How Loose Parts Help Children Succeed at Life

How Loose Parts Help Children Succeed at Life

By Tammy Kaiser, ECLC Director

Imagine entering a classroom and being told that the theme of the week is weather. You are told that today’s topic is sunshine. You are given a paper plate, yellow paint, and orange construction paper strips. You are told to sit at the table with the other children and make a sun – like the example the teacher has in front of the room. What do you think that sun will look like? Now imagine entering a classroom, singing a song about sunshine, reading a book about weather, and then having a craft space available for you all day to explore and create any kind of sun that you can imagine. Maybe your sun is smiling, setting, rising, behind a cloud, reflecting on water. Maybe your sun is red, or green. What would your sun look like?

According to a recent study, children are becoming more stressed. Psychologists think the reason may be lack of imagination and creative play. So why are so many parents and educators scared of free play and creative expression? Why are yellow-painted paper plate suns still considered art projects? Lenore Skenazy, president of Let Grow, an organization that promotes childhood resilience states that “unlike supervised activities, free play teaches kids how to negotiate, compromise, make friends and communicate. When we deprive children of unstructured playtime, they don't learn how to mature or deal with frustration or fear."

One of the ways we encourage free play and creative self-expression at the ECLC is through play and creative art with Loose Parts. You probably spent much of your own childhood playing with loose parts: balls, buckets, sticks, blankets, pillows, cups, rocks, and boxes (just to name a few). The ideal toy, according to Harvard’s Susan Linn, is “10% toy and 90% kid.” That means the children decide what the toy is. Is the stick a wand or a flag? Should I make my sun out of cork or glass gems?

A famous study in the 1940s asked kids 4 to 7 years old to stand still as long as they could. They were timed. Then the kids were asked to pretend they were palace guards and stand still again. All the kids stood still longer as guards. That’s because play is the easiest way to practice new and difficult skills, including self-control. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning says, the results were very different. "Today's 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today's 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago."

According to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, in the 1950’s children's play became focused on things. "It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says Chudacoff. "Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object."

Chudacoff's recently published history of child's play argues that for most of human history what children did when they played was roam, mostly unsupervised, and engage in imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. "They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors... or whether it was on a street corner or somebody's back yard."

During the second half of the 20th century play changed radically. Instead of spending their time in make-believe and creative self-expression, children were supplied with specific toys for play and predetermined scripts. Instead of using one’s imagination to pretend a stick was a light saber, parents would purchase a light-up plastic toy light saber complete with action sounds. Children didn’t even have to imagine sound effects anymore! This trend began to shrink the size of children's imaginative space.

In addition to over-commercialization, parents stunted children’s imaginative growth by enrolling them in adult-run classes like gymnastics, karate, and tutoring.  These classes mixed with free play are great, but as the only outlet for a child’s physicality, they leave much to be desired.

A growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed children’s cognitive and emotional development. Spending time playing make-believe helps children develop executive function. A critical element of executive function is the ability to self-regulate. Children with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. Strong executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ!  In a world where we see young people turning to violence to get heard, this skill is more important than ever.

Despite the evidence of the benefits of imaginative play, however, children's play is in decline. According to Yale psychological researcher Dorothy Singer, some teachers and school administrators still don't see the value. "Because of the testing, and the emphasis now that you have to really pass these tests, teachers are starting earlier and earlier to drill the kids in their basic fundamentals. Play is viewed as unnecessary, a waste of time."  

Introducing the concept of Loose Parts into the ECLC was not an easy one. It is challenging to teach teachers that children should be playing with sticks and rocks and stuff that we find in our recycle containers.  I thought the best way to illustrate the idea was to have the staff do it themselves. So, I conducted a training. I asked them to create something using materials that I found around my house, the school, and even in nature. I told them to illustrate what they hoped their time at the ECLC Summer Camp would look like. 

We talked about how playing with loose parts allows children to  move, carry, combine, design, take apart and put the parts together in infinite ways. No one is telling them what to create, they are figuring it out themselves, open to new ideas and variations. Loose parts include anything from stones, stumps and sticks to blocks, rope, beads, wood and recycling. Toys that “do” things turn the child into an audience. Loose parts turn children into makers, thinkers, and tinkerers, learning creativity and skills.

Of course, we still have the toys that light up and make sounds. But, when you walk into our classrooms look for the creative self-expression of the children. Look for the games they create on their own and for their little imaginations at work.  Sometimes, the children know best!