How important is play? I mean really???

 

How important is play?   

By Melinda Bossenmeyer, Ed.D. 

For the generation of Americans that lived by the daily adage, “you must come inside when the street lights come on,” the importance of play was intuitive and occurred naturally in the course of everyday American life. Baby boomers recite the street light regulation as one of America’s unwritten rules that most children understood and practiced. Certainly that was the case for those of us who lived within “city limits.”
For another set of children, their unwritten rule about the limits of daily play would have supported the notion of “play”up until “the cows come home”, which by farm standards meant that play had ended because there was work that needed to be done before dinner.
Parents then also shared another universal unwritten rule on play, which was practiced in both cities and farms across America, because their verbiage “go out and play”, guaranteed a resulting peace and quiet inside the house.