Free play

This article is about the psychological term. For the type of video game, see Free-to-play. For other uses, see Free play (disambiguation).

Free play is unstructured play among children without adult supervision who decide themselves how and what to play and make up the rules as they go along. Free play is crucial for child development, and promotes social skills, emotional health, resilience, cooperation, confidence, cognitive growth, and brain development.

A group of children playing with a balloon; Ismailia, Egypt

A lack of free play has negative effects in childhood and through adolescence and beyond, but it isn't clear how serious the consequences are. Declines in unstructured outdoor play among children in the last few decades has led to concern among experts about negative physical and mental effects in many countries including increased obesity, depression, anxiety, and other issues.

Definitions

Mark Twain, in the voice of Tom Sawyer (1876), defined play in contrast with work: "Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."^[1]

Peter Gray defined free play as unstructured play among children without adult supervision "in which the players themselves decide what and how to play and are free to modify the goals and rules as they go along. Pickup baseball is free play; a Little League game is not."^[2]

Ellen Greenlaw defines it as "any type of unstructured play that is directed by the child".^[3]

Free play is play that isn’t organized or directed by adults or older peers and that generally doesn't have a defined purpose or outcome.^[4]

Free play has been termed "self-directed", as opposed to play which is guided by adults.^[5] An earlier term for this is unstructured play.^[6][7]

The term free play was used in its current sense in the 1967 educational film Organizing Free Play, produced by Vassar College for project Head Start (program) training programs.^[8][9]

Make believe, also known as "pretend play", "fantasy play" or "imaginative play", is a loosely structured form of play that generally includes role-play, object substitution, and nonliteral behavior.^[10]

The age group involved when discussing "children" is the years between about six and twelve. This the time when children, not yet affected by puberty, are involved in making friends, engaging in athletics, hobbies, and other non-sexual activities.^[11]

History

Background

The history of early childhood education dates to the early nineteenth century, and began in Germany with Friedrich Fröbel's kindergarten, and in Britain with the infant school in Great Britain. These were both teacher-led efforts. In the kindergartens, the focus was not on teaching subjects but on a holistic approach developing basic social, emotional, motor and cognitive skills, with children taking an active part and supported by the teacher. In the British infant schools, traditional primary school subjects were taught in brief lessons with play and relaxation making up the time in between. Play was considered important in both systems, and continues to be.^[12]

Friedrich Fröbel, the founder of kindergarten, also invented the sandbox as a place to stimulate free play among children in the 1830s. He also employed free play outdoors in nature to teach children motor and creative skills. By the 1850s, sand gardens (German: sandgarten) were established in Berlin, and by 1885, reached Boston, and by 1889 a dozen other U.S. cities.^[13]

Jean Piaget analyzed play as activities engaged in for pleasure in three behavioral categories: sensorimotor (repetitive bodily interactions with an object or themself without purpose), symbolic (using one object to stand in for another), and games with rules. These develop in parallel with thought, as it passes through each of these stages in turn.^[14]

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian and Soviet psychologist, best known for his work in the 1920s on psychological development in children.^{[citation needed]} In contrast to Piaget, Vygotsky focused on just one type, symbolic play. Where Piaget considered that a child had already separated referent from object (e.g., a stick that was a pretend item from the horse it represented) Vygotsky believed that it was through symbolic play that a child learned to make this separation, and in doing so, develop their faculties of abstract thought. ^[15]

Vygotsky‘s work on childhood was brief, but innovative and ahead of his time. He stressed the importance of representational play (make-believe; fantasy play) that flourishes in the preschool years and that later evolves into structured play with games and rules in middle childhood. It was central to his theory, and he viewed it was a leading factor in the development of fantasy play. He saw children as advancing themselves in psychological development, using make believe as a zone of developmment enabling such progress. Vygotsky saw play as having two unique features: it creates an imaginary situation that allows the child to work out unrealizable desires, and there are social rules based on real-world situations that define the parameters of the imaginary scenarios constructed by the child. Thus he saw this type of play as being an imaginary situation governed by socially determined rules.^[16]

Rise

Howard Chudacoff in his 2007 history of children at play called the first half of the twentieth century the "Golden Age of Unstructured Play".^[7][6]

Decline

In the second half of the century, however, free play declined sharply, and experts have noticed increases in anxiety, depression, and other problems in children and adolescents.^[6] Unstructured outdoor play in children 3–12 has declined in the forty years since 1975, while computer and electronic games have increased in the first decade of the 21st century, leading to concerns about the ill effects of growing childhood obesity in many countries.^[17] A few countries such as Hungary and Taiwan have taken steps at the governmental policy level to ensure opportunities for children to engage in free play.^[18]

