Understanding Children's Play

Ruth E. Hartley, Lawrence K. Frank, Robert M. Goldenson, Lawrence Frank, Robert Goldenson, Richard M. Goldenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415209908
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136314193
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume X in a series of thirty-two on Developmental Psychology. Originally published in 1952. By presenting the play experiences of children within the framework of their living problems, this volume and its companion booklets will give to these adults who help shape their lives a fuller understanding of the significance of children's play, and offer them valuable aids in fostering the development of productive, well-integrated human beings.

CHAPTER I

The Function of Play in the Child’s Development

THE PROJECT on which this book is based was undertaken in order to explore the potentialities of play materials and expressive activities both for understanding young children in nursery and kindergarten groups and for providing them with opportunities for discovering and expressing themselves. The method of exploration was through intensive diary recordings (see Appendix) of children at play who were generally engaged with the more usual materials but at times were participating in experimental procedures. Since the purpose of the project was to foster healthy personalities through educational practices, all techniques and methods of study were adapted to the currently operating program in the schools. Except where specifically stated, no attempt was made to control the conditions under which the child played or participated in creative activities. Obviously such procedure would be very disadvantageous for a research project, but for such a demonstration program as ours it was not only a necessary but also a useful limitation.

Major emphasis in mental hygiene has been placed upon the interpersonal relations between the very young and adults, particularly parents and teachers. Without questioning the crucial importance of such relations, this study focused on how play as well as creative and expressive activities enable the child to translate impulses, feelings, and fantasies into action—to “play out” some of his problems; and on how such activities serve as sensitive indicators of the development of of the child’s personality.

Play activities are equally significant for the relatively untroubled youngsters and for the many children who have suffered deprivations, frustrations, neglect, bad treatment, or exposure to crisis and disturbance in the family—for example, desertion, divorce, alcoholism, prolonged absence of the father in military service, or enforced absence of the mother for gainful employment. Children from disturbed homes may find in play and expressive activities the help they need in meeting their problems and releasing their feelings, especially if their teachers are aware of these possibilities and provide the materials and the encouragement.

The importance of creative activities and play opportunities within preschool and early school settings is recognized more and more by workers in many areas of human development. There is now a wider acceptance of the special function of the early years in the development of the individual’s character structure, in the formulation of his expectations of the world, and in the molding of his approaches to other people. What is perhaps not so frequently emphasized is the great plasticity of the young during these years, their instant response to environmental impacts, their relative freedom from compartmentalization, and their consequent readiness to benefit from favorable experiences and to assimilate these into their growing concept of self. Likewise it has not been fully recognized that while the young child is undergoing many of the trial-and-error experiences that are crucial for his mental health, he needs an “educational therapy” designed to help him deal with his difficulties and conflicts while they are still in process. This, like treatment for mental and emotional battle casualties just behind the front lines, may prevent their fixation and permanent damage.

The desirability of providing channels of communication and means of expressing emotional difficulties for all children in the groups is supported by the findings of Jean Macfar-lane,¹ who directed a study of the development of approximately 250 children and their families from birth through adolescence. Concerning the frequency of problem behavior during the preschool years, she reported, “We have found that no normal child is completely free of adjustive devices that are labeled as ‘problem behavior’—the average number varying during the preschool years at any one age level from four to six per child,” out of 63 descriptive and interpretive labels systematically covered at each age level. (Italics are ours.)

Lawrence Kubie² has stressed the necessity for introducing means of expression not usually available to most children, and for helping their teachers make the most of them. He says, “… we must learn how to free the child, while he is still a child, from his conflicts, his terrors and his rages. It is not enough merely to overpower him and to force his rebellious conflicts underground as we do today.” He goes on to suggest that preventive treatment in mental health consists of handling every acute episode or disturbance in the child as an emergency, dealing with it as early and as intensively as possible. He implies that these difficulties are part and parcel of the growth process of every individual, and he insists that the child can pass through each successive phase of his development optimally only if the difficulties are handled in such a way that their roots are removed. The way to do this is to use “each episode as an opportunity for the child to express all of his confused fantasies, fears, misinterpretations and misconceptions, all of his painful, angry yearnings and conflicts, and all of his exaggerated fears and guilts.” (Italics are ours.) He goes on to say that this process is one in which parents and teachers can, with appropriate guidance, assist in varying degrees.

Repeatedly Kubie³ emphasizes the importance of exploring fantasy and giving the child the right to express his feelings without any sense of sin or danger. He says, “For instance, I can imagine honest discussion groups in the kindergarten and the primary grades in which children will be helped to think about and to discuss openly their real feelings toward adults and toward other children, both the adults and children of their homes and of the school. Group therapy we call it for adults: group preventive education it might well be called for toddlers. And the value of conducting such talks in groups is obviously that it would help to lift the taboos on secret feelings which isolation always imposes. It would help each child to feel his share in the common human heritage.” (Italics are ours.)

