IPA USA White Paper: The Child's Right to Play

Photo by Fabian Centeno on Unsplash

The International Play Association (IPA) USA has published a 50th Anniversary White Paper (links to pdf download) on The Child’s Right to Play.

The white paper’s topic was chosen specifically to address the erosion of opportunities for play in the increasing externally-structured lives of children. The authors address the question, “Why now?”:

The child’s right to play has reached a tipping point. Protecting childhood has been replaced with catching children up or getting them ready for a future grade level. The current focus on readiness ignores the extensive research and theories that have supported play for centuries. Instead, in an effort to accelerate development, current trends ignore 100 years of seminal research on developmental milestones and the dispositions learned through play that build the prerequisites for all future learning.

Over the last 40 years, children’s play in neighborhoods and preschool, public, or private school settings has become increasingly limited and replaced with ancillary sports, dance, gymnastics, after school tutoring, and many other adult-led activities. The importance of play has moved from being a biological necessity for healthy development to being seen as a break from learning.

Childhood is no longer the sanctuary it once was, and child-led play is no longer recognized as the cornerstone of healthy growth. Instead, play is often viewed as a mere respite from learning rather than the biological necessity it truly is, on par with food, shelter, and safety.

Heather Bernt-Sandy, M.Ed., in her article, “Academic Pushdown” for the white paper, addresses the issue of increasing pressure to demonstrate academic achievement being imposed on children, “where children under the age of five are subjected to academic expectations that would be more appropriate for older children”.

In the discussion paper, the author raises three issues:

            1.         The loss of free play opportunities for young children. “The mythology of teaching academic concepts earlier and earlier to solve workforce issues, societal inequities, and international competitions shortfalls has led to changes in how our early childhood programs are equipped and arranged, as well as in teaching methods and curriculum goals… Play is less recognizable to lay stakeholders and teachers of older children as a valuable use of childhood time or as an avenue for learning, and so it is not prioritized.”

            2.         When independent choice and free play are removed from children’s lives, their mental health is at risk. “In academic-focused early childhood settings, effective teaching is measured by whether all children reach the same standards in the same time frame. The individual child disappears or is only seen as a measurement of success or failure.” The author notes several studies to support her argument, including a Harvard study cited by Kerry McDonald (2018) that connects “too-early schooling, with its unrealistic academic and behavioral expectations, to an increase in preschool-aged children being ‘labeled with or medicated for delays and disorders that often only exist within a schooled context’ (p. 4)”.

            3.         The academic pushdown has a negative impact on adults working with young children in early childhood settings. “Adults working with young children experience high levels of stress as mandates prevent teachers from ‘using much of the most important basic information they know about how best to meet the diverse developmental needs of young children in individualized ways, through active engagement with hands-on materials’ (Levin & Van Hoorn, 2018, p. 35)”

The author cites the 2018 publication for the American Academy of Pediatrics by Yogman et al,, which offers guidance for preschool education on the benefits of play for young children, suggesting that kindergarten should provide children with opportunities for “playful collaboration and tinkering”. She lists five defining characteristics of play that support brain development and learning from a white paper published by the Lego Foundation in 2017.

            •           Joyful: “Increased dopamine levels positively impact memory, attention to goals, motivation, curiosity, and creativity.”

            •           Meaningful: “Engaging in exploration that is meaningful to them…their skill in analogically reasoning, knowledge transfer, and metacognition is strengthened.”

            •           Actively engaging: “When the child is actively engaged in an experience it demands both attention and response … associated with neural networks involved with attention control, goal-directed behavior, long-term memory retrieval, and stress regulation.”

            •           Iterative: When children are allowed, or expected, to repeat thoughts or actions during their experiences, there is potential for new discovery with each repetition. They develop skills in perseverance, perspective-taking, and cognitive flexibility.

            •           Socially interactive: “As the authors of the white paper contend, the same serve and return functions that impact our visual and auditory abilities also impact our cognitive, social, and emotional regulation later in life.”

The paper’s recommendations include;

            •           IPA-USA and other organized play advocates should develop agreed-upon definitions of “play” and “learning” that are developmentally informed for children birth to 8 years old.

            •           Alternatives to state early childhood standards should be developed for developmentally informed support of math, literacy, science, movement, social and emotional development.

            •           Kindergarten Readiness should be formally defined, focusing on developing executive function skills and developmentally responsive kindergartens.

            •           Claims of “evidence base” should be questioned whenever they are raised. Does the study from which the evidence is drawn focus on adult goals and priorities or on the healthy development of children?

            •           Higher education early childhood education programs should include comprehensive content related to play.

In episode 349 of her podcast, That Early Childhood Nerd, Heather Bernt-Santy requested Carol Garboden Murray, author of Illuminating Care, to interview Bernt-Santy about the discussion paper. The result is a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation on early childhood education issues which can be found here.