Show notes
Contents Podcast Panelists Additional Resources Transcript These days, resilience is needed more than ever, and one simple, underrecognized way of supporting healthy and resilient child development is as old as humanity itself: play. Far from frivolous, play contributes to sturdy brain architecture, the foundations of lifelong health, and the building blocks of resilience, yet its importance is often overlooked. In this podcast, Dr. Jack Shonkoff explains the role of play in supporting resilience and five experts share their ideas and personal stories about applying the science of play in homes, communities, and crisis environments around the world. Panelists Andres Bustamante, Assistant Professor, University of California Irvine School of Education Laura Huerta Migus, Deputy Director, Office of Museum Services at Institute for Museum and Library Services Lynneth Solis, Researcher and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Erum Mariam, Executive Director, BRAC Institute of Educational Development, BRAC University Michael Yogman, Pediatrician, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge Hospital Additional Resources Resources from the Center on the Developing Child Video: Play in Early Childhood: The Role of Play in Any Setting Video: How-to: 5 Steps for Brain-Building Serve and Return Handout: 5 Steps for Brain-Building Serve and Return Video: Building Babies’ Brains Through Play: Mini Parenting Master Class (from UNICEF) Report: Three Principles to Improve Outcomes for Children and Families InBrief: The Science of Resilience Resources from Our Guests Panel Learning to Cope through Play UCI STEM Learning Lab Playful Learning Landscapes Understanding the Social Wellbeing Impacts of the Nation’s Libraries and Museums Play in Humanitarian Settings 5 Takeaways from Supporting Refugee Parents to Help Children Learn and Thrive During Covid-19 BRAC Humanitarian Play Lab: when playing becomes healing BRAC: ECD and Play “I try to take their pain away through play”: A healing experiment in Rohingya refugee camps (Quartz: membership required) Prescription for Play The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children Preventing Childhood Toxic Stress: Partnering with Families and Communities to Promote Relational Health Transcript Sally Pfitzer, host: Welcome to the Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m your host, Sally Pfitzer. Our Center believes that advances in science can provide a powerful source of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and families. We want to help you apply the science of early childhood development to your everyday interactions with children and take what you’re hearing from our experts and panels and apply it to your everyday work. So in today’s episode, we’re going to get serious about the topic of play. For children, play is a fundamental building block of child development, but its role in supporting resilience is often overlooked. And after the past few years, we surely need resilience now more than ever! For me, as a former preschool teacher, I’m especially excited about this episode and speaking with today’s experts, because I’ve seen first-hand how important play is for young children’s development. But what can science tell us about it? And what can be done to support more play in everyday life, even in crisis contexts? In this podcast, we’ll dive into the science of play and resilience, and then we’ll explore how people are using that knowledge to support child development around the world. To explain the science, we’ll start with Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Professor of Child Health and Development and the Director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. So Jack, what do we mean by resilience and what do we know about how people develop it? Jack Shonkoff: What we mean by resilience is that we’re talking about the ability to do well, the ability to cope, the ability to overcome hardship, or adversity, or threat to your well-being. So the key about resilience is it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Resilience is something that you actively build, and you build it in the context of relationships in an environment that helps you learn how to cope with challenges, cope with stress, cope with hardships. And it starts very early. It starts in infancy. And infants need to have some sense of participation in that. But also, you don’t do it totally on your own. You need the support and the security, when you’re a baby, of adults who basically help provide a manageable environment in which you can learn resilience. So, if stresses and threats are overwhelming, they can overwhelm the system. And you don’t really get a chance to build resilience. If every time something happens that challenges you, somebody jumps in to protect you, that’s not good for you either because you have to build that yourself. So the environment has a lot to do with how you develop resilience and skills, but so does your own activity on the environment, your own sense of being a player rather than just a receiver. But no two children are the same, even children in the same family, growing up in the same environment. From birth, children differ in how adaptable they are. If you go into a newborn nursery in a hospital, the nurses who work there can tell you about how those babies are all different from each other. Some kids are just more easygoing, constitutionally. Some kids roll with the flow, a little bit easier than others. So in a sense, we don’t all start off with the same way of reacting to stress or hardship. Sally: That’s great. And thinking about how resilience is built, are there specific building blocks that you need to think about? In this case, could you talk a little bit more about how play might support those building blocks? Jack: Play, by definition, is an interactive process or a kind of self-directed process. It’s not by chance that all children, regardless of where they live in the history of the species, use play as a way to develop skills. It’s the way children learn to master their environment. And they learn to try things out. They test things. They test limits. It’s driven by curiosity, and it’s driven by an inborn drive to master the environment. And if you think about what resilience is all about, resilience is mastering your environment. It’s building the skills to be able to cope, building the skills to have strategies, to deal with your own reactions, be able to have some control over what’s going on around you. And none of that would develop as well as it does if you depended on just being taught how to be resilient. No. Your ability, your natural ability to play, is one of the most important strategies that we have developmentally to build resilience in the face of adversity. Sally: So, what is the science that underlines this connection between healthy development and how play supports it? Jack: God, there are mountains of science that help us to understand the process of development. And three principles, three concepts, just continue to stand out among all of the research, evidence, and knowledge we have about development. And they are the keys to healthy development. The first is the importance of supportive relationships. Children develop in an environment of relationships. So, supportive relationships are critically important for healthy development. The second is the need to reduce significant sources of stress—not eliminate stress, but reduce stress, so it’s manageable. And then the third is building core skills, the kinds of skills that are needed for just about anything that we’re expected to do at any point in our life. So these are the core skills that are the building blocks of learning, and behavior, and good health. And if we put those three things together—supportive relationships, reducing sources of stress, and building core skills—they are essential for us to understand not only how resilience develops over time, but also what an