Children Play Definition and Theories

In the University of Washington's The Online Daily student's newspaper, Alison Dahmen in her two pages article published in 1997 titled "Kids Need Real Freedom to Grow" wrote "Today's generation lead much more insulated lives," (Dahmen1) that is they are insulated from the actual freedom to play to, get into trouble, do things that kids are suppose to do. She ultimately concluded that play is no longer play because it has progress from the outdoor type of play into indoor, because parents are too protective of their children. I agree with Alison Dahmen that play has progressed, but that does not dictate that today's children are not experiencing the "fun" in which she had had as a child.

What is play? Alison Dahmen begin her article with a series of past play experiences that depict the definition of play. She wrote, "Our play time never had a structured format", "yet I can't remember even being at a loss for what to do." In many events she recalled her play experiences as she wrote, had no structure, which is the core to our definition of play. Play requires no time or place, play rather happen spontaneously. The key word here is "place" according to Alison Dahmen, our generation spends too much time indoor and very little time outdoor, participating in play activities that requires a child to runabout freely. This is where I disagree with Dahmen, she made the notion that children should be allow to "gallivant" about the street freely, to have fun. But according to the definition mention above play should have no structure or format, that is play can happen anywhere at any given time if the "fun" factor is satisfied.

With the increase in gang violent, child abduction, and various other deadly incidents involving children, the world in which we live in has become more and more dangerous for our children. Due to this, parents are becoming more alert, more open to protect their children. They allow such commercial products with the purpose to "Child-proof", to monitor their child during their course of play. These products for example the computer, video games, the TV gave parents the power to completely plan their child's play activities to keep their child safely inside their home, and Alison Dahmen believe this ultimately hindered the real purpose of play. Once again Alison Dahmen completely misses the important factors that define play. Computer, video games, as well as TV has it's own benefits. Video games allow a child to carry on his or her creative self-expression through the virtual characters. In the game the child is allow to be anything that he or she want to be, and of course it produce pure pleasure. This is apparent because video games is particularly popular among children, the same can be said about computer or TV.