We sometimes neglect to mention a very basic yet powerful method of cognitive and emotional development, for children and adults alike: Play.

Dr. David Elkind, author of The Power of Play: Learning That Comes Naturally, discusses the need to build a more “playful culture” in this great article brought to you thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine.

- Alvaro

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Can We Play?

– By Dr. David Elkind

Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone, children have lost eight hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week. More than 30,000 schools in the United States have eliminated recess to make more time for academics. From 1997 to 2003, children’s time spent outdoors fell 50 percent, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. Hofferth has also found that the amount of time children spend in organized sports has doubled, and the number of minutes children devote each week to passive leisure, not including watching television, has increased from 30 minutes to more than three hours. It is no surprise, then, that childhood obesity is now considered an epidemic.

But the problem goes well beyond obesity. Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

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Over the months we have received many requests for good articles that could be reused in a variety of places, from a hospital newsletter to a corporate wellness e-newsletter and a number of websites. We want to reach as many people as possible, so tomorrow we are launching a free Content “Brain Feed”, and also custom content services.

In short, we are going to offer a weekly article in the new SharpBrains free content feed. This feed is designed to help website and newsletter publishers disseminate good information on brain exercise and fitness. 20 articles are available immediately (check them in our Articles section), building on the content we have written in this blog.

And, if an organization wants good content on brain health/ training/ fitness to distribute internally or externally, we can help.

On a related note, we just joined the BlogBurst network to offer our blog content to a variety of newspapers. Let’s see how these initiatives work!