Woman's Hour - Parenting: The Importance of Play

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

How much are we squeezing play out of our children’s days, our institutions and spaces? Michael Rosen, author of ‘Book of Play’ joins Jenni to talk about why play matters to both children and adults – and to share tips on how we can get more of it in our lives.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to this week's podcast for parents. Now Michael Rosen's voice is not an unfamiliar one to Radio 4 listeners. He's the presenter of Word of Mouth. He's a former children's laureate. And I'm sure lots of you will have read his stories and his poems to your children. Well his new book

is called Michael Rosen's Book of Play. Why play really matters and 101 ways to get more of it in your life. Michael, you describe yourself in this book as an ad-libber, a chancer and a blagger.

And you say we all have those qualities. Do we really? Yes. Everything I've ever known about people is that they have these moments when they improvise, think on their feet, blurt something out, try something out at a party, at a wedding, at a funeral. Yes, I think there's something pretty well in all of us that is like that, yes. But why are there useful qualities when it comes to play? Because play is about trial and error without any fear of failure. That's how I see play.

A lot of things that we do, we either don't have much trial and error about it, or if we do something that is a bit gamey i would say in the gaming area we do have a fear of failure it's not bad it's not bad to have a fear of failure in a sort of gaming situation because that's part of the fun of it but the important thing about play is that it's open-ended and if there are rules then you're the one who makes them so the idea of improvising and blagging and chancing it are really important in play because you have the sense that anything can happen here.

I could just work this out on my feet. So what kind of things do you include yourself under the term play? I was quite surprised to find that you try to see how much of the dishwasher you can empty without actually breathing. That's right. Because we have these things around us, dishwashers washing machines front doors and all the rest of it and these are all very rule bound, they've all

been created by the wonderful world of science but for them, and you can treat these things in a very passive way as if somehow or other they're there and permanent and you have to do how you've been instructed to do it, but actually all around us there are things that you can play with. So I know it sounds weird.

You know, kiddies will remember in the old days of very loud flushing toilets and chains. You know, could you get from the loo to the kitchen, holding your breath before the loo stopped flushing? Things like that. Well, why do kiddies do that? Why do I go on doing it? Because it's to make the world more of your own.

So you're not a passive receiver, but somehow or other, you make it part of yourself. So it's you treat the world as something that you can be active in instead of it's something that you receive. What do we know about the idea of play, its origins as a concept? I think we can say that when we look at ancient artifacts of one sort or another, when we look at some of the great scientific discoveries, that at the core of them is an idea that somebody had to play with possibilities, had to play with what was there. So, you know, there's an ancient flute that has been found, 30,000 years old, possibly more, and it's been out of the the wing bone of a vulture so this is one of the oldest artifacts we have and it's a flute so just if we think how would you arrive at the possibility of making what must be one of the world's first flutes if you weren't playing with the materials around you to find what could make noises that enabled you to make that kind of

cawly sound that a flute does and it's got holes so you can stop the notes on it. I mean I just think this is incredible. It's thousands, tens of thousands of years old and it could only have come about with play. If you think again to the double helix and DNA and you think well they had

to play with things like pipe cleaners to figure out how it was that you could replicate um from that from one human being to the next they had to work out and we know Rosalind Franklin uh Crick and Watson and so on they they worked out how it was but it can only come with the mind being able to think of something in a playful way in order to arrive at what's the truth. How easily do children play naturally and I'm not talking about you know having lots and lots of toys to play with but pretending things, dressing up and being different people, does it come absolutely

naturally to them? I think it flourishes put it that way with our encouragement and it can be easily discouraged if we tell children that they're being silly um so i think we can create an environment that encourages it in other words if you have an old clothes box and if you have things and you're not too bothered immediately as to whether the clothes go back in the box and so they can spread them out on the floor and create a mess in the room that my mother used to call a mission de manque, that you can pick it up and pick up a hat and drop it. And then in that situation, then I'd say between the ages of three and nine, children will do a lot of dramatic play.

They'll also do it, of course, with whatever they've got, a little combination of dolls or Playmobil or whatever it is, any of these little people that they can play with and role-play through it, and listening through the keyhole of my children's doors sometimes, you could hear them. Quite handy if grown-ups aren't actually in the room. They'll start playing out, being the people in these little scenarios and these plays that they create.

And it's thought, we know, that this is incredibly important. You're basically re-enacting the world as you've seen it and trying out what would it be like to be an ambulance person what would it be like to be uh you know a person in a traffic control or something like that you're trying out these things but also trying out those important things about your close personal relationships and of course that again that's what play enables you to do. Try it out, see what it feels like. And also with children to try out omnipotence,

to try out what would it be like if you're bigger than yourself? What would it be like if you could run everything and fly through the air? Why do we tend to lose it as we grow up? That's a tricky one, isn't it? I think it's because we're invited to be serious and productive. So we connect this word play with childish, childishness. We've got these words that are pejorative about children. Why? We like children. Why do we have this word childish? And so we connect that idea. And then there's this sort of bit where you prepare to be productive,

let's say at secondary school onwards. And then you've got 18 of bit where you prepare to be productive let's say it's secondary school onwards and then you've got 18 to 60 where you're being productive and then you're this sort of uh not very useful person post 60 so there's this idea that that's what's important so on either side of it and also of course in leisure time that's unimportant now if you've got that hanging about then play can seem seem like unnecessary, unimportant, an add-on, rather than if we treat human beings in a holistic way and say, well, it's all of you, your ability to play, to work, to be ill, it's all of you. You're a big fan of what my mother used to call, rather pejoratively, Dolly Daydreaming. Why?

Well, I think Dolly Daydreaming, or whatever you want to call it, reverie, we've got lots of words for it, haven't we? This is when we, if you like, chew over who we've been, what happened, what we would have preferred to have happened, and what we would like to happen.

So this is powerful stuff. This is all stuff to do with how we really feel about ourselves. And that is a form of play because you can sit there and say well why wasn't he there why wasn't she there and then you could say what would have happened if he she was right and then i when i work with children i work with the idea that you can harvest your daydreams and that's a nice thing to do because you can harvest them by drawing by painting by photography by writing poems by all sorts of things when you harvest your daydream

then you in a sense you go one step further because you put the play thing out in front of you and then you can then speculate even more about it just briefly just two things that you would like to see a family doing when they've heard the words oh mum I'm bored well I would go towards word games because I'm a wordy person but some people do other things so with wordy games it's ever so it's good fun to make up make up tongue twisters because all you've got to do is find two sounds that are a bit alike like each other you know sh and sir and then you think of all the sh sir words that you know and then you see if you can repeat it. So that's one nice thing.

Some people who've got the limerick form in their heads, they can do that. But doodling is just a lovely thing to do. What way do you doodle? And then to colour in your doodles, and then to swap round. Take your do-your-doodle, pass it to someone else. Pass it to someone else.

Michael Rowden, lovely idea. Thank you very much indeed for being with us. And don't forget, we love to hear from you. It's where we get our ideas about the problems parents have. So let us know, send us a tweet or an email, and we'll use your ideas in the future. Thank you. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody.

Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.