Showing papers in "American Journal of Play in 2011"

The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in children and adolescents.

Abstract: Over the past half century, in the United States and other developed nations, children’s free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in children, adolescents, and young adults. This article documents these historical changes and contends that the decline in play has contributed to the rise in the psychopathology of young people. Play functions as the major means by which children (1) develop intrinsic interests and competencies; (2) learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules; (3) learn to regulate their emotions; (4) make friends and learn to get along with others as equals; and (5) experience joy. Through all of these effects, play promotes mental health.

Older-Adult Playfulness: An Innovative Construct and Measurement for Healthy Aging Research.

Abstract: Few studies of adult playfulness exist, but limited research on older adults and playfulness suggests that playfulness in later life improves cognitive, emotional, social, and psychological functioning and healthy aging overall. Older adults represent a rapidly growing segment of the U.S. population, underscoring the need to understand the aging process. In this article, the authors report on the first three steps of a four-step, multimethod approach to test the hypothesis that playfulness is an important component of healthy aging in older adults. Step 1 determines the characteristics of older-adult playfulness, extending Barnett’s (2007) study of young-adult playfulness and recruiting participants from a different age group (older adults rather than younger adults). Based on findings from Step 1, in Step 2 the authors develop the Older Adult Playfulness (OAP) scale to measure playfulness in older adults. In Step 3, they validate the reliability of the OAP scale. A forthcoming manuscript will report on the relationship between older adult playfulness and healthy aging (Step 4).

The Play-Literacy Nexus and the Importance of Evidence-Based Techniques in the Classroom

Abstract: A growing body of research has focused on the role of play in young children’s literacy development and early-literacy learning. In reviewing this research, the authors define the play-literacy nexus as that space where play, language, and emerging literacy behaviors converge and interact. They describe findings about the play-literacy nexus (which they call knowledge of the nexus) and what these findings mean for children, their parents, and their teachers in literacy development and early-literacy learning (which they dub knowledge in the nexus). They define play and literacy in terms of this current knowledge; they review the major theoretical frameworks that give rise to play-literacy hypotheses and relationships; and they discuss topics that connect play and literacy, including literacy-enriched play environments, play’s role in narrative development, and how play supports cognitive-linguistic abilities and skills that help children learn to read. They argue that knowledge of the play-literacy nexus, i.e., research, should determine the nature of the knowledge used in the play-literacy nexus within the larger context of early-childhood education, and they illustrate their argument with several evidence-based techniques for classroom practice, including literacy-enriched play environment design, topicand theme-related dramatic play, and play planning.

The Special Value of Children's Age-Mixed Play.

Abstract: From an evolutionary perspective, the normal social play of children involves kids of various ages. Our human and great-ape ancestors most likely lived in small groups with low birth rates, which made play with others of nearly the same age rare. Consequently, the evolutionary functions of children’s social play are best understood by examining play in groups that include children of different ages. The author calls this kind of play “age mixed.” He reviews the research on such play, including his own research conducted at the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts where students from ages four to about eighteen mix freely. He concludes that age-mixed play offers opportunities for learning and development not present in play among those close in age, permitting younger children to learn more from older playmates than they could from playing with only their peers. In age-mixed play, the more sophisticated behavior of older children offers role models for younger children, who also typically receive more emotional support from older kids than from those near their own age. Age-mixed play also permits older children to learn by teaching and to practice nurturance and leadership; and they are often inspired by the imagination and creativity of their younger playmates.

Playing with the Multiple Intelligences: How Play Helps Them Grow.

Abstract: Howard Gardner first posited a list of “multiple intelligences” as a liberating alternative to the assumptions underlying traditional IQ testing in his widely read study Frames of Mind (1983). Play has appeared only in passing in Gardner’s thinking about intelligence, however, even though play instructs and trains the verbal, interpersonal, intrapersonal, logical, spatial, musical, and bodily intelligences that Gardner regards as original human endowments. Playing out of doors also enhances and exercises the faculty that Gardner later marked as the naturalist intelligence. As recess dwindles in American schools, and as free play shrinks in the childhood experience, this article finds fresh cause to inspect the merits of multiple-intelligence theory through the lens of play.

Evolutionary Functions of Social Play: Life Histories, Sex Differences, and Emotion Regulation.

Abstract: Many research findings about animal play apply to children’s play, revealing structural and functional similarities with mammals in general and primates in particular. After an introduction to life-history theory, and before turning to humans, the author reviews research about the two mammals in which play has been studied the most extensively: laboratory rats and monkeys. He looks at the development of play, deprivation studies, gender segregation, and the functions of gender-differentiated forms of play. The gender segregation and sex differences in play parenting and rough-and-tumble play observed in many primates are also evident in children. Vigorous social-play benefits all children physically by developing strong bones and muscles, by promoting cardiovascular fitness, and by encouraging exercise habits that help prevent obesity. Unsupervised play also helps hone the skills of communication, perspective taking, and emotion regulation. For boys especially, rough-and-tumble play in early childhood provides a scaffold for learning emotion-regulation skills related to managing anger and aggression.

