2017 International Play Association Triennial World Conference in Calgary, Canada Plenary Session Day 1.

Dr. Peter Gray:
The Decline of Play and the Mental Health Consequences of that Decline - Dr. Peter Gray

This presentation will define play as an activity that is freely chosen and structured by the players themselves;  present evidence for the dramatic decline over the past few decades in children’s opportunities and freedom to play; present evidence for the dramatic increase in mental disorders that have accompanied the decline in play; and describe the logic and evidence for believing that there is a cause-effect connection between the decline of play and the rise of mental disorders.

Revisiting Childhood - Dr. Roger Hart

It has often been written by observers of children’s lives that childhood is being lost, and that a central part of this is the erosion of children’s play. Drawing from a current longitudinal study of changes in childhood over two generations in one town I will show that many parents also recognize that their children’s play is radically different from that of their own childhood and they are commonly disturbed by these changes, yet they feel driven to control and guide their children’s play. There are many factors that have transformed children’s play but a central part of the story is parent’s own changing understanding of the place of play in children’s lives and their role in this as parents. A key issue in our struggle to inform this debate as IPA members is the continued tendency of the general public to see children’s socialization as a one-way process of adults preparing passive children for the world through education, rather than seeing that when their children play with their peers they are actively self-organizing, inventing, and managing their activities and that through these processes they are flexibly adapting and transforming culture and thereby helping to produce the future with us. The presentation will include sequences of film of children's play in the 70's alongside commentary by the same children as parents today together, this with footage of the play of their own children. I hope to demonstrate that one of the most effective ways of enabling parents and caregivers to reflect critically on the place of play in children's lives is for them to look back at play in their own childhood and to compare it with that of their children, in spite of the distortion that nostalgia commonly brings to this exercise!