My Connections To Play

“Everything I needed to learn, I learned in Kindergarten.” “When I was child I spoke as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

My play was supported by my family and friends. When I got my rocking horse on Christmas I rocked on it every day for months. And I remember having a doll in which I kept it until my late teens. My doll was essential to my childhood because I was an only child so I played by myself and with neighborhood friends. Childhood play is much different today. Today, childhood is spent mostly indoors, watching television, playing video games and working the Internet. When children do go outside, it tends to be for scheduled events - soccer camp or a fishing derby - held under the watch of adults. The shift to an indoor childhood has accelerated in the past decade, with huge declines in spontaneous outdoor activities such as bike riding, swimming and touch football, according to separate studies by the A child is six times more likely to play a video game on a typical day than to ride a bike. The change can be seen in children's bodies. More kids are overweight. It can be seen in their brains. Studies indicate that children who spend lots of time outdoors have longer attention spans than kids who watch lots of television and play video games. "New research indicates that our intuition is right: Kids are spending way too much time with media and not enough time outside. The lure of television and video games isn't the only thing keeping kids indoors. Parents are more afraid of letting kids roam in a world of heavy traffic and reports of pedophiles and missing children. Smaller packs of kids roam neighborhoods. Air-conditioning means kids don't need the local pool or swimming hole to cool off. "Boundaries for kids used to be measured by blocks or miles. Now, the boundary for most kids is the front yard. My childhood was somewhat different than the children today. I used my imagination more and I actually interacted with other children on the street in which I lived. Play was indeed a very important part of my childhood and I am glad I grew up in the time I did.