Currently, less than 10% of those with disabilities participate in daily outside recreation.
To Play the Game – Like Everybody Else
By Carol Gulley
The concept that “play is child’s work” is sometimes marginalized in today’s high-paced, high-pressured environment, even by school districts where current trends exist to shorten recess periods and to enforce quiet or even silent lunchroom policies. To control a child’s natural need for physical movement and for expressive communication is to entrap an innate biological impulse and intelligence and to interfere with life skill abilities and social patterns that develop through interactive play. These acquired skills learned through physical and creative play are precisely the abilities that will build individuals with greater emotional maturity throughout life as they assume their roles as responsible community citizens.
Children with disabilities, or children who are “outsiders” for any other reason, often feel stigma and shame. Observing other children playing together is not the same experience as actually playing together with other children. The former is passive whereas the latter is active. The skills acquired are not the same at all. Watching other children play while being left out and on the sideline may make a child feel lonely, different in a bad way, “weird”, unlovable, and incompetent. They feel DIS-couraged. The heart is taken out of them. The children playing, conversely, can feel as if they have friends, are with a group, “fit in”, are lovable, and are competent. They are EN-couraged. The heart is put into them. (“courage” – ancient French – from the heart)
Life skills learned in play situations include the following, as well as others:
The “rules of the game” are frequently the “rules of life”. Learning to share, to take responsibility for personal actions, to respect others, to try to do the best in whatever position one is placed, to show up and to work hard--these are all qualities that fortify a person and provide a solid foundation for living a very able life. These skills require personal work; many individuals work on these concepts for a lifetime, never fully mastering the concepts. For children to have access to these essential qualities early in life provides them a jumpstart to much more than an afternoon in the park.
Morgan's Wonderland will enable and will ennoble. Let’s let our children play – ALL of our children – and let’s elevate the game to liberate the fields that will elevate our children.
