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  3. The Serious Need for Play[A]Stuart Brown, a Texas’s psy

The Serious Need for Play[A]Stuart Brown, a Texas’s psy

游客2023-08-25  26
问题                         The Serious Need for Play
[A]Stuart Brown, a Texas’s psychiatrist, interviewed 26 convicted murderers and discovered that most of the killers shared two things in common: they were from abusive families, and they never played as kids.
[B]Brown did not know which factor was more important. But for years, he has interviewed some 6,000 people about their childhoods, and his data suggest that a lack of opportunities for unstructured play, which is critical for coping with stress and building cognitive skills such as problem solving, can keep children from growing into happy, well-adjusted adults. Research into animal behaviour confirms play’s benefits and its evolutionary importance: play may provide animals(including humans)with skills that will help them survive and reproduce.
[C]A handful of studies support Brown’s conviction that a play-deprived childhood disrupts normal social emotional and cognitive development in humans and animals. Brown and other psychologists worry that limiting free play in kids may result in a generation of anxious, unhappy and socially inadaptable adults. But it is never too late to start: play also promotes the continued mental and physical well-being of adults.
[D]But kids play soccer and Scrabble — why are experts concerned that these games and more structured activities are eating into free play? "Certainly games with rules are fun and sources of learning experiences — they may foster group cohesion, for instance," says Anthony D. Pellegrini, an educational psychologist at the University of Minnesota. But, Pellegrini explains, "games have priori(先天)rules — set up in advance and followed. Play, on the other hand, does not have priori rules, so it affords more creative responses."
[E]Creativity is key because it challenges the developing brain more than following predetermined rules does. The child initiates and creates free play. In free play, kids use their imagination and try out new activities and roles. It might involve fantasies — such as pretending to be doctors or princesses or playing house — or it might include mock fighting, as when kids(primarily boys)wrestle and tumble with one another for fun, switching roles periodically. And free play is most similar to play seen in the animal kingdom suggesting that it has important evolutionary roots.
[F]How do these seemingly pointless activities benefit kids? Perhaps most crucially, play appears to help us develop strong social skills. Children learn to be fair and take turns — they cannot always demand to be the fairy queen, or soon they have no playmates. Because kids enjoy the activity, they do not give up as easily in the face of frustration as they might on, say, a maths problem — which helps them develop persistence and negotiating abilities.
[G]Keeping things friendly requires a fair bit of communication — arguably the most valuable social skill of all. Playing with peers is the most important in this regard. Studies show that children use more sophisticated language when playing with other children than when playing with adults.
[H]Does play help children become socialised? Studies suggest that it does. According to a 1997 study of children living in poverty and at high risk of school failure, published by the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, kids who enroled in play-oriented preschools are more socially adjusted later in life than are kids who attended play-tree pre-schools where they were constantly instructed by teachers. By age 23, more than one third of kids who had attended instruction-oriented preschools had been arrested for a serious crime as compared with fewer than one tenth of the kids who had been in play-oriented preschools. And as adults, fewer than 7% of the play-oriented preschool attendees had ever been suspended from work but more than a quarter of the directly instructed kids had.
[I]Research suggests that play is also critical for emotional health, possibly because it helps kids work through anxiety and stress. In a 1984 study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, researchers assessed the anxiety levels of 74 three- and four-year-old children on their first day of preschool as indicated by their behaviour — whether they pleaded, cried and begged their parents to stay — and how much their palms were sweating. Based on the researchers’ observations, they labelled each child as either anxious or not anxious. They then randomly split the 74 kids into four groups. Half of the kids were escorted to rooms full of toys, where they played either alone or with peers for 15 minutes: the other half were told to sit at a small table either alone or with peers and listen to a teacher tell a story for 15 minutes.
[J]Afterwards, the kids’ levels of distress were assessed again. The anxiety levels of the anxious kids who had played had dropped by more than twice as much as compared with the anxious kids who had listened to the story.(The kids who were not anxious to begin with stayed about the same.)Interestingly, those who played alone calmed down more than the ones who played with peers. The researchers speculate that through imaginative play, which is most easily initiated alone, children build fantasies that help them cope with difficult situations.
[K]Play fighting also improves problem solving. According to a paper published by Pellegrini in 1989, the more elementary school boys engaged in rough-housing, the better they scored on a test of social problem solving. During the test, researchers presented kids with five pictures of a child trying to get a toy from a peer and five pictures of a child trying to avoid being scolded by his mother. The subjects were then asked to come up with as many possible solutions to each social problem while their score was based on the variety of strategies they mentioned, and children who play-fought regularly tended to score much better.
[L]Playing also appears to help with language development, according to a 2007 study in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Researchers at the University of Washington gave a box of toy blocks to children from middle- and low-income families aged 18 months to two and a half years. Parents of these kids, as well as parents of a similar group of kids who had no blocks, kept track of how often the children played. After six months, the kids who had played with blocks scored significantly higher on language tests than the others did. The researchers are not sure, however, whether these improvements resulted from playing with blocks — because by playing with blocks, the youngsters were spending less time in unproductive activities such as watching television — but the end result was good for them in any case.
[M]If play is so crucial, what happens to children who are not playing enough? Ultimately, no one knows. Studies on rats indicates that play drive comes from the brain stem, a structure that precedes the evolution of mammals.
[N]Of course, many parents today believe they are acting in their kids’ best interests when they sacrifice free play for what they see as valuable learning activities. Some mothers and fathers may also hesitate to let their kids play outside unattended, and they may fret about the possibility of the scrapes and broken bones, says Sergio M. Pellis, a behavioural neu-roscientist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. Although those instincts are natural, protecting kids "simply defrays(支付)those dear costs to later, when those same children will have difficulty in dealing with an unpredictable, complex world," Pellis says.
[O]Parents should let children be children — not just because it should be fun to be a child but because denying youth’s joys keeps kids from developing into inquisitive, creative creatures, Elkind warns. "Play has to be reframed and seen not as an opposite to work but rather as a complement," he says. "Curiosity, imagination and creativity are like muscles: if you don’t use them, you lose them." [br] Comparing with listening to stories, play can help the anxious children release pressure more effectively.
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答案 I
解析 根据题目中的listening to stories和anxious children将本题出处定位于[I]段第2句。该句介绍了实验的结果：与刚听过故事的焦虑型孩子相比，刚刚玩耍过的焦虑型孩子的焦虑指数下降了两倍多，由此可见，玩耍可以更有效地帮助焦虑的孩子释放压力。本题是对该句的同义转述。
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