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2012-01-25
2012-01-23
Toddlers to tweens: relearning how to play
We found this interesting article on the website of Christian Science Monitor. Read the original HERE.
Havely Taylor knows that her two children do not play the way she did when she was growing up. When Ms. Taylor was a girl, in a leafy suburb of Birmingham, Ala., she climbed trees, played imaginary games with her friends, and transformed a hammock into a storm-tossed sea vessel. She even whittled bows and arrows from downed branches around the yard and had "wars" with friends – something she admits she'd probably freak out about if her children did it today.
"I mean, you could put an eye out like that," she says with a laugh.
Her children – Ava, age 12, and Henry, 8 – have had a different experience. They live in Baltimore, where Taylor works as an art teacher. Between school, homework, violin lessons, ice-skating, theater, and play dates, there is little time for the sort of freestyle play Taylor remembers. Besides, Taylor says, they live in the city, with a postage stamp of a backyard and the ever-present threat of urban danger.
"I was kind of afraid to let them go out unsupervised in Baltimore...," she says, of how she started down this path with the kids. "I'm really a protective mom. There wasn't much playing outside."
This difference has always bothered her, she says, because she believes that play is critical for children's developing emotions, creativity, and intelligence. But when she learned that her daughter's middle school had done away with recess, and even free time after lunch, she decided to start fighting for play.
"It seemed almost cruel," she says. "Play is important for children – it's something so obvious it's almost hard to articulate. How can you talk about childhood without talking about play? It's almost as if they are trying to get rid of childhood."
Taylor joined a group of parents pressuring the principal to let their children have a recess, citing experts such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends that all students have at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day. They issued petitions and held meetings. And although the school has not yet agreed to change its curriculum, Taylor says she feels their message is getting more recognition.
She is not alone in her concerns. In recent years, child development experts, parents, and scientists have been sounding an increasingly urgent alarm about the decreasing amount of time that children – and adults, for that matter – spend playing. A combination of social forces, from a No Child Left Behind focus on test scores to the push for children to get ahead with programmed extracurricular activities, leaves less time for the roughhousing, fantasizing, and pretend worlds advocates say are crucial for development.
Meanwhile, technology and a wide-scale change in toys have shifted what happens when children do engage in leisure activity, in a way many experts say undermines long-term emotional and intellectual abilities. An 8-year-old today, for instance, is more likely to be playing with a toy that has a computer chip, or attending a tightly supervised soccer practice, than making up an imaginary game with friends in the backyard or street.
But play is making a comeback. Bolstered by a growing body of scientific research detailing the cognitive benefits of different types of play, parents such as Taylor are pressuring school administrations to bring back recess and are fighting against a trend to move standardized testing and increased academic instruction to kindergarten.
Public officials are getting in on the effort. First lady Michelle Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, for instance, have made a push for playgrounds nationwide. Local politicians from Baltimore to New York have participated in events such as the Ultimate Block Party – a metropolitan-wide play gathering. Meanwhile, business and corporate groups, worried about a future workforce hampered by a lack of creativity and innovation, support the effort.
"It's at a tipping point," says Susan Magsamen, the director of Interdisciplinary Partnerships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Brain Science Institute, who has headed numerous child play efforts. "Parents are really anxious and really overextended. Teachers are feeling that way, too."
So when researchers say and can show that "it's OK to not be so scheduled [and] programmed – that time for a child to daydream is a good thing," Ms. Magsamen says, it confirms what families and educators "already knew, deep down, but didn't have the permission to act upon."
But play, it seems, isn't that simple.
Scientists disagree about what sort of play is most important, government is loath to regulate the type of toys and technology that increasingly shape the play experience, and parents still feel pressure to supervise children's play rather than let them go off on their own. (Nearly two-thirds of Americans in a December Monitor TIPP poll, for instance, said it is irresponsible to let children play without supervision; almost as many said studying is more important than play.) And there is still pressure on schools to sacrifice playtime – often categorized as frivolous – in favor of lessons that boost standardized test scores.
"Play is still terribly threatened," says Susan Linn, an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the nonprofit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. But, she adds, "what is changing is that there's a growing recognition that the erosion of play may be a problem ... we need to do something about."
One could say that the state of play, then, is at a crossroads. What happens to it – how it ends up fitting into American culture, who defines it, what it looks like – will have long-term implications for childhood, say those who study it.
Some go even further: The future of play will define society overall and even determine the future of our species.
"Play is the fundamental equation that makes us human," says Stuart Brown, the founder of the California-based National Institute for Play. "Its absence, in my opinion, is pathology."
But before advocates can launch a defense of play, they need to grapple with a surprisingly difficult question.
What, exactly, is play?
It might seem obvious. Parents know when their children are playing, whether it's a toddler scribbling on a piece of paper, an infant shaking a rattle, or a pair of 10-year-olds dressing up and pretending to be superheroes.
But even Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary definition, "recreational activity; especially the spontaneous action of children," is often inaccurate, according to scientists and child development re-searchers. Play for children is neither simply recreational nor necessarily spontaneous, they say.
"Play is when children are using something they've learned, to try it out and see how it works, to use it in new ways – it's problem solving and enjoying the satisfaction of problems solv[ed]," says Diane Levin, a professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston. But Ms. Levin says that, in her class on the meaning and development of play, she never introduces one set definition.
"This is something that people argue about," she says.
Scientists and child advocates agree that there are many forms of play. There is "attunement play," the sort of interaction where a mother and infant might gaze at each other and babble back and forth. There is "object play," where a person might manipulate a toy such as a set of marbles; "rough and tumble play"; and "imaginative play." "Free play" is often described as kids playing on their own, without any adult supervision; "guided play" is when a child or other player takes the lead, but a mentor is around to, say, help facilitate the LEGO castle construction.
But often, says Dr. Brown at the National Institute for Play, a lot is happening all at once. He cites the time he tried to do a brain scan of his then-4-year-old grandson at play with his stuffed tiger.
