Why Play Matters More Than We Think
- admin37680
- Jul 10
- 7 min read
Rethinking childhood, creativity, and community through the lens of play
By Gabrielle Ivinson - Professor of Education and Community, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University.
This is a full record of the interview with Professor Ivinson in creation of the Neighbourhood Backyard documentary.
Gabrielle shares her beautiful, compelling and insights narrative into the depth of what children are getting from a space such as Joomunjie Land.
We started with the BIG QUESTIONS:
What Is Play, Really?
Play is one of those things that feels instantly familiar—until we try to define it.
Rather than seeing play as just games or recreation, some thinkers describe it as something much deeper. Philosopher Erin Manning calls play a process of “worlding”—a way of actively creating and experiencing the world.
In this sense, play isn’t simply an activity. It’s:
A way of exploring possibilities
A form of experimentation
A direct, sensory engagement with life before it’s categorized or structured
Children, especially, experience the world in this fluid and open way. Through play, they aren’t just learning about reality—they’re actively shaping it.
Why Is Play So Hard to Define?
Despite its importance, play has always been difficult to pin down.
Researchers from psychology, education, and psychoanalysis have all tried—Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Donald Winnicott, and many others.
One key reason for this difficulty lies in how society tends to frame play: We often see play as the opposite of work.
This “work vs play” divide is deeply rooted in Western thinking, where productivity and seriousness are valued above spontaneity and exploration.
But this framing creates a problem: It positions play as trivial—something optional, rather than essential.
The Hidden Problem: How Society Undervalues Play
When play is treated as secondary, its importance gets overlooked.
This has real consequences:
Resources for play are limited
Spaces for play are disappearing
Play is treated as a luxury, not a necessity
Meanwhile, structured learning (like formal education) receives the bulk of investment and attention.
Yet play contributes something equally important: social, emotional, and creative development.
In many non-Western cultures, this divide doesn’t exist. Learning is seen as relational, embodied, and connected to environment, rather than purely cognitive.
What Play Does for Children
At its core, play blurs boundaries—between:
Individual and environment
Mind and body
Learning and living
Psychologist Donald Winnicott described play as happening in an “intermediate space” between inner experience and the external world.
This space is where creativity emerges.
Through play, children:
Experiment and take risks
Develop independence and agency
Build resilience through trial and failure
Collaborate and negotiate social relationships
Play is also where children encounter challenge, frustration, and joy—and learn to navigate all of it.
Why Neighbourhood Play Spaces Matter
Some of the richest forms of play happen outside structured environments—especially in neighbourhood spaces.
Places like Neighbourhood backyards or informal play areas offer something unique:
• Safety—but also freedom
• Structure—but also unpredictability
• Adult presence—but at a distance
These environments allow children to:
• Explore creatively
• Invent their own rules and worlds
• Interact socially on their own terms
They become spaces where children can “find their way” in both the physical and social world.
Are Children Getting Enough Play Today?
In modern society, play is under pressure.
Several factors are shaping this:
Increased screen time and digital environments
Reduced access to safe outdoor spaces
Greater parental concerns about safety
Urban environments with limited child-friendly design
While digital play can be imaginative (for example, in games like Minecraft), it doesn’t fully replace physical, outdoor, social play.
Overall, many children today likely have:
Less freedom, less space, and less time for high-quality play.
In our current social structure, do children get enough play?
Everyone is concerned about the amount of time children spend on devices, screens and accessing virtual worlds. The concerns are even more complex than when TV’s first came into societies., and everyone thought children would become couch potatoes. There is quite a lot of imaginative play in virtual games such as Minecraft. Also, children need to be prepared to navigate online worlds, and some of this should to be directly taught, so I am not one to advocate a complete ban on access to social media, although until the tech companies put good enough regulation in place to keep children safe online, I am sympathetic to the total ban for under 16s that has been imposed in Australia, as a partial and not yet complete solution.
When it comes to physical, in-person play, do children get enough play? It probably depends on where they live. In urban areas there are not enough, neighbourhood spaces for children, in general. Local parks are sometime not safe, or attractive to children, partly because no one asked them what they wanted when these places were designed.
