Play

Definition

Children do most of their learning while playing. It's the same thing astronouts do during spacewalk. They use their minds first to imagine the spacewalk, and then they train on the ground in a safe environment before doing it in real life.

Children pretending to answer the telephone are actually wiring their brains to do it better in the future. That way they have a chucnk of neurons dedicated to that system just from playing. It's easier to drive on a road when there's been someone there before, as it is in doing something real after doing it in play, where there's already a road for you to go down on.

"The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the plying child advances forward to new stages of mastery. I propose the theory that the child's play is the infantile form of the hum ability to deal with experience by creating mode situations and to make reality by experiment and planning. It is in certain phases of his work that the adult projects past experiences into dimensions which seem manageable. In the laboratory, on the stage, and on the drawing board, he relives the past and thus relieves leftover affects; in reconstruction the model situation, he redeems his failures and strengthens his hopes. He anticipates the future from the point of view of corrected and shared past. No thinker can do more and no playing child less. As William Blake puts it; "he child's toys and the old man's reasons are the fruits of the two seasons" (Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 222. in Turkle, 12).

Also See: Playground as Factory