"He was clearly playing," Brown recalls.
"And then he says to me, 'Grandpa, what does the tiger say?' I say, 'Roar!' And then he says, 'No, it says, "Moo!" ' and then laughs like crazy. How are you going to track that? He's pretending, he's making a joke, he's interacting."
This is one reason Brown says play has been discounted – both culturally and, until relatively recently, within the academic community, where detractors argue that play is so complex it cannot be considered one specific behavior, that it is an amalgamation of many different acts. These scientists – known as "play skeptics" – don't believe play can be responsible for all sorts of positive effects, in part because play itself is suspect.
"It is so difficult to define and objectify," Brown notes.
But most researchers agree that play clearly exists, even if it can't always be coded in the standard scientific way of other human behaviors. And the importance of play, Brown and others say, is huge.
Brown became interested in play as a young clinical psychiatrist when he was researching, somewhat incongruously, mass murderers. Although he concluded that many factors contributed to the psychosis of his subjects, Brown noticed that a common denominator was that none had participated in standard play behavior as children, such as interacting positively with parents or engaging in games with other children. As he continued his career, he took "play histories" of patients, eventually recording 6,000. He saw a direct correlation between play behavior and happiness, from childhood into adulthood.
It has a lot to do with joy, he says: "In the play studies I'd find many adults who had a pretty playful childhood but then confined themselves to grinding, to always being responsible, always seeing just the next task. [They] are less flexible and have a chronic, smoldering depression. That lack of joyfulness gets to you."
Brown later worked with ethologists – scientists who study animal behavior – to observe how other species, from honeybees to Labrador retrievers, play. This behavior in a variety of species is sophisticated – from "self-handicapping," so a big dog plays fairly with a small dog, to cross-species play, such as a polar bear romping with a sled dog. He also studied research on play depravation, noting how rat brains change negatively when they are deprived of some sorts of play.
Brown became convinced that human play – for adults as well as children – is not only joyful but necessary, a behavior that has survived despite connections in some studies to injury and danger (for example, animals continue to play even though they're likely to be hunted while doing so) and is connected to the most ancient part of human biology.
"We are interested in exploratory play, how kids develop cause and effect, how they use evidence," he says.
The collection of tubing, for instance, is part of a study designed by researcher Elizabeth Bonawitz and tests whether the way an object is presented can limit a child's exploration. If a teacher introduces the toy, which has a number of hidden points of interest – a mirror, a button that lights up, etc. – but tells a child about only one feature, the child is less likely to discover everything the toy can do than a child who receives the toy from a teacher who feigns ignorance. Without limiting instruction from an adult, it seems, a child is far more creative. In other words, adult hovering and instruction, from how to play soccer to how to build the best LEGO city, can be limiting.
Taken together, the MIT experiments show children calculating probabilities during play, developing assumptions about their physical environment, and adjusting perceptions according to the direction of authority figures. Other researchers are also discovering a breathtaking depth to play: how it develops chronological awareness and its link to language development and self-control.
The latter point has been a hot topic recently. Self-regulation – the buzzword here is "executive function," referring to abilities such as planning, multitasking, and reasoning – may be more indicative of future academic success than IQ, standardized tests, or other assessments, according to a host of recent studies from institutions such as Pennsylvania State University and the University of British Columbia.
Curriculums that boost executive function have become increasingly popular. Two years ago, Elizabeth Billings-Fouhy, director of the public Children's Place preschool in Lexington, Mass., decided to adopt one such program, called Tools of the Mind. It was created by a pair of child development experts – Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova – in the early 1990s after a study evaluating federal early literacy efforts found no positive outcomes.
"People started saying there must be something else," Dr. Leong says. "And we believed what was missing was self-regulation and executive function."
She became interested in a body of research from Russia that showed children who played more had better self-regulation. This made sense to her, she says. For example, studies have shown that children can stand still far longer if they are playing soldier; games such as Simon says depend on concentration and rule-following.
"Play is when kids regulate their behavior voluntarily," Leong says. Eventually, she and Dr. Bodrova developed the curriculum used in the Children's Place today, where students spend the day in different sorts of play. They act out long-form make-believe scenes, they build their own props, and they participate in buddy reading, where one child has a picture of a pair of lips and the other has a picture of ears. The child with the lips reads; the other listens. Together, these various play exercises increase self-control, educators say.
This was on clear display recently at the Children's Place. Nearly half the children there have been labeled as special needs students with everything from autism to physical limitations. The others are mainstream preschoolers – an "easier" group, perhaps, but still not one typically renowned for its self-control.
But in a brightly colored classroom, a group of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds are notably calm; polite and quiet, sitting in pairs, taking turns "reading" a picture book.
"Here are scissors, a brush...," a boy named Aiden points out to his partner, Kyle, who is leaning in attentively.
"Oh, don't forget the paint," Kyle says, although he's mostly quiet, as it's his turn to listen.
Aiden nods and smiles: "Yes, the paint."
When Aiden is finished, the boys switch roles. Around them, another dozen toddlers do the same – all without teacher direction. The Tools classrooms have the reputation of being far better-behaved than mainstream classes.
"We have been blown away," says Ms. Billings-Fouhy, the director, comparing how students are doing now versus before the Tools curriculum. "We can't believe the difference."
Educators and scientists have published overwhelmingly positive analyses since the early 2000s of the sort of curriculum Tools of the Mind employs. But recently the popularity of the play-based curriculum has skyrocketed, with more preschools adopting the Tools method and parenting chat rooms buzzing about the curriculum. Two years ago, for instance, Billings-Fouhy had to convince people about changing the Children's Place program. Now out-of-district parents call to get their children in.
"I think we're at this place where everyone is coming to the conclusion that play is important," Leong says. "Not just because of self-regulation, but because people are worried about the development of the whole child – their social and emotional development as well."
