Building Trust and Strong Connections with Children Through the Power of Play

I don't work with children often but I LOVE CHILDREN and when I do work with them it's heaps fun!

In my previous article “Tapping into Children’s Kindness and Imagination to Reinvent a Community”, I talked about how a stream of unexpected events in 2019 changed my life and career.

After arriving in Goa for the Global Asset Based Community Development Global Festival, I got an invitation to join the children of a slum in a village to teach them a theatre workshop and got to know about their amazing children-led initiatives to clean their river and reinvent their community.

In this article, I relate the story of what transpired in that “workshop” and encounter with the children and how I used creativity and play to build trust and connect with the children in the village.

Driving to the Village

While we were driving to the village, Vishal, a local volunteer, warned me that the kids can be rough sometimes: “they might try to pick up on you; they might get very physical and play rough games so be strict with them”.

When we were arriving at the village, a big group of kids was gathered, waiting for us.

As we were approaching, they started running after the car, this is how excited they were with the opportunity to meet someone from a different country.

As soon as Vishal stops the car, I hop off and greet the kids who start approaching me. I spontaneously start hi fiving a few of them raising my hand high so they must jump to reach my hand and hi five me back. This immediately becomes a game and the kids run one after the other to hi five me; this game leads to another game and then another and then to a theatre game until they started asking me questions.

Soon enough we are all having fun, sharing stories, and the whole community, parents and other locals stop to watch the spectacle. But at the same time, I notice that it is mostly the boys that are engaging in the games and conversations and not so much the girls.

So, I to ask the kids if they want to do some dancing. They unanimously shout yes. I tell them I will show them my dance, but they also must show me theirs. I dance and the kids start dancing and Vishal and the other volunteers join as well. Slowly the girls start joining too and showcasing proudly their traditional dances. Here is something they are happy to join and contribute. Soon the girls are outnumbering the boys and to bring balance we put on a dance battle. The teachers join; needless to say, that the girls win, we are all having fun!

Some Lessons Learned

This experience taught me a few lessons. Firstly, it reminded me that using different modalities, games and activities can attract and speak to different people and hence we need to be flexible, creative, open minded and think outside of the box when it comes to youth and community engagement. 

But it also taught me a great lesson about the power of play. By introducing spontaneous and structured play, games, and dances, I managed to quickly break the ice, build trust, and connect with the kids in a way that would relate to me and they were not rough or made fun of me as Vishal has warned me. Quite the opposite, we cocreated a space of mutual learning and connecting through play.

Now I can recall I had a similar experience in Guararema, a small town in Brazil where I was volunteering in an orphanage some years ago teaching art workshops for children; they were also curious, asking me questions about my country and other countries I have been, what languages I speak. We played games and shared stories together… an experience similar to the one in Goa.  

Play is a powerful and yet underutilized asset in our communities…

What does science tell us about the power of play for children’s healthy development and learning?

Peter Gray, psychologist and author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life says:

“Children today are cossetted and pressured in equal measure. Without the freedom to play they will never grow up”. 

According to studies related on his book, a decline in children’s play has led to increase in childhood mental disorders, anxiety, and depression in young people over the decades, a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism.

According to the author, children cannot learn these social skills and values in school, because most schools are an authoritarian, not a democratic setting that foster competition, not co-operation; children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes.

Hence, I would add here, this one of the reasons for the rise of many alternative schools in Sydney such as Warakirri College and Waranara Centre that offer a more flexible and safe space for students who, for various reasons, find it hard to cope in the traditional setting of a mainstream school.

As the author argues there is an association between the decline in children’s freedom and rise in mental disorders among children.

At the same time, he cites studies on his book promoting the idea that playing is learning. At play children learn the most important of life’s lessons, the ones that cannot be taught in school.

German philosopher and naturalist Karl Groos in a book called the play of animals (1898) argued that play came about by natural selection to ensure that animals would practice essential survival and reproductive skills.

Groos pointed out that humans, having much more to learn than other species, are the most playful of all animals.

Children in every culture, when allowed to play freely, play not only at the skills that are valuable to people everywhere but also at the skills that are specific to their culture.

Hunter Gatherers Communities and Sudbury Valley School: what do they have in common?

Sudbury Valley School, in Massachusetts, is a school where students are free all day to do whatever they want, if they don’t break any of the school rules that have to do with keeping peace and order.

The school has been around for 45 years and hundreds of students have graduated and doing fine in real world not because their school taught them anything but because it allowed them to learn whatever they wanted.

The interest thing here is that when children are free, they want to learn skills that are valued in our culture, that lead to good jobs and satisfying lives. When they play, these students learn how to read, calculate and use computers with the same playful passion with which hunter-gatherer kids learn to hunt and gather. Instead of thinking themselves as learning, they are just playing or “doing things” but in the process they are learning.

