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POWER OF PLAY
I’ve been reading a lot about play lately, from David Elkind, Ph.D.’s The Power of Play. Elkind, too, believes that the advent of so much technology has seen the loss of creative play time. And with it the loss of social interaction that helps us develop what he calls three interwoven skills for emotional and cognitive health: play, love and work.
Elkind splits childhood development into three stages: before the age of reason, the age of reason, and adolescence. These stages hit me like a writer’s map of children’s literature: picture book, middle grade and young adult. So I thought taking a look at his 2007 release might—even though Elkind is a child psychologist—be interesting from a writer’s standpoint.
Play, says Elkind, is a vital component to developing our most valuable skills as human beings. It’s not “a luxury but rather a crucial dynamic of healthy, physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all age levels.”
Without getting too technical, suffice to say that his book departs from the traditional stages of child development (physical, intellectual and emotional-social) and looks instead at how we learn to interweave that trio of love, work and play in the three stages mentioned above: infancy and early childhood, elementary school years (ages 6-12), and adolescence.
Throughout our lives we gain important skills in playing everything from peek-a-boo to playacting to putting play into creative endeavors such as writing and art, says Elkind. And without trying to be a doomsayer, he notes that opportunities for these activities are slipping away. As kids instead spend more and more time in front of TVs, computers, movies, BlackBerries, and cell phone screens it means “a lack of interaction with caregivers, other kids and time spent exploring the sensory world through active play.”
But don’t kids need all this technology to keep up with the times?
RUNNING HOT AND COOL
Elkind isn’t advocating going backwards in time, but rather seeking a balance. He notes that today we’ve created a false sophistication in children that makes them look more advanced than they really are. His simple analogy is of a young child who thinks he can tell time when he reads a digital clock. But that same child doesn’t yet have the skills to understand and read a face clock.
In addition, technology’s impact on children isn’t easily measurable because there’s no simple cause-and-effect to measure. In other words, who we are and how we react to screen media has many variables. For instance, Elkind divides media impact into “hot” and “cool” calling hot content more intense and cool less intense.
Hot content demands less viewer participation, JurassicPark is one example. While cool content allows for more participation and invites more learning (such as Sesame Street).
You can see this reaction in readers as well. Certain hot, action packed books appeal to some readers, while cooler, thoughtful reads appeal to others. Writers understand this, that’s why there are as many types of books as there are readers.
THE DELIMNA
Yesterday a reader sent me a story from the New York Times about the move for libraries to make video games and stations part of their programs and collections. Following other libraries from Ann Arbor, Mich. to Los Angeles and parts of New England, the New York Public Library has added 2,500 copies of 92 different games for circulation. It’s a way to be more relative to a younger audience.
And is it bringing kids in.
Jack Martin, the library’s assistant coordinator for young adult services says in the article that games have “the potential to be a great teaching tool” through learning the game rules, its world and its story.
“Pretty cool,” a ninth grader was quoted as saying about seeing more kids in the library. “Because you don’t see too many kids my age in a place like this to check out a book.”
BACK TO BOOKS
So how do we get back to books? How do we decide for ourselves what needs to change and what’s precious enough to fight for?
Tomorrow we’ll go a bit deeper into those stages of child development from a writer’s perspective, exploring play and its kinfolk—insight and imagination. You might even find how your own writing voice was born in play and realized in literature.
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Comments
This article/topic of play/imagination also came up as a recent CCBC-net list-serve topic.
I've been particularly interested in the way in which some of the more recent award-winning picture books reflect a retro theme (and/or a theme of imaginative play - books such as Not a Box, by Antoinette Portis,) but I'll be reading this week to see how you address this issue of imaginative play, etc. in other areas of writing, and writing in general.