Free play for infants and toddlers

Elisabeth Gründler

Playing toddlers is more than just a pastime. It is a self-directed, highly complex educational process with which the child develops his brain structures. "Grasping" is connected with grasping, "understanding" can only develop through "standing". Both are concrete motor activities with which a toddler spends a lot of time. The connection between children’s play activity and brain development is presented in the following article.

Bettina, six months, lies on her back and chews on a ring with lots of wooden keys. She stops chewing, holds the ring up, looks at it, listens to the sound that is made. She moves her arm, seems to be listening to the sound again. Then she makes a rotating movement with her arm. The toy grazes her face and head. The movement ends at her mouth and she starts chewing again. She lies still for a while, chewing and sucking is her only activity. Then Bettina starts the game again: holds the ring in front of her face, looks at it, listens to the noise, runs over her head and face, ends with chewing and sucking.

This activity makes up most of Bettina’s awake time when hunger and thirst are quenched. In doing so, she uses all the senses: taste, see, hear, Smell, Keys. The mouth still plays an important role as the starting point for research. With the reflex of sucking and searching, controlled by the brain stem, she was born like all mammals. This simple set of behavior is enough to ensure survival first, provided the food source is nearby. But the human child has many more options. The cerebrum, the specifically human part of the brain that its ancestors developed in millions of years of evolution, opens up the development of a differentiated ability to act.

Sensory impressions shape the brain

With his senses, people orient themselves in the world. This system works in all mammals immediately after birth: the nerve pathways that transmit the sensory stimuli close. This happens through the stimuli of the outside world itself: light, air, noise, touch. All mammals lick their young intensively in the first 24 hours of their lives. This serves less to cleanse than to close the nerve pathways and thus open the senses. Tests have shown that mammal cubs, which lack the experience of these stimuli in the first 24 hours, survive, but become antisocial beings: they cannot play, cannot make contact with fellow species, and cannot reproduce. With Aborigines and Eskimos, ethnologists have been able to observe this child’s licking immediately after birth a few decades ago. In our culture, this behavior has been abandoned: today’s mothers and fathers talk to the child, caress, kiss and weigh it.

All of this happened when Bettina was born. Her senses are open, they provide her with information about the world. Organizing them, shaping them into a picture, is the task of the cerebrum, comparable to a giant computer, against which even the best computers are simple, rough imitations. A baby’s brain could be compared to a hard drive on which the programs still have to be loaded. The child carries out the program in its own activity. The possibilities of simple brain systems – reflex-like movements combined with sensory impressions – open up countless new possibilities. In the infinite repetition and variation, new patterns emerge that are imprinted on the cerebrum. By playing, the terms in the child’s brain are used to structure the world. The child gets an idea of the world.

Repetition consolidates movement patterns

Bettina has repeated her game five times: chew, shake, look at, listen, run over your face. She only moved her arms and face. Now she stops completely for a moment. Then she moves her leg, stretches it, tightens it, as if to get some momentum, turns slowly on her stomach. She didn’t let go of her toy. She leans on, looks at it from a new perspective. Strikes the wooden floor, listens to the new sound. Put the ring in your mouth: the thing is familiar in touch and taste. Then she lets herself fall back on her back and starts again the familiar pattern of looking, listening, feeling, tasting. In the next three minutes, she plays her game alternating the perspectives from the prone and supine positions. Then she loses interest and just lets go of the ring. After a moment’s pause – nothing seems to be happening – Bettina rolls and turns to the point where there are other toys. She grabs a yellow plastic container, looks at it briefly, puts it in her mouth.

Like all babies, Bettina was born with a grasping reflex. A movement pattern controlled by the brain stem, which, unlike her tribal ancestors, she no longer needs: her mother no longer has any fur to cling to. However, evolution has not given up this pattern of movement. Rather, it is modulated. The first gripping is completely pointless. Every object is clutched and used. These are probably remnants of climbing reflexes. This inevitably results in sensory impressions that are processed. Brain cells network, relationships become clear: Little by little, the child sees himself as the author of everything he does. He succeeds, at first in tiny steps, but through repeated repetition ever better, the movements of his hand with the sensations, e.g. of eyes or ears to coordinate. This coordination of muscles and senses is becoming more and more diverse and fine. The human movement patterns arise. The child builds them up in an independent, playful action. The child is the actor in its development.

Learning from an inner drive

Nobody has to teach the child how to grip, crawl, walk. It learns all of this on its own, provided you leave it. Provided that its surroundings are prepared in such a way that it can find objects to touch and can therefore experiment safely. Provided that the objects can arouse his interest again and again.