important role play occupies in that process. Particularly in a young child, there is this sense of trying to figure out what the world is all about. So core skill development, which is essential for building resilience, is very much tied into the ability to learn actively through play and through interaction with others. There has been so much research done on resilience in a variety of circumstances, trying to understand what is it that explains how some children overcome adversity and do well in spite of hardship and threats. The one thing that comes out in just about every single study is whenever there’s evidence of resilience, you can always identify at least one very important relationship that was critical to the development of resilience. Very often, it’s a parent. It doesn’t have to be a parent. It can be another member of the family. It doesn’t have to be a family member. It could be a neighbor. It could be a preschool teacher. It could be a child care provider. It could be a coach. It doesn’t really matter who it is. It certainly doesn’t have to be a blood relative, but there has to be at least one relationship that basically provides a scaffold in which children develop the skills to be able to cope themselves. That’s the ultimate answer to the question of, can you build your own resilience? The answer is for all the studies that have ever been done, no, you can’t. You can’t become resilient yourself. You can’t will yourself to be resilient. You have to be able to be supported by at least one nurturing relationship. If we look across the incredible range of experiences and conditions that children grow up in, the principles remain the same. Children are all busy actively mastering their environment, regardless of what that environment is. The challenge is to understand what’s individually different about each child and what is the nature of the environment in which the child is living. And everything else is just figuring that out based on basic principles of what science tells us about development. Sally: So Jack, you spoke earlier about how play helps build resilience. I’m wondering if you could you give us an example of what that might look like at different ages—for example, what would it look like for an infant? Jack: What play is about is early on, beginning in the earliest of infancy, really, shortly after birth, is if you think about what babies do, and once babies become attuned to the people who are caring for them, it’s the kind of thing that gets everybody all excited—the eye contact, the beginning of a smile, the cooing, and the vocalizations, and all that stuff that elicits back and forth, serve and return interaction between very young infants and adults. The vocalizing back and forth, the smiling, the looking around and then looking at the same thing, and then handing something, and grabbing it, and giving it back. And, all of those very simple interactions early on are playful interactions. And then, as you move out of the very earliest of infancy and get into the second half of the first year, when babies become more mobile, and they’re rolling over, and then they’re crawling, being able to reach for things, and grab things. You find the right balance between allowing the child some room to do things in a protected environment and also initiating some things with you. So you initiate interactions. You respond to interactions. You let a child move around. You put stuff out on the floor for a child to play with. And sometimes, hopefully, you leave the child alone in a safe place and let the child explore. All of this, a lot of people may not think of that as play. They may think of play as more organized kinds of activities. But that is the beginning of play. It’s the beginning of active learning, discovery, curiosity, trying things, learning from what happens when you do something, action and reaction, all that stuff. And then, as you get older and you start to play more organized games, play peekaboo, play Simon Says with a child that’s a little bit older, play all these kinds of games that have rules attached to them, rules about taking turns, rules about following instructions, all of this, board games as kids get older, and then as they get into the school age years, organized games, sports, more challenging board games, again, now most people would say, oh, yeah, that’s like play. That’s what play is all about. But it started much earlier, and it started with the foundation that was all about discovery, creativity, exploration, learning. In the best of all worlds, play doesn’t end until you die, because play is a way of thinking and engaging with the world. Play is one of the most important vehicles for having some sense of mastery and control over the world that you live in, which is getting us very close to the definition of what resilience is all about. It’s not being able to just deal with predictable things that you’re expecting and you’re prepared to cope with, but being able to deal with anything that life sends your way. Sally: Could you talk a little bit more about how play might actually support health? What are we learning from our current research? Jack: This is a really important question and a really important expansion of how we think about play. It’s easy to understand that most of the conversation and most of the thinking about play for the last, let’s say, last 20 years as we’ve been learning more and more about the science of early development is it naturally connects to learning and behavior. It was very brain-focused. But it’s not just the brain that’s developing. It’s the immune system and metabolic systems. Just like the brain is experience-dependent, the immune system is experience-dependent. It’s learning about different bacteria and viruses that are out there and it’s exposed to. And as a result of that, the immune system is building resistance to those infections early on and preparing you for better physical health. And the same thing with metabolic systems. A well-regulated environment every day is affecting all of these systems. And a dysregulated environment or a highly stressed environment, as it affects the immune system, can cause increased inflammation, which is part of the stress response. And early behavioral regulation, it leads to more health-promoting adult behaviors, less likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors, less likely to engage in addictive behaviors, problems with smoking, problems with alcohol, problems with risky physical activities that get you into trouble. So the link with play—there’s no question that somewhere down the road over the next 10 to 20 years, we will all have an understanding that playful learning and the role of play in building resilience is as much about physical and mental health as it is about early learning and school achievement. Sally: You’ve given us so much to think about, as always, Jack! Thanks so much for your time and being here with us today. When we come back, our panel is going to give us some examples of how they’re putting that science into action. Musical interlude Sally: Okay, so we’ve learned a bit about how play affects our biology. Let’s bring it out of the lab now, and into our daily lives. Most of us think about play happening in child care and on playgrounds, but play can honestly happen anywhere! In our next segment, I’m so excited to talk to our panel members, who have lots of examples to share. Joining us on today’s podcast, we have Andres Bustamante, who is an assistant professor in human development in context at the University of California Irvine. Thanks for being here today. Andres Bustamente: Thank you, Sally. It’s such a pleasure to be here. Sally: Also on today’s podcast, we have Lynneth Solis, who’s a researcher and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It’s so nice to talk to you today, Lynneth. Lynneth Solis: Thank you, Sally. It’s a pleasure to be here. Sally: And also o…
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