Article: Let them Play by Elkind, David --Scholastic Parent & Child (Feb/Mar 2007)

BY ENCOURAGING FREE, UNSTRUCTURED PLAY, YOU CREATE THE BEDROCK FOR YOUR CHILD'S FUTURE LEARNING

Without realizing it, parents can get caught up in a competition with other parents when it comes to their children's academic and social success. This "parent peer pressure" can lead to overmanaging a child's life, right down to his playtime, says Dr. David Elkind, Ph.D. In this reassuring excerpt from his new book, The Power of Play, Dr. Elkind talks about how to reintroduce creative, imaginative play into your child's life.

Peer pressure usually refers to the influence of children's peer group on them. Yet parents also experience powerful peer pressure. My sense is that parents often engage in hyperparenting, overprotection, and overprogramining, in part at least, because they are concerned about how their parenting looks to others. They may even do something they don't believe in because society prescribes it as the right thing to do. This kind of pressure is particularly strong when children are young. Parents are much more involved with the schooling of preschool and elementary school children than with middle schoolers. And parent peer pressure is the most powerful during these formative years.

Following my talks on the importance of play, many parents often recall their own childhoods and the happy hours they spent outside with their friends, without adult involvement or supervision. "But," they say, "things are different now. I can't really tell my son or daughter to go out and play; it really isn't safe out there." Another parent says, "I really didn't want to put my son in soccer, hut all the other boys in the neighborhood are on the team and he wouldn't have anyone to play with." Other parents tout the value of the many organized activities in which they enroll their children. "In playing sports," I am told, "children learn cooperation, competition, and good sportsmanship."

There is merit in these comments. In addition, for nvo-parenr and single-parent working families, organized after-school activities provide adult supervision when parents aren't there. Yet parent peer pressure is at work here as well. To understand how peer pressure works, it is helpful to recall our early adolescence.
Young teens are preoccupied with the physical, emotional, and intellectual transformations they are undergoing. They thus create an imaginary audience that is every bit as evaluative of their behavior and appearance as they arc themselves. This helps explain why young teens are so self-conscious and so susceptible to peer group pressure.

Being a new parent is a bit like being a young adolescent. Parents are in a new social and emotional situation. Many mothers tell me that they develop a crush on their infant. Fathers experience feelings of nurturance and protectiveness they never realized they possessed. Parents' social lives change, as well. They become friends with a whole new group of people, usually couples who have children of the same age. Because of their understandable preoccupation with their new feelings and emotions and new involvement witb their child, parents again fail to distinguish between what they are thinking about and what others are thinking about. They assume that other parents are observing and evaluating their child and their parenting. Consequently one of the reasons that parents of young and school-age children are so susceptible to parent peer group pressure is that they are responding, in part at least, to an evaluative imaginary audience of peers.
There is a paradox here. While young parents are concerned with what other parents think of them, they are just as concerned with what they think of other parents. Anxious concern about how others are evaluating their parenting, therefore, comes from within much more than it does from without.

GO WITH YOUR GUT

How do you develop a strong sense of your authority as a parent? I learned about one way from a woman who was amused when I talked about parent peer pressure. She was the mother of four children aged 4 to 16. Her husband was a missionary, and the family had just returned to the States from many years of traveling overseas. She said that she was amazed at how influenced parents were by the media and their peers. Moving around the world, her family had become very close and secure in their values and beliefs. As a result, she felt no need to put her 4-year-old in an academic preschool or her 8-year-old in soccer, as other parents in her neighborhood were doing. Living in strange countries without peer group support, she and her husband had learned to look to themselves in deciding what was best for their children.
I heard similar stories when I worked with American teachers and their families who were living overseas. These families moved often and were always outsiders. As a result, they had to rely on themselves for support, intellectual stimulation, and entertainment. These parents could be authentic because they did not have to worry about what other parents thought.

The point is that our concern with what other parents think about our parenting is misguided. Most people do not spend their waking lives thinking about other people; they are too busy dealing with their own issues and lives. If we appreciate that the audience we are concerned about is largely imaginary, this can free us to use our own common sense and values in making decisions about what is best for our children. If you really believe putting your 4-year-old on a soccer team is a bad idea, don't do it. Perhaps if you explain your decision to other parents, they will have the strength to act on their better judgment as well.

LEARNING FROM PLAY

It is vitally important to support and encourage self-directed activities by your young child. Even if those activities appear meaningless to us, they can have great purpose and significance for the child. These activities are not random and have a pattern and organization in keeping with your child's level of mental ability. Allowing your child time and freedom to complete these activities to her personal satisfaction nourishes her powers of concentration and attention. Left to her own devices, an infant or young child can spend a long time on an activity in which she is deeply immersed.

Young children create learning experiences through four major types of play. Here's a look at each and why it's important to value your child's self-initiated activities.

Mastery Play Playful experimentation with hands, feet, and senses is the dominant mode of mastery for the infant. It is time consuming and requires effort and cannot be hurried. As we watch the infant learner, the inappropriateness of confronting him with computers, flash cards, and educational videos becomes more than obvious. Infants and young children exemplify the adage "practice makes perfect." Repetitive play is one of the ways in which children master major motor skills.

Innovative Play Once children have mastered a skill by repetitive play, they want to innovate and push the limits of their new found skill. It is not only the mastery of motor skills that gives rise to innovative play. We can observe it with language skills as well. Once children become more advanced verbally, we see many different forms of word play, of going beyond the usual word meanings.

Kinship Play Children of about the same age and size are naturally drawn to one another. They share a common pint-size view of the world, a common subordination to adult authority, and a common wish to relate to someone like themselves. Children who don't know one another communicate through self-initiated games. These games are fun because the children are at the same skill level and because it is a relationship of mutual rather than unilateral authority (as with adults). Kinship play is an initiation into social learning and cooperative activities.

Therapeutic Play All children use play therapeutically as a way of dealing with stress. Sometimes a child's play can help the child deal with impulses that are socially unacceptable. Imaginary companions may serve as fantasy surrogates of the child's wild side.

During the first years of their lives, young children are quite literally visiting a foreign land. And, because young children do not think in adult concepts and categories, they approach this new land from many different perspectives at the same time. As children transition from early childhood into the elementary school years, their play takes on new functions as it becomes subordinate to the dominant disposition of this age period-work. In this context, work is acquiring the basics of literacy, math, and science.

 

 ALLOWING CHILDREN TIME AND freedom NOURISHES THEIR POWERS OF CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION.

 

Author

David Elklnd, Ph.D., is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Hurried Child and All Grown Up and No Place Jo Go.