Play that has a lasting effect – the sustainable solution

Why am I discussing play in a website about anxious children?

The answer is because we've had an exceptional time recently during the global pandemic.

The number of primary school children suffering from depression and anxiety must surely have alarmed most of us this year, whether we’re grandparents, parents, child minders or teachers.

Lots of our children have all the latest gadgets and toys – and, pandemics aside, you'd definitely wonder how they could possibly be miserable!

Except that, during the last year, we’ve all grasped just how easy it is to have everything and still be miserable: cut off from friends, social outings and fun. Locked onto a screen, hoping for intermittent contact.

Yet, despite all the stuff thrown in our face during the pandemic, there’s still one important fact that has always applied...

And that is: children are not playing in a way that’s helpful emotionally.

I want to deal with that here because play is so important to healthy development.

They play in all sorts of ways that don't involve toys – like peekaboo, inventing stories, hide and seek, and swimming, to name just a few.

But this is about play with toys.

And their toys are militating against them.

If you’ve just imagined a row of toys up in arms and threatening the child, you’ve got the message! Metaphorically speaking.

Joking aside, a puzzled child once turned to me and asked where the doll cot was. I suggested they look round and see what they could use. After a pause, they grabbed two cushions and a rug, tipped the toys from a tray they needed, and spent 10 minutes making up a special bed for the dolls. 

Magically (for me watching), the child continued with their imaginative play. They put the dolls to bed and gave them a tea-set spoon to be their rattle.

This child was delighted with what they’d done. 

Stuffing the dolls in a brand-name cot with a garish mobile would have taken only seconds and deprived them of the enjoyment of “providing a bed” – nurturing someone smaller and finding themselves capable of being resourceful and effective.

That’s real play. 

I’m not suggesting we should reject computers and devices, video games and apps. They’re wonderful (though I never did get my head around Minecraft!).

Nor should we turn our backs on branded toys that are given to them. It isn't all or nothing.

But playing with those is not the same as playing with more basic things.

play with toys like dolls, vehicles and cutlery sets allows imagination to grow

The kind of play that has an ongoing value – which I call sustainable – is based on a range of generic toys 

These toys offer the benefit, in play, of allowing the child to imagine them to be anything at all. Children are good at “making do” and imagining. That’s how they learn about life.

So which toys are good for sustainable and imaginative play?

We all know that a child will play with cardboard boxes, wrapping paper and kitchen pans etc. But further than that?

These are some examples of what I call generic toys:

  • a large tray (minimum 60x40x15cm) of damp sand
  • some self-hardening clay
  • paper, paint and felt pens
  • a play mat featuring roads and buildings
  • some Duplo Lego vehicles and people (the fiddly sort don’t mix with sand) – and yes, I know these are branded in one sense! But just have an assorted collection, not an official set
  • small plastic people and animals
  • dolls plus clothes, shawls, drinking bottle, nappies
  • basic doctor set – stethoscope, thermometer, syringe, blanket, cushion
  • animal glove puppets (try puppetsbypost.com)
  • two telephones with keypads or dials (one is no use at all for conversations!)
  • a plastic tea set preferably able also to survive the sand tray
  • dolls house with bendy occupants (shoe boxes work well for rooms and can be arranged to suit different homes your child might have, or even just your own home design)

Both boys and girls play with these in surprising ways if the time is quiet so they can just get lost in "imagination land".

You clearly don't need all of these. Choose a selection to suit.

So, by playing more slowly with generic toys, your child has time to organise their experiences, find solutions to “life”, and feel better about themselves.

Another child I met with was determined to make a puppet. They scorned me for not having needle and thread to hand. But then they laboriously prodded with a pencil to make holes in the felt shapes they’d cut – for string to go through – and “sewed” it up successfully.

Afterwards they said: “If one of your friends says they can’t do something, you can tell them about me managing this.”

What a valuable lesson they’d learnt that day by not having everything handed out, ready-made, in a branded, colourful box.

If we give children only sophisticated toys, the manufacturers are dictating how the toy should look and be used

Super attractive on the shop shelves. I'll give them that! But this kind of offering for "instant play" doesn’t last long (remember them unwrapping their Christmas presents?). 

The emotional deprivation of such toys contributes to children feeling insignificant and disempowered, and – not surprisingly – lacking in resilience. All factors that can lead to low mood and anxiety in time.

The best and healthiest sort of play needs to be a sustainable process with toys that let your child give free rein to their imagination..

Children can then become creative and inventive.

And, crucially this year, they can start their imaginative fight-back from the extra deprivations they suffered last year.