The Value of Play

*This is, admittedly, something I wrote awhile ago but I felt like it was worth posting.


It’s a beautiful fall day and I’ve invited several friends from the homeschooling group we’re part of to come over and play in our yard. My 7-year-old son is chasing my 10-year old daughter and her friend around our yard as they squeal in delighted terror. This isn’t going well so the girls decide to start an army to defeat my son and his friends. My son is not enjoying being the object of their attack so we all work together to create two teams that will battle each other by fencing with sticks. Interestingly, and not by adult design, the teams consist of one group of four girls and one boy and another of four boys and one girl.

This is not the first time they’ve constructed a scenario to be played out--the last time we were all together at a local park, they had created a kingdom with hunters and gatherers and wizards, everyone playing a part. From our adult vantage point, it looked like they were all climbing on a big tree trunk but when we peeked into their world, for whatever reason, we discovered something much more complex, imaginative and purposeful.

While all of the parents in our group have different styles of homeschooling (from highly structured to unschooling) we all agree on one thing—the importance of letting kids have time to be kids. Imaginative play and connecting with nature are things we encourage and see actively in our children and are aspects of education and child-rearing that sometimes get lost in today’s world.

While studying education years ago, before I had children, I remember reading about the importance of imaginative play, not just in toddlers or very small children but in older children as well. Among other things, role-playing helped kids develop empathy, since they were more easily able to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. It also helped nurture an ability to find creative ways to problem-solve and think outside the box (like using a stick as a sword or a banana for a phone). Surely these things are not only useful but necessary for all of us and imaginative play is most certainly underestimated or overlooked compared to reading, writing, testing and the like.

Parents with kids in school tell me that kindergarteners are doing worksheets and homework, and that children in elementary school are developing anxiety disorders due to the stress and increased pressure to excel academically and the amount of work being given. Add to this the reduction in recess or free time and we’ve got a recipe for children who might be successful in their academic or professional lives, but disconnected from each other and the natural world around them.

I have been heartened to see my 5-year-old daughter building a nest out of twigs and leaves for herself and her “baby bird” (another 5-year old) after observing a mother and baby robin or to see my 10-year-old daughter rushing to the computer to look up anything she can on painted turtles so that she can find out how (if at all) to help the baby she found in the driveway. These aren’t things that can be taught, they must be experienced and their value must not be underestimated. Without empathy, how can we become a more peaceful society? Without imagination, how can there be innovation?


 So today, while the kids march off with sticks in hand for hours, I am confident that they will do more than just hit sticks together…rules will be made, alliances formed, ideas played out. Play is never just play. It is, as Albert Einstein says, “the greatest form of research.”