Kids who Play More Have Better Academic and Regulation Skills
Photo by Jessie Shaw
A Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology article reports on a study indicating that “time spent playing predicts early reading and math skills through associations with self-regulation”.
A 2022 study by Portia Miller et al found:
The amount of time children spent playing at home positively predicted their self-regulation.
Play time at age 4 was positively related to age 5 math skills.
Play time had positive indirect effects on children's age 5 reading and math skills operating through self-regulatory skills.
The study, responding to concerns that children’s play time has declined significantly in recent decades, used data from time diaries and direct assessments of self-regulation, rereading, and math skills to examine how “minutes spent playing at home predict these skills in a sample of 128 children followed from age four to five”. It also explored whether self-regulation explained links between play time and pre-reading and math. The results indicated “that the time spent playing positively related to children’s self-regulation. Moreover, through its association with self-regulation, play time had indirect effects on pre-reading and math skills measured one year later. Results suggest that fostering opportunities for play time during the preschool years may help to boost school readiness skills.”
Studies using data from 1981 to 1997 have indicated that children now have at least 8 hours less per week for play than children in previous decades. “This decline in play time may have troubling implications for children’s development, especially self-regulatory skills development”, noting “Play helps children acquire skills that are necessary for success throughout childhood and in adulthood, including decision making, problem solving, self-control, rule following, emotion regulation, and interpersonal skills.” In the study reported on in this article, the “focus on play time occurring in naturalistic everyday environments is significant for several reasons. First, it speaks to implications of reductions in children’s play time observed in national data. Second, it sheds light on whether unstructured, child-directed play opportunities may have benefits for children. This knowledge is informative for structuring the lives of children both at home and in early education and care settings.”
The study notes that most scholars agree on five general features of play:
freely chosen and child-directed
intrinsically motivated and concerned more with means than ends
actively engaging and pleasurable
imaginative
guided by mental rules but with room for creativity
The study concludes:
The decrease in play time in recent decades and the accompanying focus on academic instruction and structured activities for preschool-aged children may be developmentally inappropriate at this age (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009). According to the aforementioned theoretical models, reductions in opportunities for play time may compromise children's school readiness skills, particularly key self-regulatory skills like attention, executive functioning, and behavioral regulation (Burdette & Whitaker, 2005; Cameron et al., 2015). Indeed, early childhood is a sensitive period for the development of self-regulation due to rapid growth in the prefrontal cortex, which is the region of the brain associated with self-regulatory processes (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013). Accordingly, the preschool years may be a critical time to encourage and support children's play time.
Counterintuitively, increases in academic time and structured activities employed to boost preschoolers' school readiness and academic achievement at the expense of play time may ultimately hinder their academic performance-an idea to which the results of this study may be relevant. Declines in play time during the preschool years may negatively impact children's self-regulation, which in turn could harm their academic skills. The self-regulatory skills that children acquire during early childhood are foundational to the development of their academic skills (e.g., Blair & Raver, 2012; Bull, Espy, Wiebe, Sheffield, & Nelson, 2011; Duncan et al., 2007; McClelland et al., 2014; Welsh, Nix, Blair, Bierman, & Nelson, 2010). Self-regulation is a multidimensional construct that is often operationalized in varied ways (Cole, Ram, & English, 2019). The present study focuses on aspects of cognitive and behavioral self-regulation that are particularly important when children enter formal school settings, including working memory, attentional flexibility (maintaining focus and adapting to changing goals), and inhibitory control (Cole et al., 2019; Fuhs, Nesbitt, Farran, & Dong, 2014; McClelland, Cameron, Messersmith, & Tominey, 2010). These skills are important building blocks for the successful transition to formal schooling and future learning because they allow children to navigate structured learning environments, learn new material, ignore distractions, stay on task, and persist in the face of challenges (Cole et al., 2019; McClelland et al., 2014). And while a theoretical pathway from play time to self-regulation to achievement exists, research to date has never empirically examined whether self-regulation acts as a mediator between the time children spend playing and their early achievement. This study aims to address this gap in the literature.