The Tools of the Mind curriculum, for instance, uses what Leong calls "intentional mature play" – play that is facilitated and guided by trained educators. If children in the class were told to simply go and play, she says, the result probably would be a combination of confusion, mayhem, and paralysis.
"People say, 'Let's bring back play,' " Leong says. "But they don't realize play won't just appear spontaneously, especially not in preschool.... The culture of childhood itself has changed."
For a host of reasons, today's children do not engage in all sorts of developmentally important play that prior generations automatically did. In her class at Wheelock College, Levin has students interview people over the age of 50 about how they played. In the 1950s and '60s, students regularly find, children played outdoors no matter where they lived, and without parental supervision. They played sports but adjusted the rules to fit the space and material – a goal in soccer, for instance, might be kicking a tennis ball to the right of the trash can. They had few toys, and older children tended to act as "play mentors" to younger children, instructing them in the ways of make-believe games.
That has changed dramatically, she says. In the early 1980s, the federal government deregulated children's advertising, allowing TV shows to essentially become half-hour-long advertisements for toys such as Power Rangers, My Little Ponies, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Levin says that's when children's play changed. They wanted specific toys, to use them in the specific way that the toys appeared on TV.
Today, she says, children are "second generation deregulation," and not only have more toys – mostly media-based – but also lots of screens. A Kaiser Family Foundation study recently found that 8-to-18-year-olds spend an average of 7.5 hours in front of a screen every day, with many of those hours involving multiscreen multitasking. Toys for younger children tend to have reaction-based operations, such as push-buttons and flashing lights.
Take away the gadgets and the media-based scripts, Levin and others say, and many children today simply don't know what to do.
"If they don't have the toys, they don't know how to play," she says.
The American educational system, increasingly teaching to standardized tests, has also diminished children's creativity, says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology and director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University in Philadelphia. "Children learn from being actively engaged in meaningful activities," she says. "What we're doing seems to be the antithesis of this. We're building robots. And you know, computers are better robots than children."
Other countries, particularly in Asia, she notes, have already shifted their educational focus away from test scores, and Finland – which is at the top of international ranking – has a policy of recess after every class for Grades 1 through 9.
But as Dr. Hirsh-Pasek points out, children spend most of their time out of school. A playful life is possible if parents and communities know what to do.
The Ultimate Block Party, which Hirsh-Pasek developed with other researchers, is one way to involve local governments, educators, and institutions in restoring play and creativity, she says. The Ultimate Block Party is a series of play stations – from blocks to sandboxes to dress-up games to make-believe environments – where kids can play with their parents. Meanwhile, the event's staff helps explain to caregivers what sorts of developmental benefits the children achieve through different types of play.
The first Ultimate Block Party in New York's Central Park in October 2010 attracted 50,000 people; Toronto and Baltimore held parties last year. Organizers now say they get multiple requests from cities every month to hold their own block parties; Hirsh-Pasek says she hopes the movement will go grass roots, with towns and neighborhoods holding their own play festivities.
"It's an exciting time," she says. "We're starting to make some headway. It's time for all of us to find the way to become a more creative, thinking culture."
Children's play is threatened, say experts who advise that kids – from toddlers to tweens – should be relearning how to play. Roughhousing and fantasy feed development.
"I mean, you could put an eye out like that," she says with a laugh.
Related content: Little girls or little women? The Disney Princess effect
"I was kind of afraid to let them go out unsupervised in Baltimore...," she says, of how she started down this path with the kids. "I'm really a protective mom. There wasn't much playing outside."
This difference has always bothered her, she says, because she believes that play is critical for children's developing emotions, creativity, and intelligence. But when she learned that her daughter's middle school had done away with recess, and even free time after lunch, she decided to start fighting for play.
"It seemed almost cruel," she says. "Play is important for children – it's something so obvious it's almost hard to articulate. How can you talk about childhood without talking about play? It's almost as if they are trying to get rid of childhood."
Taylor joined a group of parents pressuring the principal to let their children have a recess, citing experts such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends that all students have at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day. They issued petitions and held meetings. And although the school has not yet agreed to change its curriculum, Taylor says she feels their message is getting more recognition.
She is not alone in her concerns. In recent years, child development experts, parents, and scientists have been sounding an increasingly urgent alarm about the decreasing amount of time that children – and adults, for that matter – spend playing. A combination of social forces, from a No Child Left Behind focus on test scores to the push for children to get ahead with programmed extracurricular activities, leaves less time for the roughhousing, fantasizing, and pretend worlds advocates say are crucial for development.
Meanwhile, technology and a wide-scale change in toys have shifted what happens when children do engage in leisure activity, in a way many experts say undermines long-term emotional and intellectual abilities. An 8-year-old today, for instance, is more likely to be playing with a toy that has a computer chip, or attending a tightly supervised soccer practice, than making up an imaginary game with friends in the backyard or street.
But play is making a comeback. Bolstered by a growing body of scientific research detailing the cognitive benefits of different types of play, parents such as Taylor are pressuring school administrations to bring back recess and are fighting against a trend to move standardized testing and increased academic instruction to kindergarten.
Public officials are getting in on the effort. First lady Michelle Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, for instance, have made a push for playgrounds nationwide. Local politicians from Baltimore to New York have participated in events such as the Ultimate Block Party – a metropolitan-wide play gathering. Meanwhile, business and corporate groups, worried about a future workforce hampered by a lack of creativity and innovation, support the effort.
"It's at a tipping point," says Susan Magsamen, the director of Interdisciplinary Partnerships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Brain Science Institute, who has headed numerous child play efforts. "Parents are really anxious and really overextended. Teachers are feeling that way, too."
So when researchers say and can show that "it's OK to not be so scheduled [and] programmed – that time for a child to daydream is a good thing," Ms. Magsamen says, it confirms what families and educators "already knew, deep down, but didn't have the permission to act upon."
But play, it seems, isn't that simple.
