Susan Linn, Director of the Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood, and Joan Almon from the Alliance for Childhood conducted a workshop on creative play at the CCFC Summit in April.
Linn began the workshop with a simple exercise: she held up three puppets, one at a time, and asked us to write down a) what it was, b) what its name was, and c) something it might say.
The first puppet was really just a white sock over her hand with two eyes attached. The second was similar but also had ears and a mouth. The third was a blue, furry monster we all recognized as Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster.
As you may have guessed, the first puppet elicited a variety of identifications, names, and statements from the participants. The second puppet drew a more limited response. Cookie Monster, of course, was a cookie monster and didn’t say too much beyond “Me want cookie.”
This exercise blew me away in its simplicity and its significance, as does Linn’s new book, The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World.
Linn is a ventriloquist, among other things. She started as a child, performed on the street corners of Boston and eventually moved on to the Smithsonian and even Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. She eventually used her skills and education to become a puppet therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital.
In addition to being the cofounder and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Linn is the Associate Director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.
In The Case for Make Believe, Linn does just as she promises: makes a case for childhood play by helping us to understand why it so important for childhood development and making us realize how far away from play we’ve gone:
Play is so fundamental to children’s health and well-being – and so endangered – that the United Nations lists it as a guaranteed right in its Convention of the Rights of the Child. . . . In the United States and other industrialized nations, seduction, not conscription, lures children away from creative play.
Lovable media characters, cutting-edge technology, brightly colored packaging, and well-funded, psychologically savvy marketing strategies combine in coordinated campaigns to capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of children – teaching them to value that which can be bought over their own make believe creations.
Reading the book, I was really struck by the fact that our society does not value creative play. Linn talks about how play has almost been eliminated in schools in favor of government-backed policies that “promote rote learning.”
I asked her, in an email interview, if we should return play to the classroom and how we could do that.
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