Robert, 10 months, lies on his back and holds a brass bowl in each hand. He supports one of the bowls with both feet, which are almost gripping organs at this age. The bowls are different sizes, Robert tries to push them into one another. His coordination of eyes, hand and foot movements have been developed to such an extent that this is even partially possible. The game pattern of collecting, sorting and stacking is already recognizable with Robert.

About half a year later, collecting and sorting makes up a good part of the child’s playing activity.

The 15 month old Diana has two different colored plastic baskets that she pushes into each other. Then she starts collecting: picks up a plastic cube and throws it into the basket, as well as a cube and another cube. Then she reaches for a stuffed rabbit, looks at it, drops it again. The same thing happens with a wooden grab. He doesn’t get in the basket.

It becomes clear that Diana’s self-made task is to collect a certain kind of toy in the stacked baskets. It does not collect what does not correspond to this idea. Nor can she be dissuaded from this when her game is interrupted by the little older Ricardo, who grabs the baskets and wants to start a stacking game. Diana follows him, watches him, and in a moment of uncertainty – Ricardo has positioned himself and is not yet very sure about this new movement pattern – Diana grabs the baskets again and takes them to a corner of the play area to safety. She enjoys her triumph for a moment by looking around with a smile, then she starts collecting again. Again, she differentiates exactly what goes into her stacked baskets and what doesn’t. She uses her eyes less for this distinction. She doesn’t need to look closely. She feels the surface, weight and shape of the object, hears the impact in the basket. The objects do not have to come into view so that she knows whether one of them belongs or not. Diana considers her self-imposed task so important that she continues even after an interruption. She is capable of a level of concentration that is often still denied to schoolchildren.

Success as an encouragement for experimental play

The 16 month old Faris got a large plastic bottle and three wooden rings to play with. He sits upright, puts the bottle between his legs, and begins to put the wooden rings on the bottle neck. He works concentrated and with great effort. The bottle falls over at the third ring. Faris collects the rings again, sets the bottle up again and starts his experiment again. This time he succeeds. He looks up as if looking for confirmation, then grabs the bottle with the three rings, leads it to his mouth, bites into it, chews on it.

A gesture of appropriation: “Mine”, “I did that”. Faris shaped the world in his image. The bottle now has three rings. Faris is the "doer", the success is confirmation enough for him. He stops chewing on his product, hits the floor with the bottle, is happy, dissolves the whole arrangement and starts all over again. Again he solves the task he has set himself. He starts a fourth game sequence, again he succeeds. With this repetition, Faris is able to confirm that it is he who is stacking the rings on the bottle neck. He assures himself of his role as an actor. In the repetition, the movement and coordination patterns are memorized, both in the body memory and in the brain. There, dendrite connections between the brain cells "myelinize", i.e. they coat themselves with the substance myelin and thereby stabilize their connections. This means that simple game and action patterns automate and can then be assembled into more complex ones. In the repetition, the coordination is also refined. Little by little, Faris discovers that he doesn’t need much strength to put the rings on the bottle neck. In the fourth experiment it can be clearly observed that he places the rings much more carefully. By repeatedly trying it out, he realized that he had to use little force to achieve the desired result.

Every child begins to play freely at the age of a few weeks. If his elementary needs for food and love are satisfied, he will observe the environment in his waking time, perceive his body, and develop increasingly targeted movements from initially reflexive movements. The child begins to explore its environment. In the game it develops its motor skills, its imagination and finally its pictorial and symbolic thinking. The basic condition is that it feels safe due to the proximity of the parents or a trusted caregiver, e.g. the nursery teacher. It is also a basic requirement that the environment is safe and that the child can complete his or her self-imposed tasks without any regulatory or disruptive intervention until it loses interest on its own. Very early, already in the third quarter of life, social elements appear when playing with peers. If the conditions are given, no further stimulation or support is required. From birth, the child brings everything it needs to acquire all of its abilities. Free play is a method, medium, drive and reward at the same time. In it the child becomes an actor in its development.

Selection of books and media

Emmi Pikler (2013): Peaceful Babies, Satisfied Mothers, Herder, 4th Edition.
Elisabeth C. Gründler (2008): Raw Material Intelligence, Cornelsen.
Éva Kálló, Györgyi Balog: From the beginning of free play
Monika Aly (2011): My baby discovered himself and the world, Kösel.
Liese Eliot (1999): What’s up? indoors in front? Brain development in the first five years of life, Berlin.
Anna Tardos, Geneviève Appell, Infant’s Attention While Playing, DVD with booklet, ISBN 3-931428-18-1