Scientists disagree about what sort of play is most important, government is loath to regulate the type of toys and technology that increasingly shape the play experience, and parents still feel pressure to supervise children's play rather than let them go off on their own. (Nearly two-thirds of Americans in a December Monitor TIPP poll, for instance, said it is irresponsible to let children play without supervision; almost as many said studying is more important than play.) And there is still pressure on schools to sacrifice playtime – often categorized as frivolous – in favor of lessons that boost standardized test scores.
"Play is still terribly threatened," says Susan Linn, an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the nonprofit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. But, she adds, "what is changing is that there's a growing recognition that the erosion of play may be a problem ... we need to do something about."
One could say that the state of play, then, is at a crossroads. What happens to it – how it ends up fitting into American culture, who defines it, what it looks like – will have long-term implications for childhood, say those who study it.
Some go even further: The future of play will define society overall and even determine the future of our species.
"Play is the fundamental equation that makes us human," says Stuart Brown, the founder of the California-based National Institute for Play. "Its absence, in my opinion, is pathology."
But before advocates can launch a defense of play, they need to grapple with a surprisingly difficult question.
What, exactly, is play?
It might seem obvious. Parents know when their children are playing, whether it's a toddler scribbling on a piece of paper, an infant shaking a rattle, or a pair of 10-year-olds dressing up and pretending to be superheroes.
But even Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary definition, "recreational activity; especially the spontaneous action of children," is often inaccurate, according to scientists and child development re-searchers. Play for children is neither simply recreational nor necessarily spontaneous, they say.
"Play is when children are using something they've learned, to try it out and see how it works, to use it in new ways – it's problem solving and enjoying the satisfaction of problems solv[ed]," says Diane Levin, a professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston. But Ms. Levin says that, in her class on the meaning and development of play, she never introduces one set definition.
"This is something that people argue about," she says.
Scientists and child advocates agree that there are many forms of play. There is "attunement play," the sort of interaction where a mother and infant might gaze at each other and babble back and forth. There is "object play," where a person might manipulate a toy such as a set of marbles; "rough and tumble play"; and "imaginative play." "Free play" is often described as kids playing on their own, without any adult supervision; "guided play" is when a child or other player takes the lead, but a mentor is around to, say, help facilitate the LEGO castle construction.
But often, says Dr. Brown at the National Institute for Play, a lot is happening all at once. He cites the time he tried to do a brain scan of his then-4-year-old grandson at play with his stuffed tiger.
"He was clearly playing," Brown recalls.
"And then he says to me, 'Grandpa, what does the tiger say?' I say, 'Roar!' And then he says, 'No, it says, "Moo!" ' and then laughs like crazy. How are you going to track that? He's pretending, he's making a joke, he's interacting."
This is one reason Brown says play has been discounted – both culturally and, until relatively recently, within the academic community, where detractors argue that play is so complex it cannot be considered one specific behavior, that it is an amalgamation of many different acts. These scientists – known as "play skeptics" – don't believe play can be responsible for all sorts of positive effects, in part because play itself is suspect.
"It is so difficult to define and objectify," Brown notes.
But most researchers agree that play clearly exists, even if it can't always be coded in the standard scientific way of other human behaviors. And the importance of play, Brown and others say, is huge.
Brown became interested in play as a young clinical psychiatrist when he was researching, somewhat incongruously, mass murderers. Although he concluded that many factors contributed to the psychosis of his subjects, Brown noticed that a common denominator was that none had participated in standard play behavior as children, such as interacting positively with parents or engaging in games with other children. As he continued his career, he took "play histories" of patients, eventually recording 6,000. He saw a direct correlation between play behavior and happiness, from childhood into adulthood.
It has a lot to do with joy, he says: "In the play studies I'd find many adults who had a pretty playful childhood but then confined themselves to grinding, to always being responsible, always seeing just the next task. [They] are less flexible and have a chronic, smoldering depression. That lack of joyfulness gets to you."
Brown became convinced that human play – for adults as well as children – is not only joyful but necessary, a behavior that has survived despite connections in some studies to injury and danger (for example, animals continue to play even though they're likely to be hunted while doing so) and is connected to the most ancient part of human biology.
'Executive' play
Other scientists are focusing on the specific impacts of play. In a small, brick testing room next to the "construction zone" at the Boston Children's Museum, for instance, Daniel Friel sits with a collection of brightly colored tubing glued to a board. The manager of the Early Childhood Cognition Lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he observes children at play with puppets and squeaky toys, rubber balls and fabulously created pipe sculptures. Depending on the experiment, Mr. Friel and other researchers record such data as the time a child plays with a particular object or what color ball is picked out of a container. These observations lead to insights on how children form their understanding of the world."We are interested in exploratory play, how kids develop cause and effect, how they use evidence," he says.
The collection of tubing, for instance, is part of a study designed by researcher Elizabeth Bonawitz and tests whether the way an object is presented can limit a child's exploration. If a teacher introduces the toy, which has a number of hidden points of interest – a mirror, a button that lights up, etc. – but tells a child about only one feature, the child is less likely to discover everything the toy can do than a child who receives the toy from a teacher who feigns ignorance. Without limiting instruction from an adult, it seems, a child is far more creative. In other words, adult hovering and instruction, from how to play soccer to how to build the best LEGO city, can be limiting.
Taken together, the MIT experiments show children calculating probabilities during play, developing assumptions about their physical environment, and adjusting perceptions according to the direction of authority figures. Other researchers are also discovering a breathtaking depth to play: how it develops chronological awareness and its link to language development and self-control.
The latter point has been a hot topic recently. Self-regulation – the buzzword here is "executive function," referring to abilities such as planning, multitasking, and reasoning – may be more indicative of future academic success than IQ, standardized tests, or other assessments, according to a host of recent studies from institutions such as Pennsylvania State University and the University of British Columbia.
