What 1 Expert Says About Play Could Change Your Child's Future

One of Christakis's most stressed arguments is that play and learning should be looked at as things that go hand in hand — "playful learning," she calls it. Science tells us that experience-based, exploratory, creative, and imaginative kinds of play are directly linked to strong academic and cognitive outcomes. For example, building a ramp with blocks and sending cars down it supports mathmatical thinking, engineering, and measuring. Having a child sit to fill out an alphabet worksheet doesn't engage their mind or translate to learning in the same way as play does.

She says, "I think parents can really take some comfort — no matter what their child's early learning environment is like — in knowing that they really can create a play-based environment for their child that is not in opposition to learning goals, but is going to produce the outcomes that we want."

Many of the toys available for children now are what Christakis calls "gizmos," or, toys that really only do one thing — but if a child is handed something more open-ended, like blocks, they're forced to make cognitive leaps. For example, if a child has a toy cell phone, they know the toy's purpose is to be a phone. If a child is handed blocks, which can be used to build any number of things, and they put one to their ear as a phone, they're making a symbolic connection between a block and a real thing.

To restore this type of open-ended play, we can help our children to think outside the box when playing with simpler objects. Rather than play solely with "gizmos," we can ask kids, "Do you think we could make a car out of some of the things we find in the kitchen?"

If a child is drawing something that looks like a house, and an adult says, "Oh, what a nice house," that gives the child zero opportunity to share his creative train of thought, nor does it lead anywhere else. If you change the dialogue to "Tell me about your drawing," you've opened the floor for the child to discuss his process, and he might tell you that it's not a house at all, but something completely different.

We often — and usually unintentionally — steer our kids in a very specfic direction; for example, when we have them make Thanksgiving turkeys made out of a hand tracing (one of Christakis's least favorite projects). Those types of projects are cute and adults like them, but they don't allow our child to think creatively or originally.

Christakis states that, "learning and schooling are not the same thing," and that kids seem to be working more but learning less. There are parents and teachers that will agree that children are being pressured to learn too much and should just play — thus separating the two things — but Christakis disagrees.

We tend to assume that our children have short attention spans because they are bored of what they're playing with and need something new, but Christakis thinks children get bored so quickly because they haven't spent enough time on a meaningful activity. When we have enviornments full of "stuff," the temptation to "pull things out of your bag of tricks" at the first sign of boredom becomes overwhelming. Sometimes when there's less in a room, it's easier to keep the child engaged more deeply and for longer.

"It’s a habit of mind for all of us as adults to slow down and be more mindful of what we’re using, what we’re doing. And it’s the same kind of habit of mind for kids. But as parents we can really help them them along by not throwing constant solutions at them."

Bridging the gap between a child's home life and school life is vital to a child's success both in and out of the classroom. The more a teacher knows and understands about your child — his interests, strengths, the way he likes to do things — the better she can serve him in ways that both directly and indirectly affect learning.

From Christakis's perspective, two things teachers want children to be armed with when they start preschool are social and emotional skills, both of which are linked to academic success and can be achieved through play.

"I think if I were telling a parent what they can do that would really, really change everything. I would say to focus on conversation. Let your child talk, let your child listen, cultivate dialogue," Christakis says. She goes on to explain that there is a ton of supporting research that strong oral language and conversation skills are very beneficial for learning and building relationships (which also circles back to creating open-ended questions to encourage meaningful discussion).

Observing our children is one of the best ways we can aid learning and attempt to eliminate some of the failures and frustrations that may occur. Once you are really in tune with your child's interests, strengths, and things they're having trouble with, you can try to better accommodate learning without asking too much or too little of them.

Especially for children in the preschool years, breaking down tasks — for example, instead of "Clean your room," we can try, "Let's put away all of the blue things" — leads to meaningful activities that not only foster independence, but become a version of play that achieves a task. When we set our children up for success, we can watch them achieve more and learn more in a cognitively rich way.