When children play, they create their own places and things. As Fred "Mr. Rogers" said, "When children pretend, they're using their imaginations to move beyond the bounds of reality. A stick can be a magic wand. A sock can be a puppet. A small child can be a superhero."
Creativity shimmers in their eyes and faces while they go about their purposeful activities. For we must not forget that play for them is learning; more, it is learning how to learn. And it is giving children the opportunity to practice what they are learning — practice, modify, expand — over and over again.
"Play is our brain's favorite way of learning," writes a contemporary author, Diane Ackerman. "Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold," writes a contemporary scholar, Joseph Pearce.
This is essential; this is important. Any of us who have children or who remember our own childhoods know that. So why is there such concern in the minds of thoughtful people about children's play today? "There is a poverty of play," warns D. W. Winnicott, prominent British pediatrician. Might this poverty have something to do with the toys children have?
I walked into Walmart last week wanting to buy some marbles. Two years ago I found a bag of bee marbles there: mustard yellow crossed with dark curves from honey to chocolate brown. I put them in a glass jar where I can admire their beauty. Finding no marbles in my search, I sought out a kindly salesman who sympathetically told me that there are no marbles this year; there are no jacks or jump ropes or yo-yos, either. It's rather hit or miss where old-fashioned toys are concerned.
I walked up and down the isles of "Watch What I Do" toys. They are expensive, ofttimes complicated, with faces that are almost caricatures of the real thing: of children, cows, dogs, kittens — and their colors are brassy and bright. I felt everything within me recoil.
I watched the children who were in the aisles with me. They would pick up a toy and poke it, looking for wires and buttons, for knobs to turn. "What does it do?" I heard a child ask its mother, over and over again. Or: "Look what it does, Mom! Look what it does."
What it does interferes significantly with what the child is able to do. Experiences such as Terry Brooks describes used to be common: "Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination — think up a story and go live it for an afternoon!"
Or, from Nastassja Kinski: "My parents found what I was interested in and encouraged me. They didn't put me in front of a television, and buy lots of toys, as many American parents do."
When I was a child, we were expected to be able to entertain ourselves, whether we felt like it or not. Our mothers shooed us out-of-doors, even on the hottest of summer days. And if we did no more than sit on a slope of shaded grass, licking packages of sticky Kool-Aid and talking, we learned how to be, and how to be responsible for our own hours.
"Toys have become commodities," complains Beth Copeland, "instead of playthings." We all sense that and feel at times overwhelmed and taken advantage of as we try to sift through the garish and overpriced array.
If we stifle creativity, bore or over-stimulate our children, it is like dampening the fires of their spirits; short-changing them in a way that will make a difference throughout all of their lives. Parents themselves are often distracted and over-extended, and it has become so easy to slip into the comfortable format of putting a child in front of the television, or sticking an electronic toy in his hands so he can punch the buttons and bring up the images that will keep him quiet — and stop the demands he is making on us!
"Deep meaning lies often in childish play," says the great German poet, Schiller. And, as far back as Greece in the 500's BC, Heraclitus said, "Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." Even Dr. Spock said, "A child loves his play, not because it is easy — but because it's hard."
Of what are we robbing our little ones? What are we relinquishing and losing, along with them?
As children go about the "hard work of playing" they do it with the spontaneity of their very newness, of the enchantment they see in everything about them, and which still exists in them. Therefore the "work of life" is seen in their little eyes as something marvelously fascinating: they see joy, and they express in delightful ways this joy that they see.
Toys that are mechanical facsimiles or contrivances, cheap and poor, confuse and dull the pure energy of childhood, and we cannot afford that. As Carl Jung taught, "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct." And William Cowper said, "Men deal with life as children with their play." Work we love — work that claims the highest within us — is not an obligation; it is, as with children, a joy.
It is a challenge of our times to restore and enhance childhood for our children, and I hope we do not ignore nor underestimate the importance of this work — nor the growth, freedom and satisfaction that will come to us and to them.
Let's remember the words of Plato: "Life must be lived as play."