Curriculums that boost executive function have become increasingly popular. Two years ago, Elizabeth Billings-Fouhy, director of the public Children's Place preschool in Lexington, Mass., decided to adopt one such program, called Tools of the Mind. It was created by a pair of child development experts – Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova – in the early 1990s after a study evaluating federal early literacy efforts found no positive outcomes.
"People started saying there must be something else," Dr. Leong says. "And we believed what was missing was self-regulation and executive function."
"Play is when kids regulate their behavior voluntarily," Leong says. Eventually, she and Dr. Bodrova developed the curriculum used in the Children's Place today, where students spend the day in different sorts of play. They act out long-form make-believe scenes, they build their own props, and they participate in buddy reading, where one child has a picture of a pair of lips and the other has a picture of ears. The child with the lips reads; the other listens. Together, these various play exercises increase self-control, educators say.
This was on clear display recently at the Children's Place. Nearly half the children there have been labeled as special needs students with everything from autism to physical limitations. The others are mainstream preschoolers – an "easier" group, perhaps, but still not one typically renowned for its self-control.
But in a brightly colored classroom, a group of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds are notably calm; polite and quiet, sitting in pairs, taking turns "reading" a picture book.
"Here are scissors, a brush...," a boy named Aiden points out to his partner, Kyle, who is leaning in attentively.
"Oh, don't forget the paint," Kyle says, although he's mostly quiet, as it's his turn to listen.
Aiden nods and smiles: "Yes, the paint."
When Aiden is finished, the boys switch roles. Around them, another dozen toddlers do the same – all without teacher direction. The Tools classrooms have the reputation of being far better-behaved than mainstream classes.
"We have been blown away," says Ms. Billings-Fouhy, the director, comparing how students are doing now versus before the Tools curriculum. "We can't believe the difference."
Educators and scientists have published overwhelmingly positive analyses since the early 2000s of the sort of curriculum Tools of the Mind employs. But recently the popularity of the play-based curriculum has skyrocketed, with more preschools adopting the Tools method and parenting chat rooms buzzing about the curriculum. Two years ago, for instance, Billings-Fouhy had to convince people about changing the Children's Place program. Now out-of-district parents call to get their children in.
"I think we're at this place where everyone is coming to the conclusion that play is important," Leong says. "Not just because of self-regulation, but because people are worried about the development of the whole child – their social and emotional development as well."
Today's kids don't know how to play
But not all play is created equal, experts warn.The Tools of the Mind curriculum, for instance, uses what Leong calls "intentional mature play" – play that is facilitated and guided by trained educators. If children in the class were told to simply go and play, she says, the result probably would be a combination of confusion, mayhem, and paralysis.
"People say, 'Let's bring back play,' " Leong says. "But they don't realize play won't just appear spontaneously, especially not in preschool.... The culture of childhood itself has changed."
For a host of reasons, today's children do not engage in all sorts of developmentally important play that prior generations automatically did. In her class at Wheelock College, Levin has students interview people over the age of 50 about how they played. In the 1950s and '60s, students regularly find, children played outdoors no matter where they lived, and without parental supervision. They played sports but adjusted the rules to fit the space and material – a goal in soccer, for instance, might be kicking a tennis ball to the right of the trash can. They had few toys, and older children tended to act as "play mentors" to younger children, instructing them in the ways of make-believe games.
Today, she says, children are "second generation deregulation," and not only have more toys – mostly media-based – but also lots of screens. A Kaiser Family Foundation study recently found that 8-to-18-year-olds spend an average of 7.5 hours in front of a screen every day, with many of those hours involving multiscreen multitasking. Toys for younger children tend to have reaction-based operations, such as push-buttons and flashing lights.
Take away the gadgets and the media-based scripts, Levin and others say, and many children today simply don't know what to do.
"If they don't have the toys, they don't know how to play," she says.
The American educational system, increasingly teaching to standardized tests, has also diminished children's creativity, says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology and director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University in Philadelphia. "Children learn from being actively engaged in meaningful activities," she says. "What we're doing seems to be the antithesis of this. We're building robots. And you know, computers are better robots than children."
Other countries, particularly in Asia, she notes, have already shifted their educational focus away from test scores, and Finland – which is at the top of international ranking – has a policy of recess after every class for Grades 1 through 9.
But as Dr. Hirsh-Pasek points out, children spend most of their time out of school. A playful life is possible if parents and communities know what to do.
The Ultimate Block Party, which Hirsh-Pasek developed with other researchers, is one way to involve local governments, educators, and institutions in restoring play and creativity, she says. The Ultimate Block Party is a series of play stations – from blocks to sandboxes to dress-up games to make-believe environments – where kids can play with their parents. Meanwhile, the event's staff helps explain to caregivers what sorts of developmental benefits the children achieve through different types of play.
The first Ultimate Block Party in New York's Central Park in October 2010 attracted 50,000 people; Toronto and Baltimore held parties last year. Organizers now say they get multiple requests from cities every month to hold their own block parties; Hirsh-Pasek says she hopes the movement will go grass roots, with towns and neighborhoods holding their own play festivities.
"It's an exciting time," she says. "We're starting to make some headway. It's time for all of us to find the way to become a more creative, thinking culture."
2012-01-16
Twenty top predictions for life 100 years from now
Last week we asked readers for their predictions of life in 100 years time. Inspired by ten 100-year predictions made by American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins in 1900, many of you wrote in with your vision of the world in 2112.
Many of the "strange, almost impossible" predictions made by Watkins came true. Here is what futurologists Ian Pearson (IP) and Patrick Tucker (PT) think of your ideas.1. Oceans will be extensively farmed and not just for fish (Jim 300)
IP: Likelihood 10/10. We will need to feed 10 billion people and nature can't keep up with demand, so we will need much more ocean farming for fish. But algae farming is also on the way for renewable energy, and maybe even for growth of feedstock (raw materials) or resource extraction via GM seaweed or algae.
