Disrupting play: A cautionary note

There exists a rather strong vector of sentiment, discourse, and ideology at the current moment which takes “play”—particularly, but not exclusively, children’s play—as something of an all-inclusive cure to a wide swath of social ills. Lack of creativity, learning difficulties, the polluting effects of media and commerce, the debilitations of racism and sexism, together with a variety of therapeutics are regularly presented at the altar of play in hopes of realizing some sort of transformation, some kind of conversion. Indeed— to extend the metaphor further—the pilgrimage to the play deity extends seemingly in all directions without end in sight. Adults are urged to engage in playful parenting (Cohen, 2001), teachers in playful teaching (Jones and Reynolds, 2011), and couples in playful romance (Thayer, 2015). Playfulness, especially the ability to engage in self-deprecation, now figures as a component of any “serious” politician’s campaign arsenal for US President (Zimmerman, 2015). A playful or playfully designed workplace apparently enables innovation, as most any high-tech/new-tech company will attest. Significantly, the faith that play constitutes the heartbeat, the quintessence, of children’s creativity and learning owns such a depth of unquestioned verity that one might seem a bit unhinged in pointing out its status as a component of a belief system. Living within the contours of this contemporary ludic episteme poses serious challenges and, I would say, threats to child studies scholarship and practice—and, importantly, to the integrity of the field and endeavor as a whole. Many uncritical, univocal views of play—from various arenas of social life and scholarship—regularly (re)assign an essentialness to the child and childhood. When conceptions of play (re)essentialize the child, the definitive problematic of childhood studies becomes compromised, weakened. The “problem of the child”—that is, what (or who) a child is, how to apprehend different childhoods—dissipates and diffuses in the presence of tacit agreements about the nature and, often, the benefits of play. To fuse “play” together with the “child” inscribes each term with a normativity implied in the other. Psychologist David Elkind (2007), for instance, opines that children have an “inborn disposition for curiosity, imagination and fantasy [that] is being silenced in the high-tech commercialized world we have created” (p. ix). Susan Linn, in The Case for Make Believe (2008), argues that play is “essential to the development of creativity, empathy, critical thinking, problem solving and meaning making” and is “being actively undermined” (p. 26) by adults. In these views, fantasy is natural and child-generated, while realism is contrived, adultified, and imposed. Elkind and Linn speak for many who locate the original, procreant urge of humanity within the presumably unfettered play of the presumably unfettered or pure child. In this neo-Rousseau-ian view, creativity dies a little in every moment spent on this earth when it is subjected to the “adult” world, a world which seems to include virtually most anything produced with intent by non-children. 622699 CHD0010.1177/0907568215622699ChildhoodEditorial editorial2015