CreativePlay Plus: Ideas in Play and Child Development

The social and cognitive benefits of recess and free play are too important to be ignored. During recess children learn valuable social skills like learning to negotiate with peers in order to keep playing with them.

“I want to play on the monkey bars too.  How about we take turns?”

“You got to choose 4-square yesterday, today let’s play tag, okay?”

“Come play with us! We need more people to play kickball! It will be fun!”

Recess also gives children opportunities to become comfortable with deciding how they want to spend their free time and who they want to spend their time with.

The argument that physical education is a good substitute for recess is not adequately supported. The instructional nature and highly structured time found in physical education classes does not allow children the same sort of free time to explore, be creative, or control how they spend their time with peers, on their terms. Physical education also does not give them the time to practice sophisticated ways to compromise and resolve conflicts.

Dr. Anthony Pelligrini has studied important questions like, does what children do on the playground predict school achievement? In fact, Dr. Pelligrini found that the behavioral measures he developed to observe children at recess actually predicted first grade achievement better than kindergarten test scores.  Meaning, playground behaviors should be considered an important part of child development that could determine academic success of children early on in child education.

How do you feel about the amount of free-play time your children gets at school? Do you agree that play could potentially promote academic success?

Dr. Anthony Pelligrini is a notable scholar of recess and the education system. According to him, recess is disappearing because school administrators are more concerned with increasing instructional time and claim that recess promotes bullying and aggressive behaviors.

The argument that recess is not as developmentally important as instructional time is not well founded. We know from extensive research, that children who are asked to perform a school task are significantly more attentive after recess than when they are deprived of a break. (See our previous posts, A breath of fresh air and More than just a walk in the park)

Moreover, the argument that recess promotes negative interactions between children is also not supported. In a cross-cultural study, conducted by Pelligrini, they found that less than 2% of behaviors observed on playgrounds are physically or verbally aggressive. Additionally, with adequate adult supervision, this rate becomes even lower. We also know that children who are bullied are also bullied at lunch, on buses, in bathrooms, just about anywhere where children are not well monitored by adults. In actuality, lack of adult supervision may more likely be the culprit in creating opportunities for children to be aggressive.

How much time does your school district allot for recess or free play periods? Are your children monitored well during recess? What do you think of this argument? Do you think children are bullied more on the playground than any other setting at school?