Playing is good for youth, children and their communities - here’s how Christian parents and churches can encourage it

Today the Raising the Nation Play Commission released it’s report Everything to Play For: A Plan to Ensure Every Child in England Can Play - it shows that spaces and opportuntities for play in the UK are being eroded and that perhaps unsurprisingly youth and children in the UK are some of the unhappiest in Europe. How can parents and churches play their part in addressing this? Well before we get to that let’s wind back and think what play actually is.

What is play? 

Play is a funny thing. Everyone knows intuitively what it is but struggles to define it. It’s fun, but it is also a serious business. We associate it with children but deep-down love it as adults. It comes naturally and yet we seem also to spend a lot of time working at it. Play, it turns out, is a bit of a paradox.

Play theorist (yes there is such a job!) Johan Huizinga defines play as having a number of facets. Firstly, play has to be voluntary; if it isn’t, it can never be play as it becomes a forced task. Secondly, whilst the rules of any play must be freely accepted there have to be rules – when people break the rules play is ruined and others claim, “that’s not fair!” Thirdly, and perhaps, most importantly, for something to be play it must be done for itself – an activity is not play if it is done for a benefit that comes from it. Play comes with joy but it is not explicitly done for the joy. 

Professional footballers provide us with a helpful picture of this last point. Once, a former Premiership footballer told me that every single professional he had ever met stopped enjoying playing as soon as he received his first pay cheque. Once you play for something else other than the game itself it stops being play and it stops bringing joy.