While discussion groups such as Kubie suggests could be extremely helpful as soon as the children have acquired sufficient command of verbal symbols to project through them their emotional experience, for the younger children modes of expression must be offered which will be consonant with their experience and capacities. And if we are to be able to receive their communications, we must realize, as Margaret Lowenfeld has emphasized, that their experiences are inarticulate and complex and cannot be fitted into a scheme of communication based on adult concepts, biases, emphases, and taboos. (This may explain why, as Schachtel has said, amnesia for early childhood experiences is almost universal.) The very ways in which a child uses his senses, for example, differ from those customary to an adult. For the very young the proximity senses of smell, taste, and touch tend to be more important than the distance senses of sight and hearing, and it is therefore impossible for the adult to imagine concretely what the child is experiencing. If he is to understand the child and establish sympathetic contact with him he must put aside adult biases and concepts as far as possible, and observe him closely in activities that permit him the full use of the proximity senses as well as of the distance senses. But he must also remember that for the child, his body is an organ of expression as well as of perception, and that his attitudes toward himself and the world about him are expressed in the way he uses his body more fully than in his verbalizations. This point will be amply documented not only in the chapter on music and movement, in which the body is most obviously involved, but in regard to practically every play activity we shall consider.

Even when a child does resort to speech, the adult can understand him fully only if he understands also the desires and needs from which the thought springs. Vigotsky has demonstrated that the speech of early childhood, which is egocentric speech, depends on a grammar of thought and a syntax of word meaning that are not identical with the conventional socialized speech of adults. The meaning of the child’s words is derived from the whole complex of subjective experience which it arouses in him, and one word in his egocentric speech may be saturated with sense to such an extent that it would require many words in socialized speech to explain it. It follows inescapably that any teacher who would comprehend his speech and foster his growth in the social world must be continually aware of his basic affective and sensory experiences as well as his attempts at nonverbal communication.

It may very well be that play experiences are so valuable to the child because they take an intermediate place between these inarticulate, subjective impressions and the structured language and prescribed conduct of adult social communication. Erikson⁴ says the child uses play “to make up for defeats, sufferings and frustrations, especially those resulting from a technically and culturally limited use of language.” He suggests that play offers the child direct, nonverbal modes of communication, as we have argued above, and he points out that “If we can establish the language of play with its various cultural and age dialects we may be able to approach the problem why it is that certain children live undamaged through what seem to be neurotic episodes and how early neurotic children have indicated that they have reached a deadlock.” Although it is not the province of this book to offer extended case studies that might throw light on the problem of child neurosis, we shall cite many records of play sessions to show clearly how a child reveals his emotional reactions and handles his difficulties.

Slavson,⁵ in discussing therapeutic play groups, emphasizes the role of the group in enhancing the value of the play process itself. Among other things he says, “… through play the child expresses traumatic fixations, conflicts and hostilities. … The child also uses play to disguise genuine conflicts and difficulties, or he may use play to relax tension and anxiety. Of greatest importance … is the fact that as the young patient discharges aggression and seeks to overcome traumatic anxieties through play, it acts as a regulative mechanism. … The service of play in finding permissible and acceptable outlets for primary impulses is of considerable value with which one must reckon.” These functions of play will all be illustrated in the chapters that follow. In the centers investigated in this project, we also found ample evidence for the following statements of Slavson: “When several children play together, their interaction and mutual support help to employ the materials progressively, rather than to become fixed at one level of self-expression”; and, “In play groups, and this is to a great extent also true of other groups, children assign to themselves roles which are an expression or an extension of their basic problems. In such roles one either plays out the awareness of what he is or a hopeful phantasy of what he would like to be. … In a group such phantasies are reinforced and find easy and natural means of coming through in a variety of play forms and activity channels.”

The value of multidimensional expression for young children is generally accepted by trained workers in related fields such as child psychology and psychiatry, psychiatric social work, and early childhood education. The importance of the teacher’s acceptance and understanding, however, is frequently underemphasized. Some workers, indeed, question the appropriateness of attempting to induct teachers into the mysteries of children’s nonverbal modes of expression. Some representatives of professional specialties feel that some teachers might misuse such information or that they do not have the background to assimilate it. We fully recognize that it is not desirable for teachers to try to be “amateur psychiatrists” and attempt to diagnose and treat individual children, since they lack adequate training for these functions. On the other hand, it is not necessary to acquire a professional vocabulary of psychiatric terms and categories or a set of therapeutic skills, to begin to understand what children are doing and what they are communicating in their various activities and forms of expression. This understanding is essential if teachers are to have insight and be helpful in what they do—and proof that it can be acquired is shown by the increasing numbers of teachers who have learned to think and function in more understanding ways.

Already a start has been made in the use of so-called “therapeutic” techniques in the classroom. In an article in The Nervous Child, Emily Gillies⁶ describes a use of dramatics in a first-grade classroom which proved to be effective in the emotional re-education of some children. She reports multiple values for this technique: “Both the classroom teacher and I checked and found that these dramatizations tended to be a good leveler, a good reducer of tensions in the group. The too-aggressive child seemed to become more capable of accepting others’ ideas, and of working more pliably with the group; the inhibited and withdrawn children began gradually to volunteer and to voice their long suppressed ideas. In addition we felt that this honest talking over of upsetting feelings and ideas brought about a more honest give-and-take between the children, helped create a natural channel for bringing into the open a variety of subjects made taboo in their homes. Before the year was over we had met problems of sibling rivalry, of parents who are too domineering, of why some children grow into bullies, and of sex fantasies held by many in that group.” Significantly, we found that a start could be made in many of these directions on the less articulate level of the nursery school child. The use of puppets and dramatic play would probably lead most directly to the techniques Miss Gillies describes, but other activities such as music and movement provided release of tension and encouraged elementary give-and-take.

This type of approach to the child’s emotional life means a new departure for many teachers, and, as in all new departures, requires a period of orientation. In general, teachers who are attempting to understand their young pupils’ play and use this understanding to aid them towards emotional re-education must (1) learn about the dynamics of behavior and the affective and emotional aspects of development, and (2) come to know each child in the group setting individually and thoroughly.

It is encouraging to note that a start toward this approach to play has been made in several places. At one public school (P. S. 33) in New York city, a project for kindergarten children has been in operation for several years under the direction of Eleanor Adlerblum. As part of the project five children are taken from their regular classroom three times a week for one-hour sessions in a special playroom equipped with toys, books, blocks, and plastic materials for free play in the presence of a psychological counselor. These children are selected from among those who seem to need the warmth and relaxed pace of a smaller group: children from broken homes, from non-English-speaking homes, withdrawn children, etc. In another school a special group was formed for children ranging from the third to the sixth grade, who were delinquent, aggressive, or withdrawn. The group was limited to ten members, and art, handwork, music, and puppetry were used as the therapy media. Play sessions were held in a special playroom once a week for six months, with improvement reported for nine out of the ten. Both of these experiments point the way to the provision of play groups for children with special needs within the regular school program. At present, however, these stand as isolated and limited examples of what might be done. Means of including their benefits regularly in the on-going school program are yet to be devised.

From one “War Nursery” comes a report of procedures and techniques regularly employed which indicates what can be done in the daily program to meet the affective needs of children again made acute by the current defense program. Speaking of impromptu stories told to engage the interest of the children and to open the way to the free expression of their own feelings, the teacher, Gertrude Tipton⁷ writes: “Children like best the stories and songs about the day-to-day things they do. Like adults, they like especially well the stories that capture their feelings. These give them the reassurance that their feelings are legitimate and understood by the adult. Even though they can’t throw baby sisters ‘in the ditch’ they no longer have to be dishonest but can bring their feelings out into the open. These ‘undesirable’ feelings cannot be stopped by adult denials of their existence.”

She offers an African folk chant as an example of the kind of “nursery rhyme” that really touches the children on a feeling level and releases both their unholy desires and their guilt about them:

Siembamba, mommy’s baby,

Siembamba, mommy’s baby,

Twist his neck, hit him on the head,

Throw him in the ditch And he’ll be dead.

Miss Tipton’s discussion shows that some teachers already are aware of the mental health implications of these procedures and of their own role in them. As a message from one teacher to her colleagues in the field, it is encouraging and instructive. Among other things, she says:

Teachers have usually accepted expression of pleasant and happy emotions, but there are other emotions that are equally strong and real. These other emotions have been almost universally barred from the classroom. Children should be allowed to express resentment, aggressiveness, and negativism. If the teacher cannot accept these feelings and provide suitable outlets for them, she forces the child to seek indirect and evasive ways of showing his hurt, or she drives his feelings underground to such a point that he cannot share his feelings with anyone.

The nursery school provides a natural setting in which to help the child to face his fears realistically. Through his play activities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Prefatory note
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Table of contents
• Chapter I. The Function of Play in the Child’s Development
• Chapter II. Dramatic Play: Mirror of the Child
• Chapter III. Dramatic Play: Instrument for Growth
• Chapter IV. In the Block Corner
• Chapter V. The Benefits of Water-Play
• Chapter VI. What Clay Can Do for the Child
• Chapter VII. The Use of Graphic Materials
• Chapter VIII. The Finger-Paint Experience
• Chapter IX. Music and Movement: Fruitful Combination
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index