On Becoming a Playful Blogger

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger asks, "How have you played on your blog?" Since I haven't been blogging all that much until recently, I'd have to respond, "I haven't." Though the meat of his video is thin, the sentiment is worthwhile and makes me reconsider why I started doing this in the first place.

He mentions how rants don't work for him in his space, but they do work for me. They are playful. Rants are a way to get worked up over ideas in embryo, to huff and puff without actually having to dodge falling bricks.

I don't have his playful Aussie accent or jaunty geekiness, so you won't find me posting videos of my talking head. But I have learned and developed as a result of this blog, so I'd like to let it live just a little longer. You can expect a few more rants.

Children Are an Outmoded Technology

This is one of the takeaways from a recent New York magazine article by Jennifer Senior, who tries to explain "Why Parents Hate Parenting." I have to agree:

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”)

About Take Your Child to Work Day...

Instead of indoctrinating our children into cubicle culture, shouldn't we instead celebrate Stay Home and Play with Your Child Day?

What Keeps Me Playful

Ever since I latched onto the notion of play as a guiding principle, I've revisited the concept continuously to hash out just what I mean by play. Is it fun? No, not always. As some of my snarkier posts attest, a fair bit of annoyance, even anger, comes out of play. So, then what is it?

I think play is a place to create and try things out and find the new in the mundane. Play is a place that seems safe amidst total uncertainty. And even if it isn't always truly safe, play is a place where we can fail spectacularly, accept the consequences, and move on. Play is about finding the confidence to risk.

One such place for me is Mrs. Librarian. Twists feature prominently in her world—all kinds of twists that explore the literal shifting ground beneath us, as well as the metaphorical shifting grounds of language, meaning, and identity. As you can imagine, she keeps me off balance. But it's a joyful unsteadiness, the way toddlers are when they're about tip yet continue to run, on their toes, mostly because they like the feeling even as they fall.

So if you care to know more about what keeps me Playful or need a dose of play in your world, pay her a visit at With a Twist.

The Thunder Burp

This blog's been really playful lately, what with all the coverage of the study of play in the news. Gives me the illusion of having my finger on the pulse of something. This time NPR contributed to my delusion of prescience with a report on the importance of play in children's development.

This story features findings from the National Institute for Early Education Research that suggests that make-believe leads children to learn how to self-regulate, mostly because it encourages private speech. In other words, kids tend to talk themselves through their actions when they pretend. Their studies correlate all sorts of good social behaviors that prevail in children who engage in the most make-believe and private speech.

Most interesting, though, is the connection this piece makes between how children once played and how they play now and what changes that brings about in their development. Also featured is the social historian Howard Chudacoff, who has a book coming out soon from NYU Press titled Children at Play: An American History.

What made this media ecologist's head snap back, and will likely be the reason I read Chudacoff's book, is that he points to October 3, 1955, as the date in which how we perceive play changed. The Mickey Mouse Club debuted on TV that day—but so did the first televised ad for a toy, Mattel's "Thunder Burp" gun. As Chudacoff says in the NPR story:

It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys. Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object.

Which leads me to wonder: What is the concept of play among children who've grown up in a world in which there have always been computers and the Internet? What will the children who grow up natively with pervasive, ubiquitous computing—that is embedded in our physical environments and that communicates with portable devices we carry—think play is?

It's So Important, the Times Mag Covered It

Dr. Brown and his institute, which we discussed last month, were profiled in this weekend's New York Times Magazine (thanks for the tip, Laena).

After an explanation that play, as observed among animals in nature, diminishes in times of distress, the article poses the central question, "If play is an extravagance, why has it persisted?" In other words, if it's inessential to survival, why do animals (including humans) still do it?

Well, based on how this husky's play skills stopped its ass from getting chewed by a hungry polar bear, I'd say play is more than simply an extravagance. However, I'd also say that play gives its participants confidence. Play is situational and safe—it's the acting out of an otherwise real situation in a safe context, one in which there's nothing at stake. Whether or not the specific actions of play are exact correlates of the real situation matters little. What matters is that the participants in play face a challenge under controlled conditions.

This is why martial arts training and apprenticeships are such successful systems. They involve an aspect of play—at least in the sense that the trainees are engaged in actions that simulate the real but don't carry the ultimate consequences of the real. After many many simulated challenges and circumstances, the trainee gains enough confidence to perform the action for real and often does so successfully, whether that action is breaking a board or fending off a real attacker or crafting a beautiful or useful object.

This aspect of play holds profound implications for education and art and business. By providing a safe place for newbies to learn and test their skills and knowledge, we're actually providing a great service to them and to the craft or field we hold dear. By providing a safe place for those who would follow in our footsteps, we ensure the security of our chosen field for at least one more generation—though I suspect in doing so, we ensure it for several more generations beyond.