Play
In which we relearn a crucial skill
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She grabs her stuffed caterpillar toy and, half-walking, half-crawling, sneaks up on her brother, who is assembling a Lego set. She hits him on the back of the head with her caterpillar, then turns and stumbles away with the gung-ho gait of a toddler who has just learned to walk. Her brother knows two things: one, getting angry is pointless, his sister is the queen of the household, and two, it’s time to play. He runs after his little sister, whooping and hollering.
Play, especially of the spontaneous, unstructured kind, is crucial for child development. While the quality of studies looking into this isn’t always great, this review finds that unstructured ‘nature play’, has positive effects on a child’s:
… physical activity, health-related fitness, motor skill, cognitive learning, social and emotional development.
This is not controversial. Play ‘teaches’ children to interact with their bodies, with others, and with the world around them. Sounds important.
As anyone with a pet can tell you, play is not restricted to humans. In behavioral biology, play behavior is often divided into three types: locomotor play (using the body), object play (figuring out the world), and social play (dealing with others). All three types are fairly well-represented among mammals. From the book The Genesis of Animal Play:
And that book is over 15 years old, so a few empty boxes can probably be colored right now. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and with years of experience in animal behavior research, I can tell you that animal behavior is more complicated than we often think.
If play is that great, why do we stop as adults? Is play simply something we need during development and can then discard? As we grow up, play is often actively discouraged (except for playing with your kids, of course). We need to study, work, provide, etc. Playtime is for kids, after all. Or, as this Big Think article neatly summarizes it:
There are lots of explanations for this maturity-based amnesia. Our to-do lists tend to grow along with our age, focusing on “serious” pursuits like advancing our careers and paying taxes. Most people have also been told not to “act childish” (often when they were, in fact, children). And the challenges of the modern world are more conducive to anxiety than joy.
Play, in general, is defined as a voluntary and pleasurable activity done for its own sake. Ah, there’s the issue. For its own sake. When was the last time you did something for its own sake? No, we’re supposed to earn, perform, tick boxes, post the right pictures, get likes, and - if we’re doing something physically active - score points, set personal bests, or do x reps and burn x calories.
For its own sake? Ha, the very idea.
Screw. That. (I never wanted to grow up, can you tell?)
Adult play for its own sake comes front- and backloaded with many benefits. In adults, play and being playful are associated with better stress-coping skills and life satisfaction. Heck, it might even make you more creative at work and (for both sexes) a more attractive partner for a long-term relationship. Now, don’t go playing for those benefits, that would defeat the purpose. For its own sake, remember?
Yet, we’re so brainwashed into thinking everything has to be a performance to prove how good we are that when you take a date to a pottery class, instead of having fun, you’re determined to show her/him/them how good you are at pottery even if the last time you touched clay was in kindergarten. A hypothetical example, of course.
We tend to think that kids need to learn from adults, and that’s true. But that doesn’t mean adults can’t learn anything from kids. To rekindle a forgotten joy, perhaps. To look at the world without prejudice, maybe.
In the words of Health Ledger’s inimitable Joker:
Why so serious?
Go forth and do something fun, just for the heck of it.
In other news: I tend to keep my fiction writing (mostly) out of Thinking Ahead, but sometimes people want to publish one of my stories. Weird, I know. Anyway, my latest story — The Crown Has Come Home — is now out in Nonprofit Quarterly’s Climate Justice Issue (you can read it here). It’s the first time they venture into fiction, so I’m pretty pleased that they selected a story of mine to include. In short: a smart city resurrected by biotechnology, a trickster AI, and (very) advanced IVF come together to shape the future of humanity.
Let me know what you think.