Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne, and this short series of audios on gunplay and boys. In this second part to this four part series, I wanted to talk a little bit about supercharged play because there's too little time. This is something that I've not only noticed but also experimented with in terms of boys' play.
Let me describe the dynamic firstly, and then we'll go on to what we can do about it because what we can do is then just fairly obvious really. Boys these days often play deprived, frankly. They don't get a lot of time to have unstructured play.
Their lives are jam-packed very often. They're jam-packed at school and there's way too little time to play at school. Recesses are becoming shortened for kids of school age.
Kindergartens also, the play there is becoming more and more structured as children's ability to have free play is becoming more difficult. The answer in a lot of educational settings to children not being able to play so well is to give them less time to do it, which I know is a real shame to say the least, but it is a phenomena. They've got very little time to play at school.
At home their kids more and more are in one scheduled activity after another after another. When they get together to play either at school or at home or in the neighborhood, they have to in a sense supercharge their play. They have to make it larger than life.
They've got to get a whole sort of two hours worth of play sensation into 20 minutes because that's all they've got. They don't have these endless days stretching out of play. Even in the summer vacations, off they go to camps and so on.
And so what they do is that they ramp up their play to become super exciting. They supercharge their play in order to fit as much excitement in to as short a period of time as possible. And there's just few more obvious ways for a little boy to achieve that than via gun play.
Gun play is very exciting. It's very loud. It's very raucous.
It's kind of out of control. You're just running and screaming and jumping and rolling around and arguing that you're not dead and yes you are. It is really, when you look at it again, it's supercharged play.
And the reason that this is going on is kind of disturbing because of play and playtime becoming endangered. We're having kids play less and less. And another reason for that also is that even when they do have potential playtime, guess what they're doing? They're on screens.
And so what are they doing on screens? So many boys are playing violent games. There it is again. It's gun play, but now it's gone on to the screen as opposed, because they're now a little bit older, hopefully, as opposed to very little boys who are doing it in real time.
But one way or another, we've got these violent games going on. And a lot of it is right at the sort of root cause of it is this disappearance of playtime. Now, the answer to this is pretty obvious, right, is to give them more time.
And as simple as that sounds, it actually works. There have been any number of boys over the years that I've been advising, because I visit kindergartens a lot, have a long and enduring interest and love for the world of early childhood and kindergarten and parents of little ones. And I've given this advice to allow for more time.
Give your children more unstructured time, an unstructured time to play. And not only does the gun play and the aggressive play in general begin to lessen after a week or two, but creative play starts to arise, and digging and making dams and the water flow out of those dams or making shelters and forts, and particularly if we allow materials and have materials at the ready for our kids to be able to use. And that's another whole piece in this, is that as our kids begin to have more time to play, my recommendation is to have more good junk lying about, you know, bits of ply, two-by-fours, all kinds of just little, you know, cuttings from the garden that can be used to, you know, have camouflage and things, you know, bailing twine and rope and all these kind of good things, real toys, you know, hammers and saws and so on, so that they can begin to actually have creative play rather than destructive play.
And one, not the only, but one of the key elements is to be able to give our kids, and particularly our boys, more time, because boys need more time in general. You know, they need more time to do their homework. They need more time to have relationships.
Time is essential for boys, and when we allow them that time, I've seen over and over, enough to feel confident to be able to see the patterns and speak of it now, is that the play and the nature of the play moves from aggressive and destructive to creative and cooperative. Okay, hope that's good food for thought. Bye-bye for now.
