The power of towers
One of my strongest memories of early parenthood (apart from sleep deprivation and seemingly endless changes of clothes and nappies!), is playing almost daily with various forms of building materials. Pretty much from the time he could sit up, my son’s favourite was a set of large Fisher Price blocks. They were simple, round, coloured cylinders of plastic that could be stacked in a single tower. Most importantly, the set included a car with space for two towers to be built. My baby boy adored them. We would spend hours and hours making the towers as high as they would go, noisily knocking them to the ground, and then starting all over again. I loved watching his developing dexterity as he gradually learned to place the cylinders more and more accurately. As he grew older