Play Is Not a Four-Letter Word

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“First rule: leave [the children] alone . . . .” —D.H. Lawrence

“When we use play to promote fitness and prevent heart attacks, ‘we change its gold to dross.’”

—George Sheehan

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—11/22/10—In November of 2009, Time reported that free-play for first, second, and third graders had shrunk by a quarter since 1981 while homework had doubled.

Compounding the problem, according to the parenting columnist, Leonore Skenazy, is yuppie over-parenting which “infantilizes children into incompetence.” To incompetence, many would add obesity. Ironically, the average American child, who has 150 toys, spends considerable time mutilating them while his parents excuse such destruction as a “rite of passage.”

On the other side of the Earth, the Taliban have been seizing kites just as the Nazis confiscated lead toy soldiers. Children without kites in an impoverished land like Afghanistan remind me of a documentary showing young chimpanzees cruelly denied the opportunity to play. One result was that those animals never learned “termiting”: punching a hole in a termite mound with one finger, stripping a twig of its bark to expose its sticky cambium, and then inserting the twig to capture protein-rich insects. No play, at least in this case, meant no food.

Otters sliding down muddy embankments, bears tumbling over one another in the snow, badgers playing leap frog, and dolphins grandstanding on the bow wave of a ship are essential parts of these animals’ development. Without play during their youth, the result would be the equivalent of a Charles Whitman, firing at will from a tower at the University of Texas, killing 13 students. Dr. Stuart Brown’s analysis of Whitman and 26 other convicted killers showed that none of these misfits had been “a free-range kid.” Children deprived of play and all the self-expression that accompanies it often become the crippled equivalents of those caged turkeys whose breasts are so heavy, they cannot stand.

I used to complain about our family’s frequent relocations when I still lived with my military father. In my first 17 years, I moved 15 times, which means I have very few friends to correspond with from that rich stratum of my life.The four I have, I knew for only a year or two. But, what I never appreciated until recently was the variety of play venues that our moves offered me. I chased girls my age at Camp Gordon, Georgia, built snowmen with German kids in Heidelberg, Germany, caught fireflies with my friends in Falls Church, Virginia, skated after school on the hills of Brooklyn, New York, went duck hunting with my cousins in South Georgia, wrestled boys in the bluegrass of Tennessee, played football and baseball on the parade grounds of the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, and often had the run of the Pentagon gymnasium on weekends. I also rambled with friends along the basement corridors of the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Army Medical Museum, and the Smithsonian. Of course, this was long before any American outside the CIA knew what terrorism was. The world was my oyster, and I slurped it down raw on a Saltine with a dash of Texas Pete.

My wife’s play venue was considerably narrower than mine, but just as rich. She was reared in a north German village where, thanks to World War Two, most of the children had never seen a toy store. The few toys that existed were hand-me-downs or homemade. Her first doll was sewn and stuffed with wool by her mother when she wasn’t baking mud marbles in the wood-fired oven. A child’s rubber ball was as jealously guarded as the French border. A child lucky enough to own a ball usually had a net bag and a hook in the wall to hang it all from. Leaving a ball lying on a flat surface meant running the risk of distorting the treasured globe. Furthermore, every child in the village knew whose ball was whose. There was no point in stealing one because to play with it was to confess a crime.

Many toys were fashioned from the flak that fell on the village every time a wave of Allied bombers flew towards Berlin or back home. From these scraps and rings of tin that my wife’s mother made when recycling cans, a cornucopia of toys and ornaments were fashioned that rivaled the ingenious toys African children make today from Coke cans and plastic water bottles.

But one need not take my word that the work of childhood is play. Dr. Jerome Bruner proved the point 30 years ago with an elegant experiment in which he gave five groups of children aged three to five different exposures to two rulers, a C-clamp, and a task solved by joining the rulers with the clamp.

One group watched adults clamp the rulers and retrieve a prize that was out of reach; a second watched adults clamp the rulers but not retrieve the prize; a third was shown how to place a clamp on one ruler alone; a fourth received no exposure to the materials; and a fifth was allowed to play freely with all materials.

Interestingly, the kids who had played with the materials did almost as well (40 percent success rate) as the group who received the fullest instructions (41 percent success rate). The other three groups lagged well behind (18, 20, and 8 percent, respectively) the two leaders. Of course, 40 percent is still failing, but I should remind myself that I could not tie my shoes until I was five or six, and as often as I have “played” with and studied a hammer in the hands of the pros, I still hit my fingers.

In other words, play should be in the hands of children, not academics. Like chimpanzees and muskrats, children instinctively know how and when to play. At eleven months, our granddaughter hugs the stuffing out of her dolls and rocks to any tune with a strong beat. Place her in a large cardboard box with a few pie pans, and she will entertain herself unbidden.

As for academics, I played intramural softball and volleyball for 30 years in a faculty-student league, and hardly a game was played in which a professor didn’t show up in pastel shorts and argyles with a graphing calculator strapped to his belt. Academics at play are not a pretty sight.

I’ll never forget the frowns on the administrators’ faces when I pulled a Frisbee from my book bag at Advanced Placement readings outside Princeton. Nevertheless, after several hours of paper-grading, I needed to move, and I usually found several brain-fried colleagues who would join me outside for 15 minutes of pure play. I don’t have any figures to prove my point, but I felt my evaluations were more accurate after some light exercise. After eight hours of “academic truck driving,” I absolutely needed play as badly as any junkie needs a fix.

As I said before, play is a precursor to competence among mammals. Ants and termites do not play; they are social creatures programmed to do specific tasks like cool the hive or tend the eggs. Without play, humans are closer to ants than mammals. This is especially true of communications. Given their programming, ants have no need for speech; humans do.

Play, especially for men, grounds the static between them.

My son and I discovered this atmospheric phenomenon playing catch in the back yard. Sitting across the supper table, we stammered for words, but once a ball or a bike was tossed into the mix, we opened up like a couple of women with a bottomless coffee pot.

What better reason is there to play than finding some common ground with one’s children? The quest starts with “carpet bonding,” when the kids are toddlers, and continues right into adulthood, when a Frisbee may be your salvation. I’m not taking any chances—I have nine of these modified pie pans, including an illuminated one for night flying.