Learning to Play: God help us.

If you have not seen a five-year-old child unable to play, you are blessed. Take a child of privilege and lead her outside, and there’s a good chance she will merely stand and wait to be told what to do.

This is a big problem. Given time, and no supervision, she might know how to break things or run amuck, but play? She waits to be told what to do. She does not know how to play.

Persist with time outside and it gets worse at first, not better. She may ask for a phone or pad so she can “do something.” Meanwhile, the tree fort beckons, the fairy cave is there to explore, and a field of flowers waits to provide scope for the imagination. Yet she still stands waiting for the gru’ps to say: “Here is a game!” Only then will she play.

Why we must teach our kids old games

We grownups forget that we once had to learn to play. If you are older, you were probably initiated into the games of childhood by grandparents, parents, or older siblings. I learned Red Rover from kids on the hill at Granny’s. They learned it from other kids back through a playful past to the first Granny who taught the kids a game.

Note that Granny taught us the game, but did not play with us or even supervise our rushing at linked arms. She might not have approved of all our tactics—I suspect Red Rover must have been born out of desperate Anglo-Saxon resistance to Viking marauders. It is brutal, but she would have smiled. After all, we were playing, modifying the old game, making it a new game and having fun together.

Our shared heritage of play is gone and we have not even measured the loss.

We assume that it’s fine to sell each generation a new, and ever more intrusive, “play system.” At the least, this impoverishes us by cutting us off from our parents. At the worst, it costs us an ancient heritage of play gained by centuries of trial and error. Instead of Red Light, Green Light we get whatever app will make someone as rich as an Angry Bird inventor.

We have cut off present kids from past games and, while this is not our most serious error, it is a bad mistake. We no longer have the shared experience of having played the same games in childhood. Generations misunderstand each other by nature, so any cord that might bind us together (“Remember when you played kickball?”) should not be cut lightly.

Here’s what you can do

When Socrates (Phaedrus 274c) began to discuss writing and learning, he had the same god invent writing, numbers, and basic games. Why? Games are our introduction to the higher things: we roll dice before we do calculus. Words represent ideas and games imitate reality. We play in order to get not playing right. This is why previous generations taught “fair play” and sportsmanship. If a man could not play as a gentleman, he was unlikely to live as one.

Gru’ps can begin to set up areas in which to play, they can pass on classic games, but then they should leave kids alone to play. This is vital in a rich society as people waste hours of time playing badly. The waste is bad enough, but that bad play habituates the person to bad living. If you cannot create a game, or innovate inside of one, you will not be able to create or innovate at work!

Lord, teach us to play.

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We have created the first natural playground in Houston and make learning to play well part of learning to read well, write well, and think well.  Over Giving Tuesday our community helped us raise the money to teach more kids to play.

Rachel Motte edited this essay.