Of all the quotes that were inspiring of play, I found these two to be the most inspirational to me of how I viewed play growing up and now as an adult.
Essential play items for me growing up involved Dolls, Dolls, and more Dolls. I can remember cutting up old socks to create clothes for them. We also played school together, and I treated them as if they were my own real life children. As I watch my daughter play with her dolls, I see the cycle continuing, all the things I did she is doing them now. Here are a few items that I played with in my childhood:
As any other child, play helped me to re-enact things that I experienced in childhood or either witnessed in childhood. Growing up, my mom had no problems watching me play, in fact she encouraged it. She would buy the dolls for me to play with, and any old socks that she did not use,she would offer them to me for the clothes. As I watch my daughter and son pretend play, I noticed that it has evolved a lot. Children now-a-days watch other children on youtube play, and they then re-enact what they see. This is how most of my kids play and other times they initiate play amongst themselves. I was the only child and occasionally had others to play with so seeing them play together is a step up from me.
Play is still just as important in adulthood as it was in childhood. Once you lose the notion to play with your children, it opens up doors for them to find other avenues such as playing outdoors alone, online chatrooms, and other things that are dangerous. It is important to always play with your children and stay woke to what they are doing. There are to many children going missing, and no one knows where they are.
I love your first quote! To me it's saying don't take things too serious all of the time. It's ok to be a little childish like running through the sprinklers, skipping rocks or jumping on the trampoline. The more we play with our children or grandchildren, it keeps us feeling young and wanting to do more things with them. The internet has its ups and downs but if you don't monitor your child's cell phone usage too, things could turn out wrong. So many children/teens are "friending" people they don't know and giving out too much information. We have to keep praying for our children and our society.
ReplyDeleteK.Hewitt
Hi Chanelle, I found your post very enlightening. It is really refreshing to hear that your daughter is experiencing play similar to your own. I agree with your last comment about play being just as important in adulthood. As a preschool teacher, we have to let our hair down so to speak, and not be afraid to be silly, to let the children know that it's okay to make mistakes,
Deleteit's okay to be a kid. It saddens me when I see some of my colleagues so rigid, not even taking time to see things from the child's perspective. Children really do learn more when they are enjoying what they are doing. During morning meeting, we had several students arrive late one after the other. We talked about how many were present, and kept adding one more, as each student arrived until we got to twenty. One little boy, replied "hey, I didn't know that we were learning math, I just thought we were playing and having fun.