A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
There are of course not many upsides to a global pandemic, but one of them may be that the single biggest threat to youth wellbeing is lessened. Founders of free-play advocacy organisation Let Grow, Lenore Skenazy and Peter Gray, point out that anxiety is an already huge problem for young people that has also been [...]
You may have heard of play. It’s that thing children do – the diverse range of unstructured, spontaneous activities and behaviours. Children play in many ways, including by exploring movements, constructing with equipment, creating games, using imagination and chasing others around a playground. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises play as [...]
The most famous painting of children at play is “Children’s Games,” the 1560 work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of a town square in which children from toddlers to adolescents (scholars have counted 246) are playing a range of timeless games. There are dolls and marbles and tiddlywinks, ball games and climbing games and riding [...]
“Play has become a four-letter word.” So says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychologist at Temple University and one of the authors of a new paper about the importance of play in children’s lives. The clinical report, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommends that pediatricians write a “prescription for play” at doctor visits in the [...]
Cheap items like crates and buckets encourage children to be more active and creative than expensive play equipment, researchers have found. The findings are the result of a long-term study by RMIT University researchers in Melbourne, Australia, into the play differences of primary school children with access to different playgrounds. Introducing simple, everyday objects during [...]