More than skills, they learn attitudes such as to take responsibility for themselves and their community, that life is fun, even when it involves things that are difficult.

The author argues that: “Both the Sudbury valley school and a hunter-gatherer band provide the essential conditions for optimising children’s natural abilities to educate themselves and share the social expectation (and reality) that education is children’s responsibility, not something that adults do to them, and they provide unlimited freedom for children to play, explore and pursues their own interest. “

They also provide many opportunities to play with the tools of the culture, access to a variety of caring and knowledgeable adults, who take up a helping, not judging role and mixed age play and learning among children and adolescents that is more conducive to learning than play among those who are all the same level.

In both settings children are immersed in a stable community so they can learn by example the values of the community and a sense of responsivity for others, not just themselves and like in the case of the children in Goa for their environment.

If students spend nearly all their time studying under the supervising or guidance of adults, they have little opportunity to be creative, take initiative or develop physical and social skills; in short, they have little opportunity to play.

These are principles that we also strongly believe and advocate for in Asset Based Community Development; we believe in the power of inclusive spaces that create the conditions for young people and community members to take responsibility of their neighborhoods and communities, exercise active citizenship and not expect outside experts to do it for them, to fix their issues. In these spaces, experienced hosts hold space and use creative activities for people to explore their strengths, map the different assets in their communities and come up with ideas and initiatives, causes that they care enough to act.

Play and Social Development

Play is also very important when it comes to social development. Peter Grey points that to have a happy marriage, or good friends, or helpful work partners we need to know how to get along with other people, perhaps the most essential skill all children must learn for a satisfying life.

In hunter gatherer bands, at Sudbury valley school and everywhere children have regular access to other children, most play is social play.

“Social play is the academy for learning social skills. Social play involves lots of negotiation and compromise, so you do not end up quitting but keep playing.”

He acknowledges that not all children can learn these lessons easily; bullies still exist but social play is by far the most effective venue for learning such lessons and children’s strong drive for such play came about in evolution primarily for that purpose.

Trauma, Attachment and Play

According to Zeta Anich, a New Zealand-based educational psychologist and child trauma specialist, one of the greatest deficits faced by children who’ve experienced trauma is that the development of their social-emotional skills is significantly delayed. Typically, these children are hyper-vigilant – watching out for where the next threat is coming from – which makes it hard to become engrossed in free play.

In NZ, most schools have implemented what they call “play-based learning.” This is about 60 minutes a day. Teachers typically have a number of ‘stations’ laid out with various materials (dress-up; Lego-type blocks; painting; role-play, jigsaws) from which the kids can choose. The kids are left to get on with it. Teachers typically just make sure everyone’s OK. They are only doing this for the 5- and 6-year-olds at present. In my experience, there is recognition among the teaching profession that play is learning, but it is token-gestures just yet.

A good question raised in the book Free to Learn is:

if we need more people who are good at memorising answers to questions and feeding them back? Who dutifully do what they are told, no questions asked?

Or if we need people who ask new questions and find new answers, think critically and creatively, innovate, and take initiatives and know how to learn on the job, under their own steam? 

And I reckon the second, exactly like in the case of the children in this small village in Goa.

Proud of What They Have Accomplished

After dancing and playing for almost two hours, the time came to go. But before I go, the children and locals want to show me the river, the floated garden, the crocodile, and other things in their community.

There is a sense of pride and accomplishment in the air. Their eyes look bright, and they talked enthusiastically about all the things they did in their community; a beautiful experience that touched me in a deep way.

Through spontaneity and play, I have managed to build a beautiful connection with the children and the locals in the village, get to learn about their culture, their community, their projects, dreams; play and share stories with them, a perfect example of ABCD work in action.

Closing Thoughts and a Question

 In his article Creativity Crisis (2011) Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia argued that we can’t teach creativity; all we have to do is let it blossom and it blossoms in play.

He further argues that little children, before they start school, are naturally creative and that our greatest innovators, the ones we call geniuses are those who somehow retain that childhood capacity, and build on it, right through adulthood and engage on what Albert Einstein calls “combinatorial play”.

This seems the case of the children and local volunteers in Goa as they creatively tapped into the power of their imagination and empathy to develop through curiosity, experimentation and play, children-led initiatives and as we saw on the other article, reinvent their community.

How about you?

What creative approaches do you use in your work with young people, organisations, and communities?

Do you have a similar story from your work or community?

I will be happy to connect, hear and share stories so we can learn from each other.

I would also love to talk to you if you would like to learn how to kindle inclusive spaces and encourage playful participation to transform your organisation or council into a nurturing community.

For a free 20mins strategic call, contact me at info@soul-gen.com.au

Looking forward to hearing from you and grow this important work together!

Regards, Dimitrios

2/07/2021