Recess

Aspen, granddaughter of Kathy and Don Stevens
Gurian Institute Training Division

On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on television. As we all now know, the show quickly became a cultural icon, one of those phenomena that helped define an era.

What is less remembered but equally, if not more, important, is that another transformative cultural event happened that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the "Thunder Burp."

The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season. Until 1955, ad budgets at toy companies were minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel and the Thunder Burp, which, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, was a kind of historical watershed. Almost overnight, children's play became focused, as never before, on things — the toys themselves.

"It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says Chudacoff. "Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object."

At 7:45 a.m. each weekday, while most of his peers at Naperville Central High School in Naperville, Ill., are sitting in class and groggy with sleep, 15-year-old Matt Bray is running sprints, jumping rope, lifting weights, and engaging in other activities, all aimed at getting his heart pumping.

This early-morning exercise class is about more than getting in shape, though. A small but growing number of experts and educators suggest that Mr. Bray is priming his brain for learning at the same time he’s sculpting his biceps.

“It’s been actually raising my grades a little bit higher,” Mr. Bray, a freshman, said of the class, which he has been taking since September. “Now I’m getting A’s and B’s on average,” he said. “In junior high, I was getting B’s and C’s.”

Seven or eight years ago, studies offered mixed results on the question of whether exercise can boost brain function in children and adolescents. Experts are beginning to contend, however, that the case is getting stronger.

“There’s sort of no question about it now,” said Dr. John J. Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “The exercise itself doesn’t make you smarter, but it puts the brain of the learners in the optimal position for them to learn.”

In the Peanuts comic strip, Charlie Brown was never able to kick the football, fly a kite properly or lead a baseball team. He was also sad and often the target of ridicule from his peers. A new Canadian study looking at the connections between athletic skill and social acceptance among school children confirms that Chuck's problems were true to life: kids place a great deal of value on athletic ability, and youngsters deemed unskilled by their peers often experience sadness, isolation and social rejection at school.

In a study published in The Journal of Sport Behavior, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton examined the relationships among perceived athletic competence, peer acceptance and loneliness in elementary school children. Their findings will likely confirm the experience of anyone who was picked last for the team in gym class: children seen as athletic by their classmates are also better liked and less likely to feel lonely, while unathletic children experience the opposite.

Over-anxious parents, computer games and school tests are to blame, a letter signed by almost 300 academics, authors and charity leaders says.

The decline in "unstructured, loosely supervised" play is adversely affecting children's mental health, they add.

It also threatens young people's long-term development, the letter to the Daily Telegraph says.

Among the signatories are novelist Philip Pullman, director of the Royal Institution Baroness Susan Greenfield and child care expert Dr Penelope Leach.

More than 40 professors, 60 psychologists and psychotherapists, and leaders of the main children's charities and teaching unions also lend their names to the letter.

It flags up a recent Unicef finding that British children were among the unhappiest in a league table of 21 industrialised countries.

The letter says: "We believe that a key factor in this disturbing trend is the marked decline over the last 15 years in children's play."

Leave those kids alone
The idea that adults should be playing with their kids
is a modern invention - and not necessarily a good one
Article by Christopher Shea, The Boston Globe, July 15, 2007

WHAT COULD BE more natural than a mother down on the rec-room floor, playing with her 3-year-old amid puzzles, finger-puppets, and Thomas the Tank Engine trains? Look -- now she's conducting a conversation between a stuffed shark and Nemo, the Pixar clown fish! Giggles all around. Not to mention that the tot is learning the joys of stories and narrative, setting him on a triumphal path toward school.

A "natural" scene? Actually, parent-child play of this sort has been virtually unheard of throughout human history, according to the anthropologist David Lancy. And three-fourths of the world's current population would still find that mother's behavior kind of dotty.

American-style parent-child play is a distinct feature of wealthy developed countries -- a recent byproduct of the pressure to get kids ready for the information-age economy, Lancy argues in a recent article in American Anthropologist, the field's flagship journal in the United States.

A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says free and unstructured play is healthy and - in fact - essential for helping children reach important social, emotional, and cognitive developmental milestones as well as helping them manage stress and become resilient.

The report is written in defense of play and in response to forces threatening free play and unscheduled time. These forces include changes in family structure, the increasingly competitive college admissions process, and federal education policies that have led to reduced recess and physical education in many schools. Whereas play protects children's emotional development, a loss of free time in combination with a hurried lifestyle can be a source of stress, anxiety and may even contribute to depression for many children.

"Development experts say children suffer due to lack of unstructured fun"
Three-part article by Karen MacPherson, Staff Writer
Pittsburgh, PA Post-Gazette, October 1, 2002

That's the somber assessment of a growing number of child development experts who are alarmed by the lack of time and interest devoted to unstructured child's play in modern American culture.

"It's such a tragedy," said Jane Healy, a Colorado-based psychologist, educator and author of "Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It."

"Adults have really lost touch with the basic needs of the child. It's parenting as product development," she said. "Everything about children's lives these days seems to be so serious, and play looks like it's not valuable enough."

Surging testosterone could be a major explanation for the home advantage in football, say UK psychologists. They found that all members of a squad - and goalkeepers in particular - have much higher levels of the hormone before a home game than before an away match.

"It is clear there is a big home advantage, and we think testosterone is a major factor that has been overlooked by theorists in the past," says Sandy Wolfson of the University of Northumbria, who conducted the research with colleague Nick Neave.

"We know testosterone is linked to dominance and aggression in animals," says Neave. "We're trying to tie the results in with territoriality. The idea is that if you're playing at home, you feel you're defending your own territory. The testosterone surges in the goalkeepers was unbelievable and obviously they're the ones who are most involved in defence."

Please note: The Gurian Institute Education Division highly recommends reading "Last Child in the Woods - Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" by Richard Louv, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2005 http://www.algonquin.com