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March 4, 2008
Some arts leaders could use this kind of play
An interesting series on NPR explored the structure, purpose, and benefits of various forms of play among young children (more on Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills and Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control, including audio of the stories, available on-line). The premise is that structured playtime, and highly specialized toys, do less to develop essential cognitive and self-control functions than creative and imaginative play. Says the overview:
It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.
It's a useful counterbalance to our frequent impulse to promote self-organizing skills through highly organized tasks (an error that many managers make with their own staff and board leadership, by the way). One of the particular mechanisms that extract self-organizing benefit from creative play, says the story, is by promoting ''private speech'':
According to [psychology professor Laura] Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what's called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.
I wonder how many arts organizations serving young children are managing this balance in their programming. And I also wonder how many grown-up cultural managers bring this perspective to the workplace.
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