Ready, Set, Play

Rolling Through History

by Jean Bailey, Toy Industry Consultant

At first glance, balls appear to be just an easy-to-understand toy that kids innately love to engage with. But children are not the only ones exploring the magic and mysteries of balls. Recently, a team of international scientists revealed they had discovered some of the oldest game balls ever found. This was reported in an October 21, 2020 article in Smithsonian Magazine entitled, “These Hair-Filled Leather Pouches Are the Oldest Balls Found in Eurasia.”

With new evidence of ball games being played as early as 3,000 years ago, one could argue that these little spheres of fun might just be the oldest play product in the history of humanity. Today we are still enthralled with balls and continue to innovate how we produce and play with them.

We have balls that float and bounce off water, balls that glow in the dark and balls that seem to move with a mind of their own. Kids, and those young-at-heart, throw them, bounce them, hit them with a club and continue throughout their lifetimes to creatively engage with these circular play products.

Let’s just say the fun factor of balls has been proven by their enduring popularity throughout history.

But what about their educational prowess?

Equally amazing is the fact that these round recreational playthings have an almost unlimited amount they can teach. Starting almost at birth, children can learn so much from playing with balls, including hand grasping. Gripping these little spherical shapes requires small motor skills that later transfer to valuable life skills.

Balls, in all their sizes and colorful forms, are perfect tutors for eyehand coordination. Tracking an object with their eyes as kids watch balls bounce, roll and swirl is one of the most valuable lessons and is a precursor to learning how to read.

Developing a child’s finger muscles and the ability to transfer an object from one hand to another is an essential early skill all

children need to conquer. Balls are also master teachers of physical abilities and gross-motor skills like throwing, catching, aiming, rolling, bouncing, and kicking.

Let’s not forget all the applied physics lessons these little round wonders teach. Playing ball is full of real-life experiments with projectile motion, collision, energy, momentum, and gravity. These are scientific subjects that some of the most brilliant thought leaders in history explored in their time including Archimedes, Newton, and Galileo.

Playing ball with a young child is the perfect vehicle to practice what child development experts refer to as “serve and return.” Simply stated, serve and return refers to any responsive and interactive engagement between a caregiver and a child in which the adult and child take turns responding to each other, like rolling or throwing a ball back and forth. One champion of serve and return is the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child. They credit this type of interaction with building a child’s brain architecture.

“Serve and return interactions make everyday moments fun and become second nature with practice,” the Center said. “By taking small moments during the day to do serve and return, you build up the foundation for children’s lifelong learning, behavior, and health— and their skills for facing life’s challenges. There is a large amount of evidence from developmental psychology about the importance of contingent, reciprocal interaction (“serve and return”) for many aspects of early childhood development.”

Having sponsored extensive research into child development, it makes sense that the Harvard Center for the Developing Child is a leader in play advocacy.

“By engaging in playful serve and return with a child, you can literally help build stronger connections in the brain,” the Center said. “Strong neural connections are the foundation for all of a child’s future learning, behavior, and health.”

One of my favorite shower gifts to give new mothers (and dads, too!) is an assortment of balls that may include bouncing balls, sports balls, beach balls, throwing balls, kicking balls and any others that I might find in the marketplace. This collection is meant to encourage all the skills touched on in this article and more. I smile when my gift is opened knowing that perhaps I have encouraged this yet to be born child to play a sport they might learn to love, or simply develop the brain architecture necessary to graduate from Harvard if they so choose.

As we continue to discover, balls have been a part of our social fabric for thousands of years for good reasons. So, let’s do our best to keep them rolling on! ASTRA