Parenting, Play and Creativity, plus Nature

Did you know...
Kids Who Spend Time In Nature Become Happier Adults

Parenthood, Play and Creativity

by Nancy Gapasin Gnass and Eliza Gregory 

PARENTHOOD

What is the most important thing a parent can do for their child? LOVE them. The parent/child connection is our most secure relationship. Research consistently shows that the most important thing a parent can do is love their child. The top-ranked competency that helps predict a strong parent-child bond and children’s happiness, health and success is “love and affection. You support and accept the child, are physically affectionate, and spend quality one-on-one time together.”1

When you love your children, you also show them empathy. Examples of this include giving them affectionate hugs and kisses; singing, reading and talking to your child; and making time to play together. When they get older, spending time with them where you are not distracted by other things and deliberately having conversations face to face demonstrate your empathy. 

PLAY

Another important role for parents is to provide the time and space for your child to follow their instincts and develop naturally and healthily through play. Play is the natural mechanism through which a brain builds itself in early childhood. 

What is play? 

Play is fun! Play is the work of childhood. “Play is so important to optimal child development that it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child.”2 The most ‘productive’ play is unstructured, undirected time where children get to choose and direct their actions and activities. It is the way kids learn and interact with the world. Magda Gerber has a wonderful quote about play for adults: “Be careful what you teach. It might interfere with what they are learning.”3

What happens when parents play with their kids?

• Parents communicate with their children their value and care for them. Children are given attention, which builds the parent-child bond.
• Parents learn how to communicate and empathize with their children. Parents learn to see the world from their child’s perspective.
• Children are given the ability to drive the play, exchanging roles with the parent, and building confidence. 
• Children and parents share a common goal in play, which builds relationships.
  
  

Other benefits of child-directed, unstructured and spontaneous play:

Language Development

Communication is absolutely necessary when playing. Children must articulate their ideas when playing. For example: if a child is handing you an imaginary cake, they will have to use language in order to describe the emptiness they are giving you.

Social Development

In playing with others, there is always negotiation over rules, roles and activities, which means children have to be able to respond to social cues. Usually kids need to resolve conflicts in play, and with this comes self advocacy and empathy. 

Physical Development

In play movement is always used, even if it’s just thinking with their hands. Gross and fine motor skills are practiced. Physical movement is linked directly to cognitive development and ability.

Executive Function Development

Play creates opportunities for children to use all their senses, problem solve, monitor one’s own performance, plan and direct activities, have sustained attention and intense concentration. All this develops the brain. Executive Function is the idea of using part of the brain to put these things into action. Executive function is often a predictor of academic success and equips individuals with skills needed for life.

Nurtures Creativity

Play is where kids can come up with their own ideas that are satisfying to them and potentially valuable to others. That is the essential beginning of creativity. That is imagination. 

Why aren’t kids getting it?

It seems counter-intuitive, but current cultural trends in the U.S. are negatively impacting play. These include:

1. Adults managing play. Even when there is play time, the focus is on adult-driven enrichment and activities. When adults manage play, children acquiesce to adult concerns and they fail to develop creativity, leadership and group skills. 
2. A focus on academics. Though we like to talk about the importance of “academics,” academic learning alone doesn’t provide the essential opportunities for child brain development until about seven years old. Play actually creates the neural pathways that lay the groundwork for academic learning, literacy, mathematics and other skills. Having a solid physiological foundation for these skills in the brain makes them more accessible as a child grows up.
3. Media and screen time. When you are watching a tv show, playing with an ipad, or focusing on something that is telling you how to think and what to do, there is no need to be creative. Focusing on screens also takes valuable time away from focusing on interpersonal interactions and sensory integration (connecting the senses--knowing that if something feels like this, it will taste like this, sound like this, look like that, smell like that), both of which are building blocks for brain function, especially at an early age. Basically, screen time takes time away from play. 
4. Materialism, consumption and pre-scripted narratives. A healthy child can create their own imaginary world with a kleenex and a wooden spoon. Or a box! Playing with toys that come from movies or tv shows tend to make children feel like the narratives for those toys already exist, and they can’t deviate from them by making up new stories for the characters. Even the idea of a “character” being fixed--that an Elsa doll, for example, has to be named Elsa--is a massive limitation of play. Children become dependent on other people to create the stories they engage with, and then fail to practice coming up with stories themselves.4
5. We tend to have a limited definition of “toys” which then limits creativity and play. Anything can be a toy. Not everything should be played with (the stove) but anything in the house, the park, the world can become part of a useful, creative, imaginary narrative for a child. Encouraging them to engage with a variety of safe materials helps bolster their learning and their creativity.

