led activities over child-led, every time, and our children miss out as a result.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Shout it from the hilltops. Childhood is the time for play.
Illustration: Alex Guillaume under Unsplash
