There is a rich literature, including important contributions from Freud, Piaget and Bowlby among many others, on the meaning and value of children's play and the need to give children time to play. 2 Winnicott followed Melanie Klein's influence in psychoanalytic play therapy to provide toys during psychoanalytic sessions and to interpret the meaning of children's play. Although adults can increase the range of experiences by providing materials and ideas, Winnicott suggests not providing too many materials, because children are good at and enjoy finding objects and inventing games. 2 Winnicott sees play as creative, life-affirming, and ‘always exciting because it deals with the precarious borderline between the subjective and that which can be objectively perceived’. Children gain experience and enrich themselves through play and fantasy and thus ‘gradually enlarge their capacity to see the richness of the externally real world’. Another reason he says is to cope with anxiety.
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In his short, wonderfully readable book, ‘ The child, the family and the outside world’, 2 and in a series of essays that extend his thoughts on play, 3 Winnicott suggests one reason children need to play is to deal with aggression, through play rather than at the moment of rage.
1 I have always viewed children's play as critical for learning to distinguish make-believe from reality.Ĭhildren enjoy play, but do they need to play? Does their play serve any deeper purpose? Donald Winnicott (1896–1971), an enormously influential child psychoanalyst, would surely have answered yes. ‘To a small child, play is work, thought, art and relaxation’. The intensity with which children often play suggests that for many it is their work. Our young children always had toys to occupy them on long journeys, and spent endless hours donning old clothes from our dressing-up box.
New toys certainly, but I was impressed, as always, with the power of play and impressed with my wife's habitual foresight. The visiting children pounced on the toys and played happily all afternoon, with the minimum of squabbling about a toy they both wanted. My wife had me clean the toys in the old family toy box (our children are young adults).
We recently invited a young couple for lunch, with their 3-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son. We may all mean somewhat different things when we talk about child play. We all know what we mean by play, don't we? I thought I did, but the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives 24 different meanings for the verb ‘to play’.