Play-Based Learning and Self Control

This week’s article summary is Helping Children Succeed--Without the Stress.

The article is both logical and counterintuitive.

Parents, in wanting the best for their children, often schedule their kids in many after-school activities from sports to music lessons to enrichment tutoring. 

By giving children these opportunities, parents hope to ‘prime the pump' for future success. Seems logical, right?

Yet, as research shows (in particular Daniel Goleman’s work and recent book Focus), the development and demonstration of ‘self-control’ is one of the best predictors of future academic success and personal happiness.

An effective way to encourage the development of self-control is to give kids, especially those in elementary school, ample time for free, imaginative play. Counterintuitive to many parents.

As an advocate of play-based learning, I’ve always recognized how it fosters the development of imagination and creativity in kids. 

But this article illustrates an additional benefit of free play: supporting the development of self control in kids.

As the article concludes, this is not the easiest sell to parents today when most other children are over-scheduled after school and on weekends.

Yet..we teachers can help parents understand the need for free-play both in and after school—not just so kids get ample time to be kids but also in that it helps them develop important skills and habits that support future learning.

Or as we talked about in preplanning: Enjoying the moment while preparing for the future.

Joe

------------

In the now-famous “marshmallow” experiments, researchers at Stanford tested preschoolers’ self-control and ability to delay gratification by sitting them in a room alone with a tempting treat and measuring how long they were able to wait. Years later, those kids who resisted temptation the longest also tended to have the highest academic achievement. In fact, self-control was better predictor of their future academic success than their IQ scores.

Further research has shown that self-control also correlates highly with greater stress tolerance and concentration abilities, as well as increased empathy, better emotion regulation, and social competence. This is true across the age spectrum: From preschoolers to teenagers, kids who can regulate their own feelings and behavior are better able to stay focused on their goals and maintain positive connections with others.

Essentially, self-control underlies both academic achievement and interpersonal finesse, both of which contribute to success in life.

While parents who hope that their children will be high-achievers often focus on tutoring, advanced classes, and more study time, the research on self-control suggests that a “backdoor” approach may be more likely to succeed and that it’s also better for kids than the high-pressure path many kids feel compelled to take by well-meaning parents and educators.

Instead of focusing directly on achievement per se, parents and educators can help children be successful by helping them practice and develop skills related to self-control.

For young kids in particular, imaginative play is an especially critical part of practicing self-control, since during play, kids set their own rules and are motivated to respect those rules when the game is fun. The enjoyment of the game provides the motivation to try.

As neuroscientists Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang note, “To play school, you have to act like a teacher or a student and inhibit your impulses to act like a fighter pilot or a baby. Following these rules provides children with some of their earliest experiences with controlling their behavior to achieve a desired goal.”

Playing is not the opposite of learning: playing is learning.

For older kids, pursuing activities and academic subjects that reflect their own budding interests—rather than someone else’s ideas about what will best position them for a competitive college or career—is critical to developing self-control because the motivation to keep at it comes from a personal goal rather than the desire to please or impress.

Self-control is a skill that can be improved through practice, so kids given more opportunities will have an advantage. Kids vary in their initial ability to demonstrate self-control, but successfully practicing self-control begets greater self-control: The more we do it, the better we get.

That said, being compared to others who are doing better, or repeated failures because a task is too challenging, may leave kids feeling inferior or resistant to trying anymore.

Crucially, this sort of practice is not about following rules in order to please others or avoid punishment.

Self-control is ultimately about learning to control one’s impulses in order to achieve personal goals.

Some parents may see this backdoor approach, with less striving and more engagement, as desirable but naive: If they stand down from the achievement arms race while their neighbors continue shuttling their own kids to coding seminars, specialized tutors, and AP classes, won’t their kids lose out in this ever-more competitive environment?

Parents may have a hard time seeing the value in, say, letting their teen who loves clothes take a sewing class instead of chemistry tutoring (“How will sewing help them get into college?”). But for this child, the sewing class offers much more than it seems on the surface: sewing skills, yes, but also the chance to be creative, self-directed, and focused on a goal of their own choosing.