Child’s Play: It’s Really Work

How does play help shape a child’s brain and learning?

What is play? It’s play when we see it as fun; but when it’s hard, it’s work. You can label child development as play, but that is the perception of an adult. For a child, it’s work.

Everything a child does stimulates the muscles, the nervous system and the brain. A baby first works to gain control of hands, arms, feet, and legs, see and hear things, and try to grasp things (the motor cortex lines up with the occipital and parietal lobes). Since the baby’s mouth is the most sensitive (and where learning occurs), that’s where everything goes once he latches on after being attracted to colors. The textures, the weight and the form are learned only with the sensations. These are preliminary steps in gaining the muscle control necessary to sit and stand where balance is critical. All of these abilities are continually developed and refined in movement and control over several years (infancy).

Children need to learn their bodies (control and location of parts) because they exist in space (spatial relationships are in the right brain). Have you ever seen a preschooler in an empty room? They run everywhere because it’s an opportunity to break free from the confines of used/furnished spaces. The body has 3 midlines (up/down at the waist, forward/back along the side, and left/right along the central axis of the torso). The child must learn to use these spaces; those who don’t have difficulties later with: letter/number/reversals in reading and writing, their bodies in relation to others, use of space (on paper, on desk, in their rooms, etc.), and later with language concepts (prepositions, subjects/objects in sentences, etc.)

At the same time that the child develops physical controls for gross motor skills, he develops fine muscle controls for language skills. The child has been language from conception (infants respond to parental voices and music familiar at birth, cry in intonation patterns of parental language). Their speech develops an initial vowel purity that becomes limited as they imitate familiar language sounds, then progresses to bilabial sounds (p, b, m, etc.), glottal stops (hard g, k, etc.), and lingual. -dental (d, t, n, etc.). I won’t bore you with the progression for the rest, but this stimulates the left brain.

As a child begins to speak, they practice those developed sounds and begin to imitate words in isolation and then in increasingly complex sentences (nouns, noun-verb, noun-verb-adjective, adjective-noun-verb-adjective-noun, and then adding adverbs and prepositional phrases to the same basic patterns before making the sentences complex with subordinate clauses). These skills, and the steps that follow, develop the association pathways of the corpus callosum that allow the two hemispheres to “cooperate.”

When children play, they use language by talking to themselves. They are practicing the language and are learning to internalize the language which will then control behavior, thoughts, conceptualization (think of how you don’t verbalize all your thoughts). They verbalize every knowledge they have to anyone in their proximity, but often another individual is irrelevant. Adults think of this as a game, and it can be, but it’s really working on skill development.

Young children do not know the difference between fantasy and what we call reality. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Mickey Mouse, etc., are all real to them (and terrifying when an adult is in costume). They are using their creativity and imagination because they are not tied to the logical reasoning that develops between the ages of 6 and 8 (when Santa no longer exists) due to language structures beginning to become internalized. Playing from this point forward gives them the ability to switch between the concrete, literal world (mainly left-brain domain) and the spatial, creative world (right-brain domain). This is when the knock-knock jokes emerge, because they suddenly understand multiple word meanings, abstractions (conceptual inversions), and are learning organizational skills. All the putting things “in order” develops the ability of the frontal lobe to use existing information from both hemispheres and make decisions, set priorities, and create hierarchical orders necessary for problem solving and abstract reasoning, all of which are normally done. evident between the age of 11. and 13 years.

When children play socially, they engage all of these skills at more abstract levels and do so with others. They are preparing to live in society, get along with others, and master content/processes that they will need as adults. Abstractions and abilities to process information or create using “whole brain” are used in adolescence when information is conceptualized in an abstract way (how to understand this information).

Why is it so important that they be allowed to explore?

Exploration is about pushing boundaries and boundaries. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not so good to do it. We all have limitations, and if we function only in our familiar, limited world, we cannot reach our potential. Children who are always shielded from exploration develop fears, and fear is disabling in life. Going beyond what is known and limiting allows the development of imagination and creativity.

One of the biggest limitations that parents can place on their children is the fear of the unknown. Being unable to explore the world around them prevents them from exploring the world within them. The child learns that the outside world is not safe, so she retreats to the inner world where everything is known, safe and secure. When a child does not push her boundaries, she will not achieve all that he is capable of being and doing.