Significance of Play: Why It s Considered To Be One Of The Child Rights

In 1992, India had signed and gave its consent by ratifying one of the most widely accepted and celebrated human rights treaties in the history of the world. While doing so, India became agreed to follow and uphold the various clauses that are explained in details in the United Nations Convention on The Rights of The Child. Every place, institution and establishment that deals with minors below the age of 18 in any field should have the knowledge of various social, economic, political and cultural rights that the government has consented to grant to the children. Either it be a family or school, daycare or hospital, a public space like park or the private quarters of the house; a child has certain rights in all these settings and all the adults, as upstanding citizens of a nation that has consented on a global for a to follow the articles set out in the UNCRC, have the responsibility of informing the children of their rights as well as providing that comfort and safety zone where children can practice them.

It has been 26 years since India had signed this treaty and it is extremely debatable as to how much change it has brought in the country, if all the articles in the treaty aimed towards development and protection of the minors are being followed. However, here the focus will be on one specific article in the UNCRC that every parent and school dealing with minors should be aware of. The first section of Article 31 of UNCRC states that every child has the right to play and leisure.

Yes, a child is born with legal rights to play. While it can garner patronizing amusement out of many, a child being given the time and opportunity to play has been considered to be of utmost importance, significant enough for international lawmakers and human rights activists to be included in a legally binding document that obliges every nation that has chosen to ratify it to take it seriously. In case this is new information to process, can we take a moment to wonder why? And if this is something we are already aware of, have we ever sat down and pondered over the reason as to why children are so deeply associated with the idea of being given the free reign to play? What is the general mentality of our society towards children being given a hefty amount of time to simply enjoy, play games and frolick to their heart’s content? Not a very positive one, to say the least. Parents might not be too comfortable with the idea of their child going to school to ‘just play the whole day’. Even as India is seeing a rise in schools diverting from the conventional education system and leans away from teacher- centered instructional methods that approach the child as a passive receiver, there remains a huge part of the society that is still reluctant to truly accept and understand the ideologies of progressive teaching method and reduces experiential learning down to just play without purpose. There seems to be a lack of understanding, or it can be said that there is a huge gap in what is understood by the idea of play when it comes to many parents and adults responsible for nurturing and upbringing of young ones compared to child rights activists, child education philosophers, and progressive learning believers. Though all of us come together, keeping in mind the future of the child, the means and goals that we imagine are not the same.

It is quite important to understand that when the United Nations introduced the Child Rights treaty, it wasn’t something new that was brought to the table but rather, it can be said that the treaty was a more formal and abridged version of an ongoing discourse, drafted while keeping in mind the various thoughts and convictions of renowned educationists, child rights activists, philosophers and psychologists who had already shared the studies they had conducted, their experiences in schools with children for decades, the insights they had gained on the process of holistic development and learning, when and how children learn, what creates a hindrance in learning etc. The value that is given to play in the life of a child by a progressive and experiential learning system is something which was considered as a requirement for little ones to grow and develop to their full extent since centuries ago. It is not something to be labeled as removed from education and intellectual growth of a child, an activity that is allowed when a child needs the time away from the grueling process of learning. Furthermore, playing needs to be given its rightful position in the child education system as the most important and powerful tool of learning and imparting knowledge. Playing is not an activity that adults grant to children so that they can enjoy some time removed from the society and realities of life but rather, it is a mirror to the world and its realities through which children gear themselves up to face it head on in future.

The amount of learning that the children gain as they play cannot even be described properly as the intersection of various things that they are observing and taking in is enormous and each child might be learning and processing things in different ways as they all have distinct minds and set of skills. The social, psychological, cognitive and physical development is at its most natural while children play.

Symbolic play that children enjoy the most, using various objects as props, pretending that it is some other object while acting out various roles that they observe around themselves is so dynamic as you can see the development happening, not just social skills but also the language of the child as they imitate the way adults talk, taking in and using new vocabulary that they hear, the way they hear it, all while being immersed in the mindset of freedom that play time provides which also makes them emotionally and mentally receptive in that moment, giving them the opportunity to observe and receive more knowledge from around themselves. Children learn to communicate, express and use language in the most organic way while engaging in play. As they pretend to be a mother, a teacher, a doctor, a vendor, a pilot or even non-living objects like a traffic light or a flower, children are learning about the world, sharing their own observations about how they see things, how they adapt to different facts, how they use new words and building up their confidence to speak. The self-assurance that is gained and identity building that happens while playing is something that a child cannot learn with a notebook and pencil in hand, being treated like an empty container being filled with knowledge that adults believe that they need to mug up to survive in the education system for the first eighteen years of their life. Children are learning to be comfortable with their environment, learning to deal with being in various social situations, adapting to the ways of society as they play by themselves and later with their peers. That is the idea that the Montessori Method was based on, where learning is always concrete at first. Everything from social etiquettes, gross and fine motor skills, sensory development, language, mathematics, science, and history is taught in the most concrete way where children can touch and feel, remember through the memory of having experienced things before they are considered to be ready to move on to the abstract part of the learning. And by that point, the child has been taught to hold the pencil with the right amount of grip and pressure, the child is familiar and comfortable with numbers, formulas, words, and ways of doing things. A child putting 5 blocks in a pile of 8 blocks telling you that there are 13 blocks in total isn’t learning less than a child who wrote on a paper that 5+8 = 18, although the former might just be merely playing in your eyes while the later is ‘studying’.

As we move towards an education system which is more child-centric, focused more on helping the children in exploring the world and choose their own place in it based on their own interests and inclinations, guiding them from behind and supporting their distinct needs, as every child is unique, with their own talents, their own difficulties that they need to overcome; we as facilitators and parents to these young ones need to accept that sometimes, we want children to learn what we think they need to learn in order to fit in the society, we want them to learn in a way we believe it is right and appropriate for them to learn. Somehow, we even make the child education system about us, not the children. If we truly want to consider the opinions of the children and let them have a say, playing is how they would want to learn. So in the end, it falls on us to be able to modify the learning and education method in a way that they would merge playing and learning so seamlessly that the learning would naturally happen as children do what they enjoy doing the best. That increases the pressure and responsibility, urging us to be more creative and think from the perspective of a child but that is the need of the time and the big change that the Indian education system needs to break away from the old customary ways that don’t serve their purpose anymore as we move towards a society which is more global and demanding than ever before. Yes, a child is born with legal rights to play. While it can garner patronizing amusement out of many, a child being given the time and opportunity to play has been considered to be of utmost importance, significant enough for international lawmakers and human rights activists to be included in a legally binding document that obliges every nation that has chosen to ratify it to take it seriously. In case this is new information to process, can we take a moment to wonder why? And if this is something we are already aware of, have we ever sat down and pondered over the reason as to why children are so deeply associated with the idea of being given the free reign to play? What is the general mentality of our society towards children being given a hefty amount of time to simply enjoy, play games and frolick to their heart’s content? Not a very positive one, to say the least. Parents might not be too comfortable with the idea of their child going to school to ‘just play the whole day’. Even as India is seeing a rise in schools diverting from the conventional education system and leans away from teacher- centered instructional methods that approach the child as a passive receiver, there remains a huge part of the society that is still reluctant to truly accept and understand the ideologies of progressive teaching method and reduces experiential learning down to just play without purpose. There seems to be a lack of understanding, or it can be said that there is a huge gap in what is understood by the idea of play when it comes to many parents and adults responsible for nurturing and upbringing of young ones compared to child rights activists, child education philosophers, and progressive learning believers. Though all of us come together, keeping in mind the future of the child, the means and goals that we imagine are not the same.

It is quite important to understand that when the United Nations introduced the Child Rights treaty, it wasn’t something new that was brought to the table but rather, it can be said that the treaty was a more formal and abridged version of an ongoing discourse, drafted while keeping in mind the various thoughts and convictions of renowned educationists, child rights activists, philosophers and psychologists who had already shared the studies they had conducted, their experiences in schools with children for decades, the insights they had gained on the process of holistic development and learning, when and how children learn, what creates a hindrance in learning etc. The value that is given to play in the life of a child by a progressive and experiential learning system is something which was considered as a requirement for little ones to grow and develop to their full extent since centuries ago. It is not something to be labeled as removed from education and intellectual growth of a child, an activity that is allowed when a child needs the time away from the grueling process of learning. Furthermore, playing needs to be given its rightful position in the child education system as the most important and powerful tool of learning and imparting knowledge. Playing is not an activity that adults grant to children so that they can enjoy some time removed from the society and realities of life but rather, it is a mirror to the world and its realities through which children gear themselves up to face it head on in future.

The amount of learning that the children gain as they play cannot even be described properly as the intersection of various things that they are observing and taking in is enormous and each child might be learning and processing things in different ways as they all have distinct minds and set of skills. The social, psychological, cognitive and physical development is at its most natural while children play.

Symbolic play that children enjoy the most, using various objects as props, pretending that it is some other object while acting out various roles that they observe around themselves is so dynamic as you can see the development happening, not just social skills but also the language of the child as they imitate the way adults talk, taking in and using new vocabulary that they hear, the way they hear it, all while being immersed in the mindset of freedom that play time provides which also makes them emotionally and mentally receptive in that moment, giving them the opportunity to observe and receive more knowledge from around themselves. Children learn to communicate, express and use language in the most organic way while engaging in play. As they pretend to be a mother, a teacher, a doctor, a vendor, a pilot or even non-living objects like a traffic light or a flower, children are learning about the world, sharing their own observations about how they see things, how they adapt to different facts, how they use new words and building up their confidence to speak. The self-assurance that is gained and identity building that happens while playing is something that a child cannot learn with a notebook and pencil in hand, being treated like an empty container being filled with knowledge that adults believe that they need to mug up to survive in the education system for the first eighteen years of their life. Children are learning to be comfortable with their environment, learning to deal with being in various social situations, adapting to the ways of society as they play by themselves and later with their peers. That is the idea that the Montessori Method was based on, where learning is always concrete at first. Everything from social etiquettes, gross and fine motor skills, sensory development, language, mathematics, science, and history is taught in the most concrete way where children can touch and feel, remember through the memory of having experienced things before they are considered to be ready to move on to the abstract part of the learning. And by that point, the child has been taught to hold the pencil with the right amount of grip and pressure, the child is familiar and comfortable with numbers, formulas, words, and ways of doing things. A child putting 5 blocks in a pile of 8 blocks telling you that there are 13 blocks in total isn’t learning less than a child who wrote on a paper that 5+8 = 18, although the former might just be merely playing in your eyes while the later is ‘studying’.

As we move towards an education system which is more child-centric, focused more on helping the children in exploring the world and choose their own place in it based on their own interests and inclinations, guiding them from behind and supporting their distinct needs, as every child is unique, with their own talents, their own difficulties that they need to overcome; we as facilitators and parents to these young ones need to accept that sometimes, we want children to learn what we think they need to learn in order to fit in the society, we want them to learn in a way we believe it is right and appropriate for them to learn. Somehow, we even make the child education system about us, not the children. If we truly want to consider the opinions of the children and let them have a say, playing is how they would want to learn. So in the end, it falls on us to be able to modify the learning and education method in a way that they would merge playing and learning so seamlessly that the learning would naturally happen as children do what they enjoy doing the best. That increases the pressure and responsibility, urging us to be more creative and think from the perspective of a child but that is the need of the time and the big change that the Indian education system needs to break away from the old customary ways that don’t serve their purpose anymore as we move towards a society which is more global and demanding than ever before.