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Kiara Turner
Dr. Cassel
English 1201
12 November 2015

The Power of Play

While I was outside on a walk in my neighborhood, I noticed a lot of adults walking their
dogs and doing yard work like raking leaves, and mowing their lawns. One thing I did not see a
lot of, which really surprised me, were kids playing outside. It brought back memories of when I
was younger and I was outside playing all the time. Sometimes I would get straight off the
school bus and drop my book bag in the grass and just play outside until it was time to come in
for dinner. My sister and I would always ride our bikes and see so many other kids outside too.
You could also just hear kids playing in their backyards. Now a days, I ride through my
neighborhood or different neighborhoods and there arent that many kids out playing. Teachers,
as well as parents, should be more concerned about how much children play outside because
playing outside not only helps with physical skills and development but social, emotional,
creative, and cognitive as well.
Getting children to play outside hasnt always been this big of an issue until more
technology was developed and children stopped playing outside as much because of it.
Throughout most of history, kids have spent hours playing with their parents, siblings,
babysitters, and friends. The amount of time that children spend playing each day has gone down
considerably over the last two decades and that obesity rates have gone up tremendously in
recent years which is also another reason getting children to play outside more has become more

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important (Gavin). Play is so important in child development that it has been recognized by the
United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child (Ginsburg).
Physical activity among children can help with obesity in children. Childhood
obesity has more than doubled in children in the past 30 years (Childhood Obesity Facts). Obese
youth are more likely to have risk factors for cardiovascular disease, such as high cholesterol or
high blood pressure. Children who are obese are also at greater risk for bone and joint problems,
sleep apnea, and social and psychological problems such as stigmatization and poor self-esteem
(Childhood Obesity Facts). Healthy lifestyle habits, including healthy eating and physical
activity, can lower the risk of becoming obese and developing related diseases. Home and
schools play a critical role by providing opportunities for students to learn about and practice
healthy physical activity behaviors. Play can also help with physical skills and development like
fine and gross motor skills. Gross motor skills are larger movements made with arms, legs, feet,
his entire body like crawling, running, and jumping. Fine motor skills are the coordination of
small muscle movements using hands and fingers like grasping, pinching, and pointing. Regular
gross motor activities should be an essential part of every childs life and it can be reached
through play. During play, children can learn and/or practice control and coordination of large
body movements, as well as small movements of hands and fingers (Holecko). In addition to
practicing gross motor skill, children receive major health benefits from play including aerobic
endurance, muscle growth, strength. coordination, and even growth stimulation of major organs
(White). All throughout child development, children have milestones which are a set of
functional skills or age-specific tasks that most children can do at a certain age range.
This figure shows the different milestones between birth and age 3 of a childs life. Milestone are
very important in child development and can be reached with the help of play. The zone of

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proximal development is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he
or she can do with help (Miller-Hargis). Play can help children reach their zone of proximal

development by allowing children to practice development on their own.

Children can develop and understanding of others using dramatic play. During dramatic
play, children pretend to be someone else whether it is an astronaut, fireman, doctor, or even a
baby. This helps them to understand others because stepping into the shoes of someone else
during play will let them imagine what they would feel, do, say, or even think. (White). In her
research summary, The Power of Play, White says, Through conflicts and negotiations with
other children or creation of characters, children become aware that other people have intentions
and desires that may not match their own. In realizing that other peoples desires and intentions
may not match their own, children learn to persuade one another and resolve disagreements. Play
is also the development of early friendships. There are several stages that young children go
through in social play; onlooker, solitary play, parallel play, and cooperative play. The stages

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start with the child in a group but not playing with the people in the group and just watching
other children play and ends with the child truly playing with other children, taking roles, giving
instructions, etc (Caldwell). The goal of parents and teachers is to get the children from the first
stage, the onlooker stage, through the other stages, to the last stage, cooperative play. But, in
general, they move toward true interaction with one another, recognizing the needs and interests
of all the children in the group.
Along with social benefits, there are emotional benefits to play as well. Long before
children can express their feelings in words, they express them through physical play,
storytelling, art, and other activities (Wallace). When children have experiences that are hurtful
or hard to understand, they review those experiences again and again through play (MillerHargis). Interactive play also builds childrens social and emotional skills as they learn to
cooperate with one another and manage their own behaviors in order to mutually plan play
activities (Miller-Hargis). Play also practices strategies to cope with fear, anger, and frustration.
Play offers children the opportunity to master negative feelings by exploring and modifying their
emotional experience (White). Pretend play allows children to think out loud about experiences
charged with both pleasant and unpleasant feelings. It supports emotional development by
providing a way to express and cope with feelings. In Ginsburgs article, The Importance of Play
in Promoting Healthy Child Development, he says These opportunities to monitor and
discriminate among feelings and emotions contribute to childrens beliefs about their own
capacity.
Creativity is defined as The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns,
relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations,

