Play: Processing Reality, Rehearsing Reality

On the original thread, a valuable A2K member suggested that asking--or allowing--a child to play plane crash was like giving permission for a morbid game of Make Believe Cancer.

If I had a child facing cancer, whether that cancer was personal or in a member of the family, I would make every effort to "play" cancer as much as that child wanted. I'd dress up in p.j.'s--or hospital whites/greens/purples. I'd open up the subject of feeling yukky. I'd encourage the child to explore how to be loving to people who feel yukky--or how to feel yukky without being a brat. I'd help explore the idea of hairlessness. I'd do everything playful in my power to subtract fear from the unasked-for experience of cancer.

Cancer would become a fact-of-life to be coped with, not the unmentionable "Big C". I wouldn't dwell on unpleasant possibilities, but I wouldn't enter fantasy land and guarantee happy endings, either.

"I feel as if we are creating a culture where we are giving children all the content that we think they need for their imagination, without realizing that in the process we are stifling their imagination," said Joan Almon, an educator who heads the U.S. Alliance for Childhood.

With such a lack of child-initiated play, "we are short-circuiting a lot of their development," Healy adds. "That's because play is the way that children work out their emotional issues, their fears, their anxieties. It's the way they develop a self, a way they develop a sense that they are important people who have ideas to share and who can get along with other people."

Children, of course, have been playing for centuries. It was the 20th-century work of Jean Piaget that underlined the importance of play in children's development. Seymour Papert, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who created the LOGO computer language, writes that Piaget showed us "children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge but active builders of knowledge -- little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world."

"While it is unfortunate that in today's world of increased time constraints, parents and teachers need to take a more active and deliberate role in ensuring that children's play meets their needs, in the long run their efforts will pay off," Levin says.

"Children will demonstrate increased levels of independence, resourcefulness and competence as a result of creative play."

Rhonda Clements, a Hofstra University professor and head of the American Association for the Child's Right to Play, adds that no one knows exactly what academic or life skills are going to be necessary 20 years down the road.

"But one thing we can bet on is that we will still need people who can solve problems, which is one benefit of play. The people who brought us the technology of today were obviously wonderful players," Clements says.