A 2009 international study reported a decline in spontaneous play in the two decades preceding the study due to multiple factors such as increased time other activities, especially with television and digital media, as well as organized sports and other extra-curricular activities, lack of nearby venues for play, and reduction of recess in school.^[19] It found that the amount of time spent on outdoor activity was being replaced by indoor activities like television, video games, and computers, and this was universal across multiple countries, whether in developed or developing countries, with the latter having the highest levels of television watching and least outdoor play.^[20]

International aspects

A 2009 international study and literature review found that free play was universal among children in different nations as reported by their mothers.^[19]

Gender profile

An international study showed that nine-year old boys prefer playing with other boys, and preferred more physical or aggressive play, while girls eight to ten prefer to play alone, and was expressed less in physical activity. In children of pre-school age, girls tended to engage in more make-believe play, but boys caught up by age five, and that this largely held across the sixteen countries studied.^[21]

Types

The type or categories that one divides up free play depends on the theoretical basis underlying it. Smilansky divided it up into functional, constructive, dramatic, and rule-based.^[22] Various types of play that fall under the definition of free play, including:^[23]

• Creative –drawing, coloring, painting, sculpting, playing with art supplies, crafting^[23]

• Imaginative –dress-up, Acting out stories, role-playing^[23]

• Physical – Running around; climbing, swinging, or playing on playground equipment; playing games like hide-and-seek or tag^[23][24]

• Constructive – building with blocks, Lego, or other materials^[23][25]

• Sensory – playing with sand, water, clay or similar materials^[23] (not to be confused with Piagetian sensorimotor play which occurs in infancy^[22])

• Exploratory – collecting rocks, leaves, and seashells; exploring with magnifying glasses, nets, and magnets^[23][26]

• Independent – reading; playing with toys or items (of their choice)^[23]

• Social – playing with others in their age group; inventing games to play together^[23]

• Symbolic – make-believe; pretend; one object standing in for another^[27]

Health impact

Benefits

Children playing; by Árpád Cserépy ^[hu] (1897)

Free play is crucial to children learning about their own interests, in exploring their world, and to thrive physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially.^[5][4]

It is a natural and critical period of child development that is crucial for developing social skills, emotional health, resiliency, stress management, cooperation, confidence, building cognitive skills, and even brain size.^[28][29][30]

A 2014 study investigated development of executive functions in children, and found that the more time children spent in unstructured activity, the better their self-directed executive functioning was. Conversely, the more time spent in structured activities, the worse it was.^[31]

It's hard to isolate playfulness from other developmental factors, so the best evidence for the benefits of play comes from its use in mental health treatments. For instance, structured play in an Indian orphanage led to major gains in motor, cognitive, and social skills despite continued deprivation in the orphanage setting.^[32]

Physically, free play contributes to motor skills, coordination, and overall health by promoting active movement.^{[33][page needed]}

After free play during recess at school, children pay more attention than they do following after adult-led, structured physical activity.^[34]

Risks of deprivation

Lack of opportunities for free play in childhood carries a risk negative effects on growing children, and may be long-lasting. Psychologists are not in agreement on the amount of risk involved.Concerns are that it may result in anxious, unhappy and socially maladjusted adults.^[29]

Research from animal studies shows that play deprivation hinders development in key areas of the prefrontal cortex. There is less data for human children because of ethics considerations, but similar effects were observed in severely maltreated children, such as those in Romanian orphanages, who showed impaired brain development and abnormal play behavior.^[32]

Studies in prisoner populations have found an overrepresentation of inmates that were deprived of free play opportunities.^[28] A commission established following the Texas tower shooting in 1966 found that the shooter's motivation was tied to a severe restriction of free play during childhood.^[28][35]

Outside factors

Various studies have examined the character or quality of free play as a measure of the influence of outside factors such as a history of maternal depression, family discord or hostility, or personality disorders in a parent on the development and adjustment of children.^[36]

Therapy

Main article: Play therapy

The use of play therapy showed social improvements in children with autism spectrum disorder in several areas. including making friends, interactions with others, family relationships, dealing with stress, and less time spent playing alone.^[32]

As human right

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is an international human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations in 1989 which sets out the civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children. Article 31 affirms a child's right to play.^[37][38]

See also

• Child
• Cooperative learning
• Democratic education
• Developmental psychology
• Early sports specialization
• Generation Alpha
• Green Hour
• Learning through play
• Man, Play and Games
• Outdoor education
• Play equity
• Pre-school playgroup
• Recess (break)
• Social-emotional learning
• Sociocultural theory