Social attitudes have change and adults are probably much more fearful of letting children go out to play, than in previous generations.
Given all this- it is probably the case that most children could do with a lot more, good quality play time and space. By good quality I mean enough freedom, challenge and wild spaces to explore. There can be nothing more exciting that an old quarry, an abandoned building site, a hidden tunnel, water and of course surf in Australia ... but these are often out-of-bounds. The
question is how much freedom can society tolerate for children’s play? We probably need to put more trust in children to find their spaces and find their ways.
What We Can Learn from Play
Perhaps the most powerful idea is this:
Play isn’t separate from learning—it is learning.
It’s how children:
Engage with the world
Develop identity
Build relationships
Explore possibilities
And maybe, it’s something adults need too. Because in play, we reconnect with curiosity, creativity, and the ability to imagine new worlds.
Are Neighbourhood Backyards such as Joomunjie Land addressing this decline?
Well Joomunjie Land was designed by children for children and this makes it a very important model because it encapsulates some aspects that I have attributed to play, such as freedom, challenge and sociality, in which adults are present yet at a distant. I know that this model has inspired the development of Neighbourhood Backyard play initiatives in the areas around Joomunjie Land. All sorts of little play habitats are popping up, in gardens, in streets and
in other bits of waste land. It’s wonderful when a small initiative takes off, and so yes, this is certainly a great way to address the decline in spaces and places for children to play.
Insights gleaned from my research of Joomunjie Land - Challenging perception on neurodiversity and play
Our observations in Joomunjie Land opened our eyes to the hyper focus that neurodiverse children bring to their activities suggests something of interest is going on. We have witnessed intense and sustained engagement and suggest that a specific culture emerged in the Joomunjie Land. The remarkable constructions that took place in this Loose Part Play areas and suggested that there was something extraordinary about the focus and intensity that some children brought to these activities.
Places such as Joomunjie Land are designed to foster free, spontaneous play enable the many variations of neurodiversity to be (Amos, 2023 ) ; that is to be without interference from adults. It is when adult step back and let neurodiverse expression unfold in its own time that the full intricacy of
playing comes to the fore.
Their serious, free play confronted, surprise and sometimes unsettled us and unexpected things happened that demanded attention. These stories and our observations have led us to engage with and rethink research on play. There is a commonly held assumption that neurodiverse children do not undertake creative play and do not share playing with others. These observations strongly dispute some conventional view about for example autism.
This leads us to challenge orthodox views that autistic children, for example, are anti-social and prefer to be in their own. We challenge what is meant by social. We widen the scope of what is recognised as 'sociality'
Pat Amos (2023) refers to neurotypicality in terms of movement and sensation – suggesting that neurodiverse people have different movement repertoires to neurotypical children. They perceive the world relationally before it is parsed into categories carried by language (Manning, 2013).
Amos (2023) suggests that autism is a kind of intense worlding. Most autistic people seek to order the world by become expert in at least one information system that they use to structure the world. They often work this through in minute detail and precision. These are often referred to as special interests or passions.
Playing is a form of worlding (Manning, 2026). Some worldings are primarily mentalist as children learn the rules and principles of writing, number, reading and other disciplinary subjects. Other worldings are created with open-ended objects and physical spaces. We have witnessed the intensity with which children world when given time and space. Playing in Joomunjie Land enabled autistic children’s intense working to be sustained over time without adults interfering with it. It enabled the neurodiversity to be (Amos, 2023).
Our observations in Joomunjie Land opened our eyes to the hyper focus that neurodiverse children bring to their activities suggests something of interest is going on. We have witnessed intense and sustained engagement and suggest that a specific culture emerged in Joomunjie Land.
Final takeaway:
If we want healthier children, stronger communities, and more creative societies, we need to stop treating play as optional—and start treating it as essential.
About Professor Gabrielle Ivinson
Gabrielle Ivinson is Professor of Education and Community at Manchester Metropolitan University. She co-ordinates the Creative Margins network exploring how to make arts accessible to marginalised young people.
An award-winning researcher and author of Poverty in Education Across the UK: A Comparative Analysis of Policy and Place and Introduction: The landscapes of poverty and education across the UK, among many others chapters and articles.
