The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education
by Rebecca Jevons-Marlin

“Rebecca, let’s go cruising the bars!”

I looked at Julia, with her curly blonde locks and pale blue eyes, filled with earnest expectation, and replied,

“Sure, how do we do that?”

Julia took my hand and guided me to a particularly muddy stretch of my back yard, whereupon she sat down and ushered me to do the same. She grabbed two sticks, handed one to me and started poking and stirring the ground with her stick. I followed suit. I asked Julia,

“Is this how we cruise the bars?”

And she replied, definitively and excitedly;

“Yes!”

It was an incredibly gratifying experience, for both of us. As Julia, 3 ½ years old, and I sat there, deeply en­­­­­grossed in our “cruising the bars” experience, I marveled at the bliss of pure, unfettered play.

Only later did I learn from Julia’s mother that she is a big Suzanne Vega fan and there is a lyric about “cruising the bars” in one of her songs. Julia had heard this song many times while driving with her mother and on this spring morning, she had set out to play “cruising the bars.”

The real meaning of “cruising the bars” was irrelevant as we sat stirring the dirt. For Julia, it was how she perceived and interpreted it that mattered. In this blissful moment of play Julia was doing many important things. She was using her imagination to critically assess the materials at her disposal and give them a meaningful purpose as she creatively interpreted the idea. Julia was engaged in the highly intellectual cognitive exercise that we have come to call critical thinking. And, equally important in my opinion, she was having fun.

I am a firm believer in the importance of unstructured play in early childhood education. Sadly, it seems that I am one of that dying breed, originally led by progressive educators at the turn of the 20th century such as John Dewey, Lucy Sprague-Mitchell, and Caroline Pratt. These days most parents, caregivers, and educators are fixated on giving their kids the best academic start in life. They spend so much time, money, and energy enrolling their kids in structured activities like arts and crafts, music, and literacy that time for free play falls by the wayside.

I know countless families that spend a huge portion of their days in their cars trekking from one child’s activity to another. My head reels at the amount of time, energy, and gas that families spend keeping their kids busy. Is this for the benefit of the kids or the parents? As a parent and a child care provider I appreciate the desire to keep kids occupied. But at what expense?

I do not want to undermine the value of structured activities in a child’s life. Children learn new skills and practice following directions. Rarely, however, do such classes give children the opportunity to think critically, since the educator has already planned the lesson and figured out the end result. The children are simply required to plod along.

I am often quietly horrified when I walk down nursery school corridors and notice that every child’s artwork on display looks alike. This tells me that the children were merely given materials and told what to do with them. This is not art, but an exercise in practicing listening skills and following directions. Art, as I understand it, is a process of exploring materials and using them to create something that has visual impact and provides an emotional response. The process of art should always be given priority over the product.

Play is vital to every child’s development. It teaches important social and emotional skills including kindness, responsibility, patience, and cooperation. Through play children address the complex skills required to be a grown-up. They confront new, exciting, and often intimidating situations, e.g. going to school or to the doctor; and address such emotions as fear, anxiety, and embarrassment. They perceive other children’s emotional states and learn about empathy. They address the complex emotions that come with life’s challenges including separation, divorce, and death. In this way, play provides a forum for healing. And let’s not forget, play provides entertainment, adventure, and satisfaction.

While watching 60 Minutes recently, I learned that NASA was having a hard time recruiting engineers with vision. While they hired the best candidates from MIT and Harvard, these workers could not compete with their 60-year-old colleagues. When researchers inquired why the new recruits did not have the same capacity to conceive of or create new technology as their older colleagues, they concluded that today’s workers had not been given the same opportunities to play during their childhoods.

As parents, caregivers, and educators, it is our job to ensure that our kids will be able to think critically. The only way we can ensure this is by allowing them to play. As an early childhood educator, who has worked both in the classroom and in my own family day care, and as the mother of a six-year-old, I firmly believe that every child deserves at least one hour a day dedicated to free play. If every child is given this opportunity, NASA recruiters in 2025 won’t have a problem finding engineers with the vision to think outside the box.

Rebecca Jevons-Marlin spent her childhood in England playing with her nine brothers and sisters. She is excited to celebrate the one-year anniversary of her family day care, Little Pickles, located in Red Hook.