How much of your time do you give your children for play? When was the last time you dusted off the wooden chess set for an hour or so of combat with your kids? Increasingly, academic excellence through rigorous testing and competency based learning has meant a decline for many children in the important area of natural learning.
Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University, considers this move away from play to be a crisis. Not just because playing educational board games reduces stress and makes children more socially competent, which evidence suggests that it does. It matters also because play supposedly improves working memory and self-regulation; in other words, it makes kids sharper and better-behaved. So, ironically, by short changing them on play in favour of academics, we may actually be inhibiting their development.