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etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination. Play has been described as practice in
divergent thinking, because in play, children are constantly coming up with new ideas and
recombining them to create novel scenarios. Children practice their creativity through play by
exploring and using their bodies and materials to make and do things and to share their feelings,
ideas and thoughts (Wallace). They enjoy being creative by working with open-ended materials
like blocks, play-dough, fabrics, re-cycled materials, paints, sand, water, clay, paper, and natural
items such as stones, twigs and leaves available to promote creativity, exploration and
imagination (Wallace). Creativity is a critical component in enabling children to cope, find
pleasure, and use their imaginative and innovative talents.
Children learn to solve problems through play. Psychologists distinguish two types of
problems, convergent and divergent. A convergent problem has a single correct solution or
answer. A divergent problem yields itself to multiple solutions (Dewar). Play develops childrens
language skills & promotes creative problem solving (Miller-Hargis). Children also learn things
like colors, numbers, size and shapes. Children have the ability to enhance their memory skills
and stimulate growth of the cerebral cortex as well as their attention span (Dewar). Children
move on to higher levels of thought as they play in a more stimulating environment. Kids pay
more attention to academic tasks when they are given frequent, brief opportunities for free play.
Young children learn not by being told but through actions (Miller-Hargis). Children want to
know things like what things do and how things work so through solitary object play and
exploratory play, children are introduced to the ways objects work and how they can apply
control over those objects.
Getting children to play outside hasnt always been this big of an issue until more
technology was developed and children stopped playing outside as much because of it. Parents

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need to realize the importance of play. Teachers, as well as parents, should be more concerned
about how much children play outside because playing outside not only helps with physical skills
and development but social, emotional, creative, and cognitive as well. Physical activity among
children can help with obesity in children, as well as, practice controlling and coordination of
large body movements, as well as small movements of hands and fingers. Play can also help
develop the understanding of others and their feelings through things like dramatic play. Play is
so important in child development that it has been recognized by the United Nations High
Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child. Some teachers and theorist believe that
the best way to learn is not through play, but through transmission which is when teachers
transmit information through direct and explicit instruction instead of when teachers transact
with students in dialogue and conversation, modeling, mentoring (Miller-Hargis). Behaviorist
like Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndike, and BF Skinner support transmission because they believe
that knowledge is stable and predetermined; an objective entity for which people compete, while
people who support learning in play based contexts believe that knowledge is generated in
relationships between people; not fixed but is constructed (Miller-Hargis). Learning through play
is used to describe how a child can learn to make sense of the world around them so it is
important that parents and teachers let children play and use social context to gather information
and make personal applications.

Work Cited
Caldwell. Bettye. Play and Social Development. Fisher-Price. 2015. Web. 14 November 2015
Childhood Obesity Facts. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 27 August 2015. Web.
21 November 2015.
Creativity. Dictionary.com. 2015. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/creativity?s=t. 16
November 2015.
Dewar, Gwen. The cognitive benefits of play: Effects on the learning brain Parenting Science.
2015. Web. 16 November 2015
Gavin, Mary. Kids and Exercise. Kids Health. 8 August 2015. Web. 12 November 2015
Ginsburg, Kenneth. The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development.
American Academy of Pediatrics. 20 August 2015. Print.
Holecko, Catherine. Gross Motor Skills for Preschoolers. About Health. 24 July 2015. Web. 13
November 2015.
Miller-Hargis, Angela. Why Play? Theoretical Underpinnings. Class Notes. March 2015.
Miller-Hargis, Angela. Why Play? Understanding and Supporting Play. Class Notes. March
2015.
Wallace, Kim. How your child benefits from play. BabyCenter. October 2015. Web. 16
November 2105
White, Rachel. Learning During Play. Smart Play. 17 October 2012. Print.