Playing with Ideas The Affective Dynamics of Creative Play

Abstract: •Through an integrated investigation of emotion, play, and creativity, this interdisciplinary study analyzes the affective nature of playfulness, explores it as feeling or attitude in an adult context, and maps its relationship to the creative process. Combining phenomenological and empirical perspectives, the author builds on ideas and findings from research in neuroscience, emotion studies, psychology, anthropology, systems and evolution theory, and aesthetics and the arts. He considers the embodied mind environmentally interactive; biologically, experientially, and culturally influenced; and intrinsically dynamic and creative. Finally, he defines a model of playfulness consisting of eight qualities and makes connections between these and ideational phases of creativity.

Marbles and Machiavelli: The Role of Game Play in Children's Social Development.

Abstract: The authors review several case studies of children engaged in rule-governed play and conclude that the process of learning rules—and of breaking them and making new ones—promotes what they call gamesmanship. They link the development of gamesmanship to the theory of Machiavellian intelligence, which considers social interaction primary in the evolution of human intelligence. They also question the benefits of adult-managed child play and assess the impact it may have on the ability of children to develop gamesmanship.

Scaffolding Productive Language Skills through Sociodramatic Play.

Abstract: This article reviews how a receptive, bilingual four-year-old increased her Spanish productive-language skills over five weeks as she engaged in Spanish-language play sessions with bilingual peers. The data show her growing participation in group verbal interactions along with her growing production of her weaker language. In addition, a microanalysis of play sessions illustrates the techniques employed by the four-year-old’s playmates to scaffold the linguistic production of the child’s weaker language in sociodramatic play. The author concludes that the study has implications for parents who wish to provide their children with opportunities to develop or maintain more than one language.

Fell Running and Voluptuous Panic: On Caillois and Post-Sport Physical Culture.

Abstract: As many cultural groups in Western societies have become disaffected with mainstream sports cultures and their logics of practice, sociologists of sport and physical culture have turned their attention to the existential benefits of play and games. There is growing interest in revisiting and exploring the classic theories of play in society, including those of Roger Caillois. The author considers the increasingly popular practice of fell running among a group of enthusiasts in the United Kingdom as an activity that playfully embraces and celebrates the voluptuous panic of ilinx activities. He argues that fell running is not a pure form of ilinx as defined by Caillois but that the sport’s willful—and highly pleasurable—disruption of the mind and body through vertigo and panic fits Caillois’s description of the benefits of play and games. Using ethnographic data about fell runners collected during two years in the United Kingdom, the author suggests that they make existential connections with time, space, and the elements through the voluptuous panic and animal mimicry described by Caillois and others. Key words : Roger Caillois; fell running; ilinx; physical-cultural studies; post-sport physical culture; voluptuous panic Getting [Theoretically] Stuck in the Fells To think, let alone write , about the connection between so-called high-performance athletics and existential pleasure is almost antithetical in academic work. I speak quite regularly with colleagues in sport and exercisescience programs who unabashedly admit that elite-level or “serious-leisure” (Stebbins 2006) sports bear little resemblance to the pursuit of physical health or to the experience of emotional pleasures (besides those, perhaps, stirred by the vanquishing of an opponent). High-performance sports and athletic cultures are typically characterized by a small range of human emotions and experiences (Kerr 2004). But many people engage in the willful abandonment of personal control through intense, sports-like physicality and by placing themselves in athletic contexts that stir doubt, uncertainty, thrills, and anxiety. The literature

Influences of Technology-Related Playful Activity and Thought on Moral Development.

Abstract: Many early developmental theorists such as Freud, Erikson, Piaget, and Vygotsky suggested that play—which the authors of this article define as both playful activity and playful thought—had the power to influence the moral emotions, behaviors, and reasoning of children. More recent researchers have also found evidence of moral development in their observations of children’s play. But, the authors claim, there have been many changes in the culture of childhood and adolescence in the past twenty years, and these have affected both the amount of time spent in play and the types of play that prevail. This article describes potential changes in the nature of play related to three new technologies—technology-augmented toys, video games, and virtual communities—and reviews the research and theory about their impact on play and on moral development. The authors look at research (including their own), discuss the positive and negative influences of these new technologies, and describe the need for further investigation.

Play as a Pathway of Behavior.

