Why Kids Abandon Creative Play
The observation that play gets short shrift as children come of age in the Western world is surely as old and as perennial as that civilization itself. The Bible puts it thus: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that 1 am become a man, I have put away childish things." Turning their attention to the phenomenon, psychologists have asked what might be the causal factors.
In the early 1900s, for instance, G. Stanley Hall argued that as children becomene "alive to [the] fictitious nature" of their play, it loses its charm. Jean Piaget argued mid-century that developing powers of rational thought make pretend play irrelevant to leaming and growing. More recently, scholars have considered other pressures that give pretend play the squeeze. Make-believe succumbs to what one le psycl/chologisrist has called a cultural "canalization" towards conventionality. That same canalization describes an apparent tapering of personal imagination and creative potential in older children and adults.
There are two typical pressure points managing the flow of imaginative play in childhood. Early on, the acquisition of language and of toys diverts make-belbelieve in certain socially sanctioned directions. Whether a child plays with a rag doll or a commercialized action figure can have as much effect as access to fairy tales or video ^ames. Again, in late childhood and adolescence, preparations for adulthood chok idiosyncratic make-believe in favor of peer-accepted games and pastimes. For thos( children and youth especially involved in complex play of their own making, this last funnel may provoke very conscious leave-taking of imagined worlds.
Notes:
Folksonomies: creativity imagination worldplay world play
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