On Christmas morning your kids enjoy playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them.  From an exploration perspective this behavior makes complete sense. You can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy, even with one like Tickle Me Elmo, which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices.5 -- Tim Brown, Founder and CEO, Ideo

What can happen when kids don’t get enough unstructured play?

Essential components of the brain (and the personality) do not fully develop. In extreme cases, this can lead to sociopathic tendencies. On a smaller scale it can simply mean children do not reach their full potential for happiness, social emotional intelligence, and achievement over the course of their lives. On a societal level, a lack of creativity impacts innovation, resilience, and problem solving ability across disciplines and social sectors. Creativity is one of our most important assets as a species--we need it in everything that we do.

Newsweek reports that since 1990, creativity scores in children from kindergarten through sixth grade have been decreasing in the U.S. A.6 lasting effect of play is creativity. Creating more opportunitys for children and adults to play on their own, together and with others will end the Creativity Crisis. Laura Seargeant Richardson writes in the Atlantic, “The division between work and play is a myth. If America is going to teach its youth to innovate, we need to unite the two.”7

On August 1, 1966, the day psychiatrist Stuart Brown started his assistant professorship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 25-year-old Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower on the Austin campus and shot 46 people. Whitman, an engineering student and a former U.S. Marine sharpshooter, was the last person anyone expected to go on a killing spree. After Brown was assigned as the state’s consulting psychiatrist to investigate the incident and later, when he interviewed 26 convicted Texas murderers for a small pilot study, he discovered that most of the killers, including Whitman, shared two things in common: they were from abusive families, and they never played as kids. 

Brown did not know which factor was more important. But in the 42 years since, he has interviewed some 6,000 people about their childhoods, and his data suggest that a lack of opportunities for unstructured, imaginative play can keep children from growing into happy, well- adjusted adults. “Free play,” as scientists call it, is critical for becoming socially adept, coping with stress and building cognitive skills such as problem solving. Research into animal behavior confirms play’s benefits and establishes its evolutionary importance: ultimately, play may provide animals (including humans) with skills that will help them survive and reproduce.8

CREATIVITY

How do we nurture creativity through play? 

(Ideas from Dr. Laura Markam9)

• Allow time in your family to do nothing. Allow unscheduled play time.
• Encourage children to make their own choices and direct their activities. Encourage them to even direct your activities when they play with you.
• Allow a mess, let your kids experiment (then teach them to clean and clean together).
• Children who are given frequent limits display limited creativity. Reserve the word “no” for safety issues. Let kids try new things.
• Focus on play and process, not productivity or product. 
• Give children permission to be different.
• Don’t be afraid of boredom.

A crucial tip: It helps enormously to prevent kids from depending on TV or computer to entertain them. Kids who regularly use the TV or computer are more likely to feel bored than other kids, and even after eliminating the habit it can take months for them to find other activities about which they are passionate.

Preempt the time spent on television and organized activities and have them spend it instead on claiming their imaginations. For in the end, that is all we have. If a thing cannot be imagined first -- a cake, a relationship, a cure for AIDS -- it cannot be. Life is bound by what we can envision. - Nancy Blakey via Dr. Laura Markham

Sources

1. Robert Epstein, “What Makes a Good Parent?,” Scientific American Mind 21,(October 2010): 46-51. 

http://www.nature.com/scientificamericanmind/journal/v21/n5/full/scientificamericanmind1110-46.html

2. “The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds,” Pediatrics: Official Journal of American Academy of Pediatrics, vol. 119 (January 2007): 182-191.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/119/1/182.full

3. Magda Gerber, “Magda Gerber’s Educaring Approach,” Resources For Infant Educators (2011)

http://www.rie.org/product/magda-gerbers-educaring-approach/

4. Diane E. Levine, “Too Young to be a Consumer: The Toll of Commercial Culture on the Rights of Childhood’” Exchange Magazine: ChildCareExchange.com (May/June 2009)

http://dianeelevin.com/wp/wp-content/articles/tooyoungtoconsume.pdf

5. Tim Brown, “Tales of Creativity and Play,” TEDTalk (May 2008)

http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play#t-131403 
6. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, “The Creativity Crisis,” Newsweek (July 2010) http://www.newsweek.com/creativity-crisis-74665 
7. Laura Seargeant Richardson, “Play Power: How to Turn Around Our Creativity Crisis,” The Atlantic (May 2011).http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/play-power-how-to-turn-around-our-creativity-crisis/238167/ 
8. Melinda Wenner, “Serious Need For Play,” Scientific American (February/March 2009) https://www.uwsp.edu/hphd/Documents/gesell/needForPlay.pdf    
9. Laura Markham, Nurturing Your Child’s Creativity, Aha! Parenting.com (2015) http://www.ahaparenting.com/parenting-tools/raise-great-kids/intellegent-creative-child/child-creativity