Traditional Children's Games

The play in child’s growing up

What is play? Treccani defines it as: “Any activity freely chosen, children or adults do individually or in group, without any specific goals other than fun, at the same time developing and practising physical, manual and intellectual skills”.
The High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations Organization, by the law 44/25 of 20/11/1989, stated that the play is an inviolable and unquestionable “right” of each child.
Schiller (1759-1805) said that “a man is fully a man only when he plays”: indeed , only by playing, the individual can free his own mind from external conditioning; that’s because the play has not other aims and it is the only activity chosen for itself and not for another purpose.
According to Vygotskij, the play is a basis activity for intellectual development and, in the first childhood, the most important one. By means of a playful fiction, the child widens his experience and knowledge field, mainly expressing his own need to fit the world. Playing is a way of living for a child. The play is the main tool by means of which the child expresses his own identity and develops his own knowledge, even the most complex. It is useful for the psychological development and it supports growing up of brain structures and functions; it fosters the cognitive and social-emotional development of the child, it regulates feelings and reduces stress.

On a cognitive level, the play fosters the development of memory, attention, encourages concentration, comparison skills, being into a relationship, using perceptual patterns. A poor or lacking playful activity can contribute to create lacking cognitive levels.
Between three and six years aged, the child acts imaginative situations: that is a fiction play and it allows him to enter the daily life complexity, made of people, things and situations. According to Anna Oliverio Ferraris “in the pleasure of fictiotious play the child takes a role that allows him to enter adults’ world. The symbolic game is a chance to explore feelings”.
The emotional developing of children is directly linked to the way the child see himself and the world. Between 30 months and 5 years aged, children can be able to express their feelings and ideas in a more complex way, establishing logical connections among ideas and creating fancy stories perfectly sensible. This is the right age to foster cooperation and communication.
On a social level, typical of 4-5 years aged children, the play becomes more structured, with rules and social interaction. The social game allows child to know, control and manage frustrations generated by the social life.

School should know how to give worth to playful dimension and accept infant development throughout all its aspects, motor, perceptive, emotional, cognitive, communicative, social, linguistic and moral. A welcoming/inclusive school should be able to put the whole child at the centre of its attention.
Our children daily life gives them little time to play, together with new technologies, which engage them in a repetitive and less social game on their devices (smartphone, tablet, etc.).
Italian Society of Pediatrics has signed the risk of using mobile phone and other devices on children development; they say the abuse of tablet and smartphone takes about 90-95% of children, pre-adolescents and adolescents. These ones must not be used by children under 2 years aged to distract and calm them and not during meals or before going to bed. For children from 2 to 5 years aged they can be used for maximum one hour a day; instead 2 hours for children until 8 years aged, but always far from meals and rest.

Rachele Giammario
Psychologist, Pedagogist, Psychomotricist,
Therapist of Neuro-Psychomotricity of Childhood
Professor at University of L’Aquila