Currently Happening Presently Now: PLAY

“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.”
-Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1953, page 50.

Gray, P. (2009). Play as a foundation for hunter-gatherer social existence. American Journal of Play, 1(4), 476-522.

_{The author offers the thesis that hunter-gatherers promoted, through cultural means, the playful side of their human nature and this made possible their egalitarian, nonautocratic, intensely cooperative ways of living. Hunter-gatherer bands, with their fluid membership, are likened to social-play groups, which people could freely join or leave. Freedom to leave the band sets the stage for the individual autonomy, sharing, and consensual decision making within the band. Hunter-gatherers used humor, deliberately, to maintain equality and stop quarrels. Their means of sharing had gamelike qualities. Their religious beliefs and ceremonies were playful, founded on assumptions of equality, humor, and capriciousness among the deities. They maintained playful attitudes in their hunting, gathering, and other sustenance activities, partly by allowing each person to choose when, how, and how much they would engage in such activities. Children were free to play and explore, and through these activities, they acquired the skills, knowledge, and values of their culture. Play, in other mammals as well as in humans, counteracts tendencies toward dominance, and hunter-gatherers appear to have promoted play quite deliberately for that purpose.}

Peter Gray. (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Basic Books.

_{"Nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or ‘quality time’ or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away. The things that children learn through their own initiatives, in free play, cannot be taught in other ways.”}

Kennair, L. E. O. (2011). Children’s risky play from an evolutionary perspective: The anti-phobic effects of thrilling experiences. Evolutionary Psychology, 9(2), 257-284.

_{This theoretical article views children’s risky play from an evolutionary perspective, addressing specific evolutionary functions and especially the anti-phobic effects of risky play. According to the non-associative theory, a contemporary approach to the etiology of anxiety, children develop fears of certain stimuli (e.g.,heights and strangers) that protect them from situations they are not mature enough to cope with, naturally through infancy. Risky play is a set of motivated behaviors that both provide the child with an exhilarating positive emotion and expose the child to the stimuli they previously have feared. As the child’s coping skills improve, these situations and stimuli may be mastered and no longer be feared. Thus fear caused by maturational and age relevant natural inhibition is reduced as the child experiences a motivating thrilling activation, while learning to master age adequate challenges. It is concluded that risky play may have evolved due to this anti-phobic effect in normal child development, and it is suggested that we may observe an increased neuroticism or psychopathology in society if children are hindered from partaking in age adequate risky play.}

Sandseter, E. B. H. (2009). Children’s expressions of exhilaration and fear in risky play. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 10(2), 92-106.

_{Children naturally seek and conduct exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury (risky play). Even though several prior studies give descriptions of risky play, none of them deeply explore children’s expressions of how they experience different kinds of risky play. This study aims to do that. The results from video observations of children’s risky play in two Norwegian preschools reveal that children experience several emotions, expressed bodily, facially, and verbally, while engaging in risky play. Their experiences include both pure exhilaration and pure fear, and quite often both emotions are present at the same time. The findings also indicate that one of the main aspects of risky play is to keep the exhilaration bordering on the feeling of pure fear; but if pure fear occurs, the play ends with withdrawal. Suggested implications of the study are that risk taking should be acknowledged as an important part of children’s play, and that children should be able to engage in challenging play adjusted to their individual sense of risk and urge for exhilaration.}


Bateson, P. (2005). The role of play in the evolution of great apes and humans. The nature of play: Great apes and humans, 13-24.

_{In all its manifestations play is characterised by its apparent lack of serious purpose or immediate goal...Play is also exquisitely sensitive to prevailing conditions and is usually the first nonessential activity to go when all is not well. Its presence or absence is a sensitive barometer of the individual animal's psychological and physical well-being...Play happens only when basic short-term needs have been satisfied, and the animal is relaxed. It is therefore the first activity to disappear if the animal is stressed, anxious, hungry, or ill.}

"Children are born with the instinct to take risks in play, because historically, learning to negotiate risk has been crucial to survival; in another era, they would have had to learn to run from some danger, defend themselves from others, be independent. Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia...
The final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980...Even rubber surfacing doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in the real world. David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University, analyzed U.K. injury statistics and found that as in the U.S., there was no clear trend over time. 'The advent of all these special surfaces for playgrounds has contributed very little, if anything at all, to the safety of children,' he told me...
What has changed since the 1970s is the nature of the American family, and the broader sense of community. For a variety of reasons—divorce, more single-parent families, more mothers working—both families and neighborhoods have lost some of their cohesion. It is perhaps natural that trust in general has eroded, and that parents have sought to control more closely what they can—most of all, their children...
As we parents began to see public spaces—playgrounds, streets, public ball fields, the distance between school and home—as dangerous, other, smaller daily decisions fell into place. Ask any of my parenting peers to chronicle a typical week in their child's life and they will likely mention school, homework, after-school classes, organized playdates, sports teams coached by a fellow parent, and very little free, unsupervised time. Failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent... "
-Hanna Rosin, The Overprotected Kid, The Atlantic, March 19, 2014.

Tom Bartlett, "The Case for Play," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2011.

Bernstein, G., & Triger, Z. (2010). Over-Parenting. UC Davis L. Rev., 44, 1221.

_{Contemporary parents engage in Intensive Parenting. Parents devote their time to actively enriching the child, ensuring the child’s individual needs are addressed and that he is able to reach his full potential. They also keep abreast of the newest child rearing knowledge and consistently monitor the child’s progress and whereabouts. Parents are expected to be cultivating, informed, and monitoring. To satisfy these high standards, parents utilize a broad array of technological devices, such as the cellular phone and the Internet, making Intensive Parenting a socio-technological trend. Many legal doctrines aim at defining the scope of parental responsibilities; yet, courts, legislatures, and scholars alike have ignored this significant change in child rearing practices. Unattended, the law already plays an important role in enhancing the socio-technological trend of Intensive Parenting. In the area of custody disputes, legislatures and courts effectively enforce Intensive Parenting norms. Other recent legal developments, such as the constriction of the Parental Immunity Doctrine and recurring transformation of preferred child rearing practices into legal standards, open the door to the incorporation of additional Intensive Parenting norms into the law. This Article underscores that despite its advantages, Intensive Parenting can become over-parenting. First, the Article shows that Intensive Parenting is not a universal trend. It is dependent on class, race, ethnicity, and culture. Enforcement of Intensive Parenting in a multicultural society would increase existing biases in the child welfare system and force Intensive Parenting on those who may be financially unable or ideologically unwilling to adopt it. Second, the Article reveals that although Intensive Parenting carries important advantages, it can disrupt healthy psychological development in children. The Article, therefore, cautions against hasty incorporation of Intensive Parenting norms into the law.}

Pimentel, D. (2012). Criminal Child Neglect and the Free Range Kid: Is Overprotective Parenting the New Standard of Care. Utah L. Rev., 947.

_{Parenting in American society is a far more demanding enterprise than it once was, and the changes over a single generation are startling. Intensive Parenting is becoming the norm in the dominant American subcultures, which are embracing safety-conscious parenting approaches that might once have been viewed disapprovingly as “overprotective” parenting. Most of the change is motivated by a well-intentioned desire to protect and promote children’s safety and welfare—more specifically to insulate them from risks of physical harm and victimization, and increase their access to educational and cultural advantage. De facto legal standards appear to be evolving right along with these attitudes about proper parenting, with individual parental choices increasingly second-guessed by a society now willing to pass judgment on them...The concern here is that parents who resist the trend toward overprotective parenting, including Free Range parents who consciously choose to give their children a long leash, may expose themselves to criminal liability.}