Abstract: Seeking to understand play as part of a more general theory of human relationships, the author defines play as one of four fundamental categories of behavior, the others being work, ritual, and communitas. He discusses how each of these behaviors is organized as a “pathway” that offers distinctive opportunities for experiencing life and for discovering “self-locations,” specifically privilege, subordination, engagement, and marginality. These pathways and self-locations are understood to be key elements in the formation of experience. Associating play, ritual, work, and communitas with either ascending (self-directed) meaning or descending (other-directed) meaning, he describes their related “emotion sequences,” essentially chains of emotions that lead from feelings of anticipation to those addressing occurrences in the present to remembrances. For example, work leads from self-confidence to pride; play, from curiosity to gratitude; communitas, from hope to blessedness; and ritual, from faith to reverence. Each of the four pathways is a profoundly important, but also a limited format for action and experience.

The Design Your Own Park Competition: Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Outdoor Play on a Citywide Scale.

Abstract: •This article describes the thinking behind and the implementation of the Design Your Own Park (DYOP) Competition, a collaborative project of a university, a city, and a fund-raising organization to empower neighborhoods and restore outdoor play citywide in Binghamton, New York. The city makes vacant lots and other neglected spaces available for neighborhoods to turn into parks that residents design and build with the assistance of faculty and students from Binghamton University’s Binghamton Neighborhood Project. The United Way of Broome County assists with funding required for implementation. Neighborhood groups help maintain their parks, which increases ongoing interactions among neighbors and reduces city maintenance costs. While it is too early to access the DYOP Competition fully, it provides a science-based model for other cities seeking to

Bodily Play in the After-School Program: Fulfillment of Intentionality in Interaction between Body and Place

Abstract: This article investigates the relationship between children in an after-school program (ASP) and the places where they play. It focuses on the kind of bodily play the children themselves choose and control. The author applies a life-world approach to this study, and his theoretical perspective is based on phenomenological philosophy. The qualitative research included interviews of children in a Norwegian ASP and the close observation of these children engaged in free play at two distinctive locations on the grounds of one ASP facility. The findings show that children’s understanding of place closely associates with their own bodily play. Bodily play appears meaningfully directed toward places and offers children the immediate opportunity to fulfill the intentionality of their activities. Such play serves an important role in constituting and adjusting the background for later actions, and the author concludes that this kind of bodily play should be encouraged in ASP. He concludes further that ASP itself should be emphasized as a complementary but contrasting niche in a school’s physical-education scheme, an emphasis that requires sound pedagogical judgments by professional staff.

Adult Attitudes and Beliefs Regarding Play on Lana'i •

Abstract: This article describes how adult attitudes toward play on the Hawaiian island of Lana'i reflect the connection between play and culture. It is based on a study of ninety-two caregivers (parents, grandparents, and other adult custodians), primar- ily representing individuals of Filipino, part Hawaiian, and Japanese heritages. These respondents completed a survey about the value of play for their children, the types of play they encouraged or discouraged, and the extent and nature of their own involvement in their children's play. The caregivers acknowledged the importance of play for their children and its developmental benefits, particularly those connected to culture. In keeping with the more collectivist ideology of Pacific Rim cultures, the caregivers encouraged types of play that fostered social skills such as cooperation, sharing, and group play. They strongly discouraged types of play that might harm or injure children. And they acknowledged the need for caretakers to set aside time to participate in their children's play.

Empowering Groups that Enable Play.

Abstract: Creating play environments for children usually requires groups of adults working together. An extensive scientific literature describes how groups function to achieve shared goals in general terms, and groups attempting to empower play may find this literature useful. Design principles for managing natural resources, identified by Elinor Ostrom and for which she received the Nobel Prize in 2009, provide an exceptionally practical guide for all groups attempting to achieve common goals. In this article, the authors discuss the related scientific literature and connect it to the experience of two national organizations creating outdoor environments for play—KaBOOM! and City Repair.

Gangsters, Pranksters, and the Invention of Trick-or-Treating, 1930-1960.

Abstract: For most children in North America, Halloween is one of the most exciting holidays of the year. But some critics insist that its emphasis on ready-made costumes, store-bought candy, and trick-or-treating seduces children into cultural passivity and socializes them to mindless consumption. These critics argue that trick-ortreating was an inherited tradition, invented, initiated, or imposed by adults to control undesirable Halloween mischief. This article turns to newspaper accounts from the 1930s through the1950s to suggest that these beliefs and conclusions about trick-or-treating are false and that, in fact, children originated trick-ortreating and shaped it to their own ends. In her view of trick-or-treating as part of the development of children’s culture in twentieth-century America, the author presents the role of children in initiating their own forms of play and contesting and negotiating such play with adults, all of which suggests a more complex understanding of Halloween and trick-or-treating in the contemporary context.