An interesting series on NPR explored the structure, purpose, and benefits of various forms of play among young children (more on Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills and Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control, including audio of the stories, available on-line). The premise is that structured playtime, and highly specialized toys, do less to develop essential cognitive and self-control functions than creative and imaginative play. Says the overview:
It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.
It’s a useful counterbalance to our frequent impulse to promote self-organizing skills through highly organized tasks (an error that many managers make with their own staff and board leadership, by the way). One of the particular mechanisms that extract self-organizing benefit from creative play, says the story, is by promoting ”private speech”:
According to [psychology professor Laura] Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what’s called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.
I wonder how many arts organizations serving young children are managing this balance in their programming. And I also wonder how many grown-up cultural managers bring this perspective to the workplace.
