Ready, Set, Play

readyset play Just Imagine

by Jean Bailey, Certified Play Expert

Halloween and Christmas are holidays ripe with imagination and full of possibilities to fuel a child’s love for pretend play.

What toys and play products promote a child’s imagination? You can easily identify those that contribute to a child’s physical, sensory, communicative, cognitive, and social and emotional development. But there is a mental faculty that overlaps and permeates so many play products. That’s imagination, and it plays a huge role in a child’s future self.

Through imagination and pretend play, a child can envision themselves in roles light years beyond their current capabilities and talents. Not surprisingly, if you examine the play histories of incredibly successful and famous people, you will often find that pretend play was an important contributor to their childhood.

Take, for example, Alexander Fleming and Richard Feynman.

Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist who was known to his friends as someone who always found time to play. He loved to paint, on petri dishes rather than canvases and with bacteria rather than paints. His search for new colors in his palette of pigments led to the discovery in 1928 of a bluish green mold. Through his play process with this bacterium, he discovered penicillium.

Feynman, as a student, was outstanding. As a scientist, he was superb. But it was in the realm of play that he was most inspired. As a child he spent hours imagining and visualizing four-dimensional figures simply for the joy of it, which strengthened his mental skills.

The book, “Sparks of Genius: the 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People,” investigated the lives of people like Fleming and Feynman to better understand creativity and how people develop it.

“Play breaks the rules of serious activity and establishes its own,” the book reads. “Play is frivolous, wandering according to the whims of curiosity and interest.”

That playful wandering helped Fleming discover the first antibiotic and Feynman to become a theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics and for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. These men pushed their minds and developed their imagination like one develops physical muscles.

“In the case of science, I think that one of the things that make it very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination,” Feynman once said. “It is very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like.”

Feynman connected games with gains in science when he said, “We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.”

When children pretend, they make new rules within their life. They can fly. They can be whoever they want to be. If you watch carefully a child dressed as a superhero, you can often witness by their demeanor and posture a transformation. Their confidence soars. Even toddlers look taller and more formidable with hands on their hips and feet spread apart in the superhero stance.

It is worthwhile to look at the products on your shelf, in your product line, or in the developmental stages of production and ask what the creativity quota is. Does it inspire imagination? One way to approach this is to borrow some of the elements identified in the book, “Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind,” by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. This list is based on their identification of aspects that highly creative people do differently.

Imaginative Play – Does your toy or play product call on the child to use imagination?

Solitude – Can the child easily play with this toy by him or herself?

Intuition—Does this play product ask the child to make a decision based on intuition versus logic?

Turning Adversity into Advantage— Does this game have some risk and turns of luck built in?

Thinking Differently—Does this play product encourage a child to think out of the box?

All these elements are easily advanced through pretend play.

Clinical child psychologist Sandra Russ is a true play advocate and has focused a great deal of her research on pretend play.

“Pretend play in childhood is where many of the cognitive and affective processes important in creativity occur,” she said.

She also believes that pretend play affects other developmental areas in the child including coping, emotional understanding and more.

The next time you see a child pretending, remember the words of Muhammad Ali.

“The man who has no imagination has no wings,” he said. ASTRA