International Day of Play
Oscar Wood is co-founder and Director of Product at now>press>play, and is a co-founder of Seenaryo.
Criteria for play: “Initiated when an animal is adequately fed, healthy, and free from acute or chronic stress.”
This somewhat dry observation about play is from Gordon Burghardt, an American evolutionary biologist, and it’s his final defining criterion for the ever-difficult question: ‘what is play?’. Burghardt has spent a lifetime studying the playful behaviour of animals (including the Komodo dragon and the duck-billed platypus) and I came across his work while attempting to pool ‘definitions of play’ for a dissertation, a tricky task given the huge increase in play scholarship in the last 15 years. This idea of playing only when fed, healthy and not stressed was not mentioned by other theorists, so I confined it to my ‘miscellaneous notes’ – and forgot about it.
When I started writing about play in Lebanon, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its invasion of Lebanon had not begun – but since this time, I have heard from colleagues that children are playing less or not at all. It was then I remembered Burghardt’s definition: a depressing indication that, of course, like other animals, human children also do not play when chronically stressed. For most children, play fundamentally contributes to the kind of brain development which builds long-term psychological resilience. But for children caught up in war, Burghardt’s notion creates a vicious cycle: children feel too unsafe to play, and so their trauma is less likely to abate; they then feel even less inclined to play, their trauma increases, and so on. Teachers in Gaza have reported that they are trying to implement play, but children are simply unable to take part:
They don’t want to participate in activities [….] sometimes it can escalate to the point where a child becomes catatonic. They can’t speak.
The horrifying notion of a catatonic child is demonstrative of how war undoes childhood, undoes what Friedrich Frobel – the kindergarten’s founder and a Christian pantheist – would say is the ‘child’s nature’. Play is emblematic of what it means to be a child, at which age the verb ‘play’ often stands in for ‘do stuff’ or more simply ‘exist’: ‘I’m just finishing up, go and play’ or ‘Who did you play with today?’. This is poetically exemplified in two quotes from teachers that I spoke to in southern Lebanon, where Israel’s invasion has been most ferociously wrought:
“Play is like food for children.”
“A child needs to play like he needs to breathe.”
These two teachers use survival metaphors, and if you throw them into reverse then the child who does not play either starves or suffocates. In Gaza, children are being starved both literally and developmentally.
When I mention my work in non-professional contexts, a phrase I hear back a lot is: ‘But isn’t it incredible how resilient children are?’ or ‘They adapt so quickly, don’t they?’. I am never sure how to respond to this, partly because I know that the adult in question is often looking for reassurance. Yes, this can be true with very effective intervention or a drastic change in circumstance. But I don’t know if the world has permitted such egregious violence to be inflicted for so long on so many children in such a concentrated space. Teachers in Gaza, who are currently helping me design a project, list off the usual lack of resources in emergency contexts (no materials, no toys, no stationery) and then add to the list, ‘Oh, and we can’t use or mention specific body parts’. This is because Gazan children are so commonly missing limbs that games or songs which name or use specific body parts are inappropriate. Even in the 21st century’s ever-increasing range of ‘emergency contexts’, this is beyond what we know. To call children ‘resilient’, who are either too psychologically or physically traumatised to play, is a failure to look directly at what is unfolding.
Play is joyful and hopeful, and I would like to clutch at some straws before ending. These come in the form of hundreds of historical Seenaryo anecdotes: a boy finally emerging from under a table to join in with a lesson – or a selectively mute girl uttering her first ever words in a playful classroom. I will not say that all these children are going to be okay, but I do believe play is still the best of the very few remaining options.