Inquiry Into the subject of play, part 1

I’ve been reading a lot about play. It’s is a big subject now. The theory seems to be that adult work is—or, at least, optimally, should be—a kind of play. The kind of work most of us need to know how to do, the kind that requires “soft skills.” Play at least as my generation knew it. That is, imaginative, creative, participatory. Playing house, playing doctor, playing store. As I mother, I am beginning to observe play and the striking thing about it, when it does happen—for it seems not easy, not predictable, the conditions have to be right—is that it is absorbing and difficult. She puts things into a basin and takes them out again, fitting them into holes that require her to identify matching shapes. Her head is tilted down, her eyes focused intently. When she fails, she looks up and cries out in frustration. This kind of play is not passive, not even fun in the sense we think of play as adults; it requires effort, but it leads to discovery.

So, okay, I buy the work analogy.

Now folks seem to be mourning this kind of play we knew as children’s play as it disappears amidst scheduling and demands of the modern entertainment juggernaut for kids. Or so the argument goes.

But I don’t know if I buy it. First off, play is, of course, a subjective term. Did it even exist in the, say, 1600s—before the modern concept of a childhood took root? In these agrarian, pre-democratic years, children had chores and began them as early as 5 or 6. They were not family mascots; they were necessary members of the economic unit.

So, maybe here’s the question: are adults really mourning the disappearance of play from kids' lives—or their own lost childhoods? Yes, this generation will have a different relationship to play—and we hope it is not one which confused play with entertainment (more about that later). . . So perhaps this generation will tell us what it was like to be consumers from a very young age. But they will tell us in their own way. It is an essential nature of humanity is to consume; but it is also essential to transform.