PT: Good chance. According to Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at the Nasa Langley Research Center, saltwater algae that's been genetically modified to absorb more nitrogen from the air than conventional algae could free up to 68% of the fresh water that is now tied up in conventional agriculture. This water could go to thirsty populations.
2. We will have the ability to communicate through thought transmission (Dev 2)
IP: Likelihood 10/10. Transmission will be just as easy as other forms of brain augmentation. Picking up thoughts and relaying them to another brain will not be much harder than storing them on the net.
PT: Good chance. Synthetic telepathy sounds like something out of Hollywood but it is absolutely possible, so long as "communication" is understood to be electrical signals rather than words.
3. Thanks to DNA and robotic engineering, we will have created incredibly intelligent humans who are immortal (game_over)
IP: Likelihood 9/10. It is more likely that direct brain links using electronics will achieve this, but GM will help a lot by increasing longevity - keeping people alive until electronic immortality technology is freely available at reasonable cost.
PT: Good chance. The idea that breakthroughs in the field of genetics, biotechnology and artificial intelligence will expand human intelligence and allow our species to essentially defeat death is sometimes called the Singularity.
4. We will be able to control the weather (mariebee_)
IP: Likelihood 8/10. There is already some weather control technology for mediating tornadoes, making it rain and so on, and thanks to climate change concerns, a huge amount of knowledge is being gleaned on how weather works. We will probably have technology to be able to control weather when we need to. It won't necessarily be cheap enough to use routinely and is more likely to be used to avoid severe damage in key areas.
PT: Good chance. We will certainly attempt to. A majority of scientists in the US support a federal programme to explore methods for engineering the Earth's climate (otherwise known as geoengineering). These technologies aim to protect against the worst effects of manmade climate change.
5. Antarctica will be "open for business" (Dev 2)
IP: Likelihood 8/10. The area seems worth keeping as a natural wilderness so I am hesitant here, but I do expect that pressure will eventually mean that some large areas will be used commercially for resources. It should be possible to do so without damaging nature there if the technology is good enough, and this will probably be a condition of exploration rights. PT: Pretty close. Before there is a rush to develop Antarctica we will most likely see a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic. Whether the Arctic states tighten control over the region's resources, or find equitable and sustainable ways to share them will be a major political challenge in the decades ahead. Successful (if not necessarily sustainable) development of the Arctic portends well for the development of Antarctica.
6. One single worldwide currency (from Kennys_Heroes)
IP: Likelihood 8/10. This is very plausible. We are already seeing electronic currency that can be used anywhere, and this trend will continue. It is quite likely that there will be only a few regional currencies by the middle of the century and worldwide acceptance of a global electronic currency. This will gradually mean the others fall out of use and only one will left by the end of the century.
PT: Great try! The trend on this is actually more in the opposite direction. The internet is enabling new forms of bartering and value exchange. Local currencies are also now used by several hundred communities across the US and Europe. In other words, look for many more types of currency and exchange not fewer, in the coming decades.
7. We will all be wired to computers to make our brains work faster (Dev 2)
Will deserts become tropical forests? 8. Nanorobots will flow around our body fixing cells, and will be able to record our memories (Alister Brown)
PT: Good chance. Right now, medical nanorobots exist only in theory and nanotechnology is mostly a materials science. But it's a rapidly growing field. Nanorobots exist within the realm of possibility, but the question of when they will arrive is another matter
IP: Likelihood: 7/10.
9. We will have sussed nuclear fusion (Kennys_Heroes)
IP: Likelihood 10/10. This is likely by 2045-2050 and almost certain by 2100. It's widely predicted that we will achieve this. What difference it makes will depend on what other energy technologies we have. We might also see a growth in shale gas or massive solar energy facilities. I don't think that wind power will be around.
10. There will only be three languages in the world - English, Spanish and Mandarin (Bill Walker)
IP: Likelihood 8/10. This does look like a powerful trend, other languages don't stand a lot of chance. Minor languages are dying at a huge rate already and the other major ones are mostly in areas where everyone educated speaks at least one of the other three. Time frame could be this century.
Space elevators 'will certainly be around' 11. Eighty per cent of the world will have gay marriage (Paul)
IP: Likelihood 8/10. This seems inevitable to those of us in the West and is likely to mean different kinds of marriages being available to everyone. Gay people might pick different options from heterosexual people, but everyone will be allowed any option. Some regions will be highly resistant though because of strong religious influences, so it isn't certain.
12. California will lead the break-up of the US (Dev 2)
IP: Likelihood 8/10. There are some indications already that California wants to split off and such pressures tend to build over time. It is hard to see this waiting until the end of the century. Maybe an East Coast cluster will want to break off too. Pressures come from the enormous differences in wealth generation capability, and people not wanting to fund others if they can avoid it.
13. Space elevators will make space travel cheap and easy (Ahdok)
IP: Likelihood 8/10. First space elevators will certainly be around, and although "cheap" is a relative term, it will certainly be a lot cheaper than conventional space development. It will create a strong acceleration in space development and tourism will be one important area, but I doubt the costs will be low enough for most people to try.
14. Women will be routinely impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a man (krozier 93)
PT: Pretty close. At the very least, more couples are choosing advanced fertility techniques over old-fashioned conception. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, in which an artificially inseminated embryo is carefully selected among other inseminated embryos for desirability, is becoming increasingly common in fertility clinics. Using this technique, it's now possible to screen an embryo for about half of all congenital illnesses. Within the next decade, researchers will be able to screen for almost all congenital illnesses prior to embryo implantation.
IP: Likelihood 5/10.
15. There will be museums for almost every aspect of nature, as so much of the world's natural habitat will have been destroyed (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)
PT: Pretty close. I cannot comment on the museums but the Earth is on the verge of a significant species extinction event. Protecting biodiversity in a time of increased resource consumption, overpopulation, and environmental degradation will require continued sacrifice on the part of local, often impoverished communities. Experts contend that incorporating local communities' economic interests into conservation plans will be essential to species protection in the next century.
IP: Likelihood 2/10.
16. Deserts will become tropical forests (jim300)
IP: Likelihood 7/10. Desert greening is progressing so this is just about possible.
17. Marriage will be replaced by an annual contract (holierthanthou)
IP: Likelihood 6/10. I think we will certainly see some weaker forms of marriage that are designed to last a decade or two rather than a whole lifetime, but traditional marriage will still be an option. Increasing longevity is the key - if you marry at 20 and live to well over 100, that is far too long a commitment. People will want marriages that aren't necessarily forever, but don't bankrupt them when they end.
18. Sovereign nation states will cease to exist and there will be one world government (krozier93)
PT: Great try! However, I think that the trend is in the direction of more sovereign nations rather than fewer. In the coming years, corporations or wealth private citizens will attempt to use earth-moving technologies to build their own semi-sovereign entities in international waters.
IP: Likelihood 2/10.
19. War by the West will be fought totally be remote control (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)
IP: Likelihood 5/10.
20. Britain will have had a revolution (holierthanthou)
IP: Likelihood 7/10. Well, possible, but not as likely as some other trends.
You can continue to contribute to the debate on Twitter using the hashtag #100yearpredictions. Ian Pearson is a future technology consultant and conference speaker. Patrick Tucker is spokesperson for the World Future Society and deputy editor of The Futurist magazine.
Read the original article HERE.
2012-01-12
The return to religion
With the chill wind of austerity blowing through the country, religion’s warm embrace looks more and more inviting. Peter Oborne welcomes the resurgence of a national pastime: churchgoing.
The return to religion Photo: ALAMY
It’s Sunday morning on Upper Street in the heart of London’s secular, left-wing Islington. The shops and cafés are doing a lively business and the pubs have opened.
But outside the portico of a handsome Georgian church stands an anachronistic figure. His white surplice flapping in the wind, vicar Simon Harvey is intent on luring shoppers into his Sunday service.
He is surprisingly successful. With a smile and a welcoming word for everyone, by 11am Harvey has gathered more than 100 worshippers inside St Mary’s Upper Street.
It is a mixed congregation: a mixture of young and old, black and white, the respectable middle class and the very poor. City bankers mingle with asylum seekers.
There’s a choir in the church, and plenty of children, who are taken downstairs to their Sunday School classes shortly after the service begins. The hymns are rousing and cheerful. Many of the congregation even appear to believe in God, not something that can by any means always be taken for granted in the Church of England.
What’s more, slowly but surely, the St Mary’s congregation seems to be swelling. Over the last 12 months, attendance at the main Sunday service at the church (where my wife Martine is curate) has risen by nearly 20 per cent, from around 95 to 115. Though much of this is down to Harvey’s hard work and charisma, the growing popularity of St Mary’s is part of a much wider and very striking phenomenon. Church attendances, in freefall for so long, have started to rise again, particularly in Britain’s capital city. Numbers on the electoral rolls are increasing by well over two per cent every year, while some churches have seen truly dramatic rises in numbers.
Change is afoot. For many years it was accepted that Christianity was all but dead, an anachronistic relic of the past whose foundations had been destroyed by modern science and rationalism, before being left behind by the cultural and sexual revolution of the Sixties. The figures seem to bear this out. Church attendance — which stood at around 50 per cent in the middle of the 19th century – had declined to around 12 per cent in 1979, or 5.4 million. By 1998 it had almost halved to 7.5 per cent and when the most recent census was conducted in 2005, it was discovered that only 6.3 per cent of the population, some 3.2 million, were regular churchgoers. The number of people calling themselves members of the Church of England has collapsed to 20 per cent, according to the latest British Social Attitudes Survey, down from 40 per cent as recently as 1983. More than half of all Britons, according to British Social Attitudes, say they have “no religion” and never attend a religious service.
Despondent churchmen judged that there were just too many alternative attractions — Sunday shopping, sports fixtures and the relentless secularism of modern Britain. Only Islam, fuelled by immigration and more disciplined and certain faith, appeared to be growing.
But, as St Mary’s Upper Street shows, there is still that yearning for faith. Indeed, as the second decade of the 21st century gets under way, there is surely a change of public mood. There have been many wonderful things about the last half-century, but it is impossible to deny that it has been an era of materialism and selfishness. The religious impulse has not quite vanished, but the teachings of the church have been mocked and suppressed. It may be that in an age of austerity, we are collectively coming back to the profound and ancient verities of the gospels.
I asked Simon Harvey the secret of his success. A cheerful priest in his mid-forties, he makes no grand pronouncements – just stresses the importance of being friendly: “This church is massive and it can appear a bit terrifying to local people. For many people, the threshold is the hardest place to cross. We need to get them through the door.” And once inside, Harvey concentrates on making people feel wanted: “Sometimes within hours of coming through the door, they are sitting down for lunch in the vicarage.”
Harvey, who was a minister in Leicester for many years before moving to London, also stresses the importance of being a full-time vicar: “In London, every parish has a church and a minister, whereas in other parts of the country, clergy can cover 8-12 churches. You’ve got to have a relationship with the minister, you’ve got to have somebody out there in the front of the church.”
St Mary’s is doing something rather special. Islington, so often caricatured as the headquarters of the politically correct, is actually a very divided community. Over the last three decades, bankers and barristers have colonised its beautiful Georgian squares and terraces, sending house prices sky high. But the traditional London working class still live in the borough, battling to stay afloat and often isolated or ignored. These two groups very rarely come together – but they do so at St Mary's, which provides the model of a church which grows by building up its links with the local community.
But there are many other ways of spreading the faith in London. Let’s take the example of ChristChurch London, whose attendance has soared to an amazing 600 in the seven years since it was founded over a lunch at the Strand Palace Hotel in 2004.
“We couldn’t afford a church building,” remembers the pastor, David Stroud. At first his church met at the New Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden. When the experiment proved successful, ChristChurch sought something larger and now holds services at 11am and 4pm on Sundays at the Mermaid Theatre. The evangelical mission is enhanced by prayer groups that meet in homes, coffee shops and restaurants across the capital.
ChristChurch may not be a local church, but it nevertheless seeks to develop a community – mainly students and young professionals, many of whom have recently moved to London. It calls itself non-denominational. “From a sociological point of view,” says Stroud, “the attraction is a longing for community and a search for meaning. We preach an orthodox Christian message. Do that well and you have to lock the doors to keep them out.”
Even more phenomenal growth is being seen in the Pentecostal churches springing up on the suburbs of Britain’s biggest cities, and attracting vast congregations of immigrants from African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria. These Pentecostal churches meet a vast yearning for spirituality and cater for congregations of 10,000 or more. Recently, the Redeemed Church of God reportedly attracted an incredible 40,000-strong congregation for an all-night prayer meeting at London’s ExCel centre.
Hillsong, a Pentecostal “megachurch” founded in Australia, attracts a global congregation in London and has seen its membership rise from 200 to more than 10,000 in 12 years. As with other growing churches, it is about more than Sunday worship. As its website announces: “We meet during the week in small informal groups, known as Connect Groups, we serve our local communities together, some people go to evening college to learn more about the God’s word, we socialise together, we do life together...”
This freelance exuberance has spread into Britain’s cathedrals too. According to Lynda Barley, the head of research at the Archbishops’ Council, attendance at Britain’s 43 cathedrals rose by seven per cent last year, with 15,800 adults and more than 3,000 children attending Sunday service. More than 1.7 million attend Church of England services in the average month.
This figure could be larger, but it is still enormous, far more than the number who attend football matches, often assumed to be Britain’s favourite weekend activity. But church people tend not to be as newsworthy as footballers. Their Christian values stand at an angle to the brash, thrill-seeking, instant consumer culture that has become dominant in Britain over the last half-century.
These eternal values do not simply make themselves known through attendance at Sunday services. Churches are today finding all kinds of new ways of connecting with the local community. The National Trust chairman Sir Simon Jenkins has tellingly observed: “As neighbourhood facilities such as the post office, the shop, the pub, the surgery, the police house, the branch library and the village school disappear, it is ironic that the one ubiquitous beacon of local community in a secular society is one that has stood since the Middle Ages, the church steeple.”
More than 1.5 million people now use their churches as a base for voluntary work, according to the National Churches Trust. In Islington, for example, a group of churches provide night shelters for the homeless during the winter months. Jacqui Mair, a civil servant, marshals an army of volunteers (sometimes including me) who provide dinner, breakfast and a comfortable night’s sleep for the men and women who come in for a night of sanctuary.
This means that churches are starting to regain some of the social function they enjoyed in the Middle Ages. During the last century churches tended to be regarded as hushed and sacred places, but they are starting to use their amazing cultural heritage to stretch the Christian message. Let’s take as an example the Rev Rob Gillion, rector of Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, and also of St Saviour’s Church, Walton Place, which lies tucked behind Harrods.
Gillion was an actor for 14 years before being called to the church. Since then, he has invited young people from inner-city London to take part in drama workshops at St Saviour’s (where the “Intermission” theatre is based), culminating in the staging of a play. Gillion calls his a “theatre church”, which he compares to “a sanctuary for wild birds”. People come when they are wounded and need help – hopefully we will build them up, heal them, and help them fly.”
The Rev Paul Turp at St Leonard’s, Shoreditch (it emerged last year that he was the inspiration for Rev, the Bafta-winning BBC sitcom), also takes pleasure in breaking the rules. He insists that people come first and foremost to his church in order to experience holiness and that his job is to “respond to the spiritual needs of the congregation. I try and do what Jesus did, because I think he was really rather good at it.” Completely unstuffy, he tells his congregation to “come as you are” and has no hesitation in using his famous church for theatre and music schools, concerts and plays.
The picture outside London is not quite as rosy, but the dramatic decline in church attendance over the last few decades has nevertheless slowed. The same applies in the Roman Catholic Church — in 2008, some 918,000 attended Mass, a slight increase on the figure of 915,000 the year before. Similarly, the Baptist Union saw a small increase in attendance during the last decade.
In The Death of Christian Britain, the sociologist Scot Callum Brown argues that the collapse of churchgoing in this country was very sudden. “In unprecedented numbers, the British people since the Sixties have stopped going to church...have stopped marrying in church and have neglected to baptise their children.”
The book was written in 2003, and there is every reason to accept that his sombre conclusion was true for the time. But something has changed. Giles Fraser, who famously resigned as the Canon of St Paul’s last autumn in a complaint against the treatment by the church authorities of the Occupy protesters, argues that a hunger for spirituality and meaning lies behind the recent rise in church attendances.
“The underlying soundness of the church will always tell,” says Fraser. “There will always be a hunger in people for more than shopping. The Church does not have to be trendy to meet that need.” When church attendances began to plummet in the Sixties, says Fraser, “the only value people were prepared to accept was freedom. That became the trump card that was always played, the only way of looking at the world. The Church is good at articulating other values – the community rather than the individual.”
James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, agrees: “I’m firmly of the view there’s a spiritual impulse in everybody. But this impulse is episodic. For instance at times of bereavement or trouble, people open up and become more sensitive to the Christian faith. I believe the same happens with society. When the material world gets knocked people are forced to think again and that’s when Christianity does have something important to say. People are aware there’s a big shift in society coming along, even though they might not understand it. So I’m not surprised that the ground is now more fertile for the spread of the Christian message.”
A sentiment with which Simon Harvey, surplice waving outside St Mary’s Upper Street in the former Socialist Republic of Islington, wholeheartedly concurs. Looking out at the shoppers on Upper Street going about their business, he says: “Every bar, retailer and coffee shop out there knows its clientele. But the church is there for everybody.”
Originally published HERE
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