[HOME GAME, Kingston Life magazine, May/June 2019]

THE PLAY-LEARN LINK

And How Risk Builds Resilience in Children

By LAWRENCE SCANLAN

A wispy nine-year-old boy with freckles across his nose and cheeks is visiting the farm of his grandparents near the village of Tamworth, north of Kingston, and he has ventured out to the red barn with six cousins. Hanging from the rafters of the barn is a thick and sturdy rope. The game is to grab the rope, swing swashbuckler style from a heavy square beam on the second floor and drop into thick beds of hay some 15 feet below. There are shrieks of delight as the city kids take turns flying through the air for hours. Nowhere to be seen in all this time is an adult.

The boy is me. The year is 1958 and of all my sweet memories of the Flynn farm, this is one of the most vivid. Rope in hand, I remember trepidation as I looked down that first time, I remember elation as I plummeted, and I remember the joy that comes from playing with other children connected to me by blood – though I had no name then for that feeling. Today we would call such play “unstructured” and “unsupervised,” perhaps even “risky.” This is how it was then: free play, children creating their own games, older ones looking after younger ones, and strength in numbers to guard against possible harm.

I thought about all this as I watched both Victoria Park and the playground at the Memorial Centre undergo massive renovations in recent years. Kingston has more than 200 parks, large and small, and they have become increasingly important play spaces in an era of apartment, condominium and townhouse living, and new houses with small back yards.

I spoke with Neil Unsworth, manager of parks development for the city of Kingston. “It’s hard for a parent,” he said, “to be in a playground with a child and not helicopter. But there is a new trend towards unsupervised, risky play. ‘Go play in the woods,’ or ‘stand on a pile of rocks,’ is what its advocates say. Our bubble wrap society may think it’s inappropriate but there’s an argument that says that by exposing the kids to risk early on, those kids are actually safer in the long run.”

To understand why, we have to realize that “playing” is not at the opposite end of learning (in the way that recess and school are often thought to be). No, childhood play is absolutely critical to human development. I came across an article in Psychology Today by a research professor in psychology at Boston College named Peter Gray. In his article, penned in 2014, “Risky Play: Why Children Love It and Need It,” he cites evidence to show that play teaches young mammals how to regulate fear and anger. He offers the example of children roughhousing. One child might get hurt, not seriously, and may experience fear or anger. “But to continue playing,” writes Gray, “to continue the fun, they must overcome that anger. If they lash out, the play is over.”

Gray cites research on young rats deprived of play at critical stages in their development. Such rats later placed in an unfamiliar environment responded with either paralyzing fear or mindless aggression.

Peter Gray grew up in rural Minnesota in the 1950s and he describes the kind of play unheard of today in nervous North America: day-long hikes or bike rides with other ten-year-old kids, some carrying jackknives and using matches to build fires on islands when they skied or skated on the frozen lake’s shores in winter. But then he goes further. Over the past 60 years, Gray says, the decline in children’s unmonitored play has coincided with a dramatic increase in childhood mental disorders such as anxiety and depression.

Does all that monitoring by parents actually cause the psychiatric woes that plague so many adolescents? Impossible to say. Farmyard cocks crow every morning at dawn, precisely when the sun comes up. Flat-earth society members excepted, most of us believe that the rising sun owes everything to astrology and nothing to the cock-a-doodle-do.

On the other hand, many scholars are convinced that minimizing free play can have crippling consequences. A noted British thinker on this subject is Sir Ken Robinson, a former arts education professor who was knighted for his contributions to our thinking on play. His group surveyed 12,000 parents in 10 countries and found that the average child spends less time outside than the average maximum security prisoner.

“Play,” argues Robinson, “is a highly beneficial and deeply natural way in which kids learn . . . [with] important roles in the development of intellectual skills, in social skills, in developing empathy, in stretching our imaginations and exploring our creativity.” Studies show that play boosts imagination, social skills and maturity.

Last August I went to Victoria Park with two young friends from Montreal, six-year-old Benjamin and four-year-old Nicolas (their father, Patrick Smith, was here competing in the K-Town Triathlon). The brothers loved the new splash pad, they ran from spout to spout, they giggled as they placed their feet and bottoms over the water jets, they played by themselves among the rocks below the little bridge, and they often screamed with delight. Is that not the sweetest music in the world? The sound of children having fun outside.

If you want to see what unrestricted play looks like, check out the much heralded Fuji Kindergarten, in Western Tokyo, built in 2007. In this ring-shaped Montessori school, the architecture itself is the playground. Children aged two to six are organized into 20 classrooms that are open both to the outdoors (two-thirds of the time) and other classrooms (all of the time) – because its Japanese architects believe that ambient noise helps the little ones focus. The one-story school’s roof is a wide wooden track cum play space that allows children this age to do what they love to do – chase each other in a circle. The kids run on average five kilometres a day! They also climb the three 25-metre-tall trees that grow through the roof, with rope nets stretched below. Listen to Takaharu Tezuka, who designed the facility with his wife, Yui Tezuka: “Kids need small doses of danger. Don’t protect them too much. They need some injury. They need to learn how to live in this world.”

If Canadian kids are not playing outside, what are they doing instead? They might be inside, glued to a screen. An American medical magazine, JAMA Pediatrics, recently looked at the amount of time spent by preschoolers in front of a screen (television, computer or other device) and its impact. The lead researcher, Sheri Madigan, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Calgary, has a special interest in the factors that shape social, emotional and cognitive development in early childhood. She and her team have been tracking Calgary families since 2008, and the results are staggering.

Of the 2,400 children included in the study, kids aged two, three and five, respectively, devoted on average 2.4, 3.6 and 1.6 hours a day to screen time. Heavy users were less likely by the age of five to achieve milestones in problem-solving, communicating and mobility.

One final note on “nervous” North America: I have Scandinavian neighbors with three children under the age of ten and I see all five virtually every morning as they walk to and from the school and the daycare up the street. When the family goes back home for extended visits, their relatives are mystified by the hovering habit and see no reason for it. But clearly the habit has taken hold in Canada where not hovering can lead to questions: I was told of a father who dropped off his six- and eight-year-old boys at Victoria Park where the mother was waiting at a distance. This father then picked up a third child at the nearby school and returned ten minutes later to the park where he was confronted by a police officer. Apparently university students had witnessed the drop off and panicked. No doubt they thought they had done the right thing, and that this father had done the wrong thing.

I live close enough to Victoria Park that I can hear the thump sound of a puck hitting the boards at the rink in winter or the clink sound that a metal bat makes when it strikes a ball at the diamond in summer. I like both sounds, for they tell me that Kingstonians young and old are doing what they should be doing. Playing outdoors. There is a risk, of course, that a stick or puck or ball might do some harm but the risk is low and well worth taking.