Play & Development | Playandmentalhealth

Connections Between Play and Mental Health

Play has proved to serve many benefits to the brain and the growing child. There are benefits to the brain connections, mental processes and executive function, emotions, and motor control.

Play and the Brain

Play is needed for healthy brain development. 75% of the brain develops after a baby is born, in the years between birth and the early 20s. Childhood play stimulates the brain to make connections between nerve cells.

In animal studies, a lack of play has led to the underdevelopment of the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that functions for our decision making, and executive functioning.

The way we experience and react to the world is determined by the prefrontal cortex.

Play helps us practice these things and as we grow, put this play into practice through our decision making.

However, play stimulates all areas of the brain in different ways. Play activates all parts of the brain and engages the whole child.

Play and Brain Development.

Play is an integral part of the brain's development. Children gain information through their experiences that create connections. These connections are critical to the development of the child. the video below provides those important roles play has in this brain development.

Play and Brain Development

Play and Executive Functioning

Play helps children develop the skills of executive functioning including decision making and control. Free play and exploration are, historically, the means by which children learn to solve their own problems, control their own lives. Play allows children to experience and experiment with control by making decisions and problem-solving, as well as managing their impulses and their immediate environment.

This is what makes play a pivotal part of development. They are able to practice problem solving whether through sharing and group play, or through their dramatic play and the situations in which they are acting out through play. In society today we have the habit to diminish risk taking and other problem solving skills for intrinsic motivation.

The act of play involves pursuing intrinsic goals, doing what children want to do in that moment. There is a correlation between valuing external goals over intrinsic goals and mental illnesses, such as anxiety and depression.

Anxiety and depression have a strong correlation with a decreased sense of personal control, with a perspective that the circumstances outside of them primarily control them. (Gray, 2011)

Autonomy in Play

Play helps them understand their role as an active participant in their own life.

Children can explore being in and out of control.

Children explore power and their relationship to the environment and others in it with that power.

Children learn to take chances and learn consequences of different behaviors and interactions.

Players main role is to keep the play going

Requires creativity and innovation with spontaneity to continue play scenes

Play and Movement

Social Play

Interactions between players account for another kind of development through play: social development.

Play facilitates social connections with peers. Social play also puts children all on a level playing field. Increased social isolation and loneliness over the years is a contributor to the high levels of anxiety and depression.

Play inherently makes children happy, versus activities in their place (homework, worksheets, etc.) that increase anxiety and make them unhappy. It allows children to experience joy.

Play serves as a medium to learn emotional regulation, whether stemming from a physical (fear) or social challenge (managing anger, fear, sadness, etc. Play requires adaptability, the balancing of one’s emotions and relationships necessary to life.

Play and Stress

Free play develops adaptability, social competence, emotional resilience, flexibility with stress and unpredictability. Toxic stress in early childhood or ACEs have large impacts on mental health.

Using play to cope with stress

Play frees us and allows an escape and allows for relaxation.
Play allows for a sense of control in the world, which in turn exhibits a feeling of competence.
Play is an expressive outlet for big emotions.
- Play therapy, replaying stressful scenarios to regain control of emotions and process them
Play can be used to work through everyday stress.
- Solitary and repetitive play establishes a sense of predictability and control.
To cope with stress, children learn the skills of self-regulation.
Pretend play supports self-regulation skills
- Possibly due to practice with self-directed speech. Children will use self-talk during individual play.
  - Active support of teachers in social play linked with higher levels of inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility.

Play also stimulates the motor cortex through fine motor, gross motor, and locomotor activities. There are many kinds of play that involve movement such as:

A child's ability to move around is also their ability to manipulate their environment and control their experiences. A child's autonomy leads to a greater sense of self control and confidence.

Dizzy play

(jumping, twisting, swinging, leaping, running)

The function is “training for the unexpected” and “rehearsing the flexibility of response needed in a rapidly changing environment”.

Rough and tumble play

Impulse control is improved through exercising free impulse.
Social empathy, emotional self-control, can prevent the development of aggression.
Deprivation of play fighting in rats led to deficits in social competence as adults.
Need to interpret subtle social cues, immediate self-restraint to balance play relationship, subtle coordination of self with others is necessary for maintaining relationships.