When it comes to supporting children's academic success, common strategies often include academic enrichment, extracurricular activities, and educational toys. Interestingly, however, one of the most profoundly beneficial tools - not found in a book or on a screen - is regularly overlooked: the simple act of play.
As parents and educators seek to strengthen the academic and executive functions of children at any age, play offers a unique opportunity for keeping those reading, writing, and math skills fresh over summer. There are also certain benefits that can only come from unstructured and self-led play; in this space, imagination runs wild and rules are invented (or nonexistent). Plus, research has found that when play is directly supervised by adults, children’s behavior becomes more expected and less creative.
As play improves a child’s physical, social, and emotional development, those gains translate into particularly valuable benefits related to academic performance, cognitive flexibility, and executive functioning skills. Although there are countless others, three key outcomes associated with play - and fundamental to learning success - are creativity, problem-solving, and self-efficacy.
CREATIVITY
Left to their own devices, children are more willing to innovate, make mistakes, and modify their approach. This process nurtures the critical thinking skills essential for creativity and imagination, whether they are inventing a new game or tackling a complex academic essay.
For example, building a living room fort from blankets and pillows doesn’t come with an instruction manual or step-by-step tutorial video. Instead, it gives children the opportunity to problem-solve in real-time, actively exploring how to make the edges stay up, balance a chair or couch cushion for support, and engineer a more lifted ceiling. While this may appear to just be a cute afternoon of free play, it offers a powerfully dynamic exercise in divergent thinking and spatial reasoning. Better still, a fort is only one small example of how unstructured play provides a safe environment for experimentation. A child’s capacity for creative invention is infinite, when given the opportunity.
PROBLEM-SOLVING
Imaginary worlds, with their invented creatures, detailed plots, and surprisingly complex rules, serve as a completely free and highly effective masterclass in problem-solving. When children engage in dramatic play with others, they also learn how to navigate social relationships, negotiate roles and ideas, and collaboratively turn their vision into reality.
Further still, when children participate in this form of play, obstacles are an expected part of the process. When playing together, conflicts in opinion and vision often clash. Without adult intervention to save the day, children instinctively craft their own solutions. This iterative process builds resilience and fosters confidence in their abilities to address what lies ahead. Both of these qualities directly translate to tackling academic challenges and, later, complex real-world scenarios in daily life.
SELF-EFFICACY
More than fun, free play is a vital, scientific process fueling their growth, building their brains, and laying the foundation for a lifetime of learning and success. Another key aspect of this foundation is self-efficacy, or the belief in oneself to be successful when faced with difficulty. Agency to self-direct and then find success, free from external pressure or excessive guidance, is fundamental to the development of self-efficacy.
When children are given the space to become the architects of their own experiences, they naturally start to set their own goals. For example, they may choose mastering a new jump trick on the playground, building their tallest-yet structure with blocks, or taking off on an imaginative expedition to the backyard. Because each victory - however small - occurs as a result of their own initiative and effort, this sense of achievement reinforces a child's belief in their capabilities.
CONCLUSION
Understanding the powerful role of play in every aspect of child development and learning allows parents and educators to be more intentional about protecting time specifically for unstructured play. It also helps to ensure access to open-ended materials that can be incorporated into that play – blocks, art supplies, dress-up clothes, or simply a patch of grass and a few cardboard boxes – and then step back.
By resisting the urge to over-schedule every minute of a child's day with structured activities, there appears a new, blank space of imagination and possibility. It’s healthy - and arguably essential - to let them get bored, because that's often when the most creative play emerges.
Written by Brandi R.
