My Connections to Play

The playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery. - Erik H. Erikson

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity. – Kay Redfield Jamison.

Play was an important activity in my life when I was a girl, and as a teacher it is something I enjoy to do with students and co-workers. Besides school and some activities I did at home or with my family, I do not remember myself doing anything else in my childhood, but playing. My parents and two older siblings were very positive about the playing activities that my young sister, our friends, and I had at home, like playing with Barbies, turning our room into our little house or riding bikes, being this last activity possible because my parents’ house is big enough and gave us plenty of room to fall down, get up, and try it again.

Besides my parents and older siblings, my grandmother, uncles, aunts, and parents of two of my best friends were people who take care of me when I was playing with my friends or cousins. My parents always let me invite my friends to play at my house, and they also let me go to some of my friend’s house, only when they knew my friend’s parents were trustable people, to my parents.

 

When I had the chance to go out of my house, I always did it riding my purple bike. My lovely bike made me feel independent and important because I could get almost anywhere riding it. I remember that my mom used to ask me to go out and buy fresh baked buns after school, and this was awesome because I felt important for getting food for our meal. Nowadays, there is no need to go anywhere to get those buns, because there are people who sell them in their trucks on the streets, and each truck has its own route and schedule.

This was my favorite Barbie, out of three, because we could do her long hair with different styles as many times as we wanted. My mom let us use our regular shampoo to wash her hair, in order to keep it shiny and clean… that was our excuse… and it always worked!

This is the main garden and the most important place in my hometown, where I spent part of my childhood playing with my friends and cousins. Here we used to play hide and seek, catch others, soccer ball, Chinese jump rope, or we just sat down on a bench to drink something and plan our next game. This place is a block away from my parent’s house and right in front of my grandmothers’ and my best friends’ house too. Having that important people to me and living that close to the place where my friends and I used to gather made feel safe and independent.

Since I grew up in a small community in Mexico, where only few cars were seen on the streets, and in a place where everybody used to know each other, it was easy to play on the streets. I think that going out on our own and play on the streets when children, gave us confidence, independence, and security. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to play on the streets because of the traffic, and the most important fact to me, there is more people living in the place, new people, people who not everybody knows either trusts. But children have opportunities that I did not have, like being part of a sport team, which was not common in my hometown, but a characteristic of the city.

Play is such an important activity in life, even as adults that as Plato said “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play that in a year of conversation”, because when we play we forget out adulthood routine and just enjoy what we are doing, being who we really are. As adults we may have an endless list of things to do, but playing should be the repetitive activity in that list.