Why imagination, fantasy and free play have a vital role to perform in your child’s world.
On my daughter’s first birthday, she was snowed under with colourful, educational toys. While moms and dads cooed and clucked over jangly rattles and alphabet-singing teddy bears, the tiny tots were enchanted with only two items – empty boxes and gift wrap.
Our own mothers and grandmothers were hardly surprised. In their day, they said, a piece of string and scraps of rags were enough to keep children amused for hours – no batteries required.
In a modern age of convenience, competitiveness and increasingly brilliant technology, we tend to forget that childhood is a time of intense development, requiring hands-on experience that can’t be replaced by computer games, television and toys supposedly designed to make kids smarter.
“A simple cardboard box does much more for a child’s imagination than a fancy toy with ‘bells and whistles’,” explains Cape Town-based clinical psychologist Jenny Perkel, author of Babies in Mind.
“Playing with simple toys, such as blocks, allows children to generate their own ideas about something. It encourages a child to think laterally and imaginatively, and to draw on his own unconscious mind, resulting in fantasy play.
“This, in turn, teaches a child to literally think ‘out of the box’, instead of doing what the toy programmed him to do, which encourages creativity.”
When Play was King
In her pioneering book, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, teacher Vivian Gussin Paley says that a few decades ago, we overlooked the fact that our young children spent much more time watching television than they ever had listening to the radio.
Then, in the 80s and 90s, a worrying trend emerged – the idea that there was too much ‘play’, and that learning letters and other educational skills were more important than appreciating the ‘shapes and sounds of characters in a story’.
It was during this time, she argues, that we started hearing children complain about being ‘bored’ – probably for the first time in human history!
“Having not listened carefully enough to their play, we did not realise how much time was needed by children in order to create the scenery and develop the skills for their ever-changing dramas,” says Gussin Paley.
“We removed the element – time – that enabled play to be effective, then blamed the children when their play skills did not meet our expectations.”
Ironically, parents blame television for making children ‘restless and distracted’ – but the academic solution simply makes them more restless and fatigued, she argues.
If we’re to stop the rot – and encourage our children’s inherent creativity – then we need to understand exactly what imagination, play and fantasy are. We know the words, but do we understand them?
Some of the world’s best ideas were born while daydreaming and playing.
Michael Meyerhoff, an American developmental psychologist with a PhD in human development and a career of over 40 years studying children and parenting, explains that creativity, a wonderful human gift, is anything that involves your child completely and encourages experimentation. Your baby or child is being creative when she’s banging a rattle, tossing plastic kitchen containers, scribbling with crayons or pretending to be a fierce lion on her jungle gym.
Some of the world’s best ideas were born while daydreaming and playing. Tools such as mud, water, sand, leaves and other bits and pieces all foster the brain development needed to harness our incredible human potential.
The Best Toys Ever!
Perkel suggests stocking up on the following basics to encourage contented creativity in your older child:
- Building blocks
- Dolls with accessories
- Basic cars, planes and trains
- Animals (farm and wild)
- Playdough
- Painting- and drawing implements
- String, scissors, glue and sticky tape
The Role of Imagination and Fantasy
Observing your children at play is a fascinating experience. When left to their own devices, children poke, prod, experiment and consider the results of mixing water with sand, making sounds with a pot and spoon or making faces at themselves in the mirror.
A child’s play instinct is the foundation of imagination, which in turn promotes fantasy play – all elements of creativity that are crucial for optimal human development.
American author and award-winning teacher, Alan Haskvitz, says that imagination is difficult to define. Simply put, though, it is an intellectual mechanism that takes existing data and reintroduces it in a variety of forms. As soon as children start to play, they are fostering their imaginations, as they are recreating something unique with ‘themselves as the centrepiece’.
Experts agree that the expansion of a child’s intellect depends heavily on how much free rein we give her to stretch her imagination and creative potential.
This is where modern society fails us, as we increasingly value achievement and competition, resulting in jam-packed schedules and an academic focus from the very first year of primary school.
“It’s sometimes hard for kids to play imaginatively if their schedules are too busy and structured,” says Perkel.
“Fantasy play requires hours of open, unstructured, unplanned time, with a caregiver/adult in the vicinity who is available but not hovering too close to the child. Busy parents might not see the value in spending time hanging out at home, with their kids playing nearby.”
Free to Play!
The little-known concept of free play is a crucial link in the creativity chain. By encouraging your children to engage in unstructured, self-directed play, as opposed to guided, scheduled activities, you are stimulating their imagination and growing their creativity.
Generally, experts indicate that toddlers aged 12 – 36 months need around 30 minutes of structured, physical play with a grown-up, but at least an hour of free play without guided input from an adult. Free-play time should increase as your child reaches grade one and beyond – and not decrease, owing to sport or ballet classes!
What is free play, exactly? Eastern Cape-based occupational therapist, Kate Sherry, defines it as undirected, unstructured play which uses imaginative, physical, cognitive, emotional, social and physical abilities for experimentation and exploration.
It is the opposite of directed play, such as rule-based games, school activities or extramural activities. Your child is in charge – she decides what she’s going to do, for how long and which tools she’ll use, if any.
Free play teaches your child about self-empowerment, expression and communication.
Our children’s capacity for free play has diminished at an alarming rate, thanks to technology (television and computer games), packed schedules, crime, lack of space and working parents with little time to foster this important skill. Free play, however, is absolutely essential. It contains all the ingredients for creativity, which in turn stimulates imagination and fantasy – and it teaches your child about self-empowerment, expression and communication.
The problem nowadays, explains occupational therapist Carly Tzanos, formerly of Cape Town and now based in Canada, is that we have moved away from giving babies plenty of unstructured play time by overwhelming them with educational toys, books and DVDs in a silly attempt to make them reach milestones faster.
Then, as our little ones grow, we fill their after-school schedules with additional activities, leaving them very little time to simply be.
Firing up the Imagination
Haskvitz’s nuggets of wisdom for helping your child to get the most out of life are easy to implement and are mostly common sense.
- Imagination is more than music or art! Encourage your child to ask questions (“I wonder what will happen if …?”) and let him know that every single thing he sees or uses was invented by someone. What would we do without a wheel? What can a wheel do? Why is a wheel round?
- Do it differently. Don’t get stuck in a rut – find a different route to school or the shop; draw with both hands; ask your child what he thinks is up this road or that street; cloud-gaze
- Make it better. Have your grade one child look at simple implements, such as a fork or spoon. How does it work and why? How can he make it better? For example, would he put more prongs on the fork? Would he make it a different colour?
- Be observant. Point out the less obvious, for instance, a choppy ocean as opposed to a calm one.
- It’s not a test! Your child can imagine whatever he likes. If his theory on forks seems silly, it doesn’t matter.
- Remember the box. Don’t allow your older child to lose that innate curiosity about the box in which his first big toy was packaged
- Encourage the process, not the product. Saying only “Well done!” when your child has completed a picture is not as valuable as observing the process that led him there and pointing out how much fun it is to move the crayon this way and that, or what happens when you mix two colours together on a page.
Getting it Right
There’s much we can do to assist our children in developing imagination and creativity – gifts which are rightfully theirs.
“Firstly, keep toys simple and appreciate the value of lots of free, unstructured play in a safe, contained environment,” recommends Perkel.
Having the right tools is key. The best things in life are free, so harness the power of nature, music and imaginary play from babyhood by spending time in the garden, giving your older baby a mini-orchestra or pots, pans and other safe non-breakables, and having a good stock of art- and craft supplies readily available.
The best things in life are free, so harness the power of nature, music and imaginary play…
Children love to draw, paint, stick and mould. As they grow, they’ll move from chubby crayons to felt-tipped pens and pencils and glitter glue, and really don’t mind using your recycled printing paper or old newspapers to create memorable paintings and drawings! Use large yogurt containers or safe, easy-to-open tubs to store goodies.
A dress-up box is a must. Make-believe play is the ideal fantasy tool, so include scarves and old jewellery, buttons (for older children), small blankets, plastic sunglasses, little shoes, toilet-roll cores, magic “wands’, and any other bits and pieces.
A ‘make-a-noise’ box containing bells, egg-shaped shakers, triangles, tambourines and other musical instruments is equally fun. You don’t need to buy fancy ones either – for older children, use tins filled with buttons and then sealed, and for babies and toddlers, closed plastic containers filled with uncooked rice or pasta are an easy and cheap alternative.
Nature provides an ideal environment too. Your grade one child will enjoy making a nature journal filled with leaves, sticks and dried flowers, while preschoolers and toddlers enjoy collecting items and helping you stick them to a couple of punched pages tied with wool.
Your primary-aged child will love ‘camping’ in the garden – give him and his friends the basic utensils, such as a blanket, two boxes and a sheet as a ‘tent’ (if you don’t have a real one), a pot for ‘cooking’ food, some healthy snacks and tell them what camping is all about. Soon, you’ll see them pitching tents, sitting around a ‘camp fire’ and telling spooky stories like true pioneers!
“We continue to play as grown-ups, especially when we do anything creative,” says Perkel.”
For adults, it can be very boring to play with children. But you don’t really have to play that much – just be around and take part a little here and there in the play. Make sure that your child has someone her age to play with sometimes, although playing alone is really important too.”
When in doubt, remember the box. Don’t ever allow your child to lose that innate curiosity which made an empty package more tempting than its colourful, manufactured contents.
To find an occupational therapist in your area, call the Occupational Therapy Association of South Africa (OTASA) on 012 362 5457 or visit www.otasa.org.za
Read it!
- The Creative Spirit by Daniel Goleman, Paul Kaufman and Michael Ray, Plume, 1993
- A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play by Vivian Gussin Paley, University of Chicago Press, 2004
Click it!
- www.familydoctor.org
Text by Angela Barry. Photographs by Sally Chance. Models Luka and Ella. This article was taken from the April 2010 edition of Living and Loving.
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