Play Time

Except even the psychologists are saying play is a crucial part of development! They have been for decades!

My elementary school banned soccer and football, but both were on the grounds that people were body-checking each other over asphalt and gravel.

edited 6th Jan '11 3:30:28 PM by Pykrete

I think a child's purpose in life is to learn and play. They learn by playing, even.

I'm not going to wait till/if I have kids; i'm going to buy one of those multi-colored parachute things.

Outside play is the best. I had so much fun as a kid with the huge tangle of cottonwood trees in our yard... and puddles. Give a child a mudpuddle and some plastic soldiers, and preferably a sibling.

Also lego; I'm always surprised these days to see lego sets and pieces that seem to be designed to make one thing and only one thing. What's the point?

I was a bloodthirsty little tyke when I used to play with lego...

Also this stuff about parents being too afraid to let their kids play outside. In some neighborhoods, sure. But in upper middle-class white bread suburbs, one should not be afraid to let their kid play outside. What the hell.

It wasn't that long ago a friend and I were nine and traipsing around in the woods, wading into ponds, and delocating turtles. :<

I didn't like playing outside with everyone else, but exploring is fun, and so is lying on the grass eating your lunch.

The fact that I was never allowed to take out books to read on the lawn always irritated me.

This whole argument reminds me greatly of the discussion I had to have with my SO when we were dating explaining why I'm 25 and still play D&D.

Kids need to play. It engages their brain, they imagine, they learn, they grow through it. Their imaginations let them project themselves into a world where they set the rules, the conflicts, the resolutions, everything. It's in this way that children get to become who they are.

Adults, well, we stop that at some point during adolescence, mostly because someone told us that it was stupid to continue to do that and that we need to live "in the real world". At least my dad did a lot.

I think this is the reason so much of adult America is totally absent of creative thought. Unless we have a job that engages that for us, when else do we actually actively imagine something? Hardly never.

I had to defend my tabletop game playing by saying that this, outside of my writing, was an effort to keep that part of my imagining brain from atrophying like the rest of the adult world.

It's sad that we're so disappointed with our own colorless adult worlds that we have to impress the "work hard, don't play around" ethic on children in order to try to save them from all the "wasted time" that we've neglected.

I'm hoping to raise my daughter in a world where imagination and creative are still something valuable, instead of a dalliance for children. All these Goddamn parents out there pushing their children to be achievers so fucking early in life, it makes me sick. If a child doesn't want to plan for the future, it's because they're not supposed to — they're fucking kids. Let them remain so, until biology and psychology dictate otherwise. Stop fucking trying to steal wonder away from yet another generation!

I think Einstein said something once along the lines of "The creative mind is a gift, and the rational mind a faithful servant. We as a modern society have forgotten the gift and worship the servant."

How true.

Anyway, I've drank an entire bottle of cabernet, and I'm probably going to regret something I wrote on here tomorrow.

Sorry in advance.

@ OP: Your daughter sounds friggin' awesome! And just for that I approve of playtime!