The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds

As a clinician specializing in working with children and an advocate/practitioner of Play Therapy, I must applaud the alert this article provides about the risks of the lost learning opportunities and the “unintended message from this hurried, intense preparation for adulthood” of our increasingly less ‘playful’ society. Research has for many years recognized the cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral benefits of providing children with unstructured, child-centered play time; HOWEVER, as important as play is for children, it is (at least) nearly equally important for adults. Popular phrases are popular because of their resonance of truth and what is it we do when we are struggling with the challenges of life? What is the process we engage in to reach a resolution? We “play with an idea”!! Most adults do so in their thoughts alone whereas others also interact with their environment as part of this process. I suggest that this devaluation and denial of play’s importance to adult health is a second major contributant to the general devaluation by our society of the power and importance of play. I would contend that play is, even for adults, the foundation of contentment and achievement. We need to advocate for adults, just as for children, to engage the world with that ‘playfulness’ that allows us to see the many possibilities and options each of our life experiences exposes. We need to remember what these people knew:

G.B. Shaw: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing”

R. von Oech: “Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.”

G.K. Chesterson:“The true object of all human life is play.”

Respectfully submitted: T.G. Borkan, PhD-Psychologist

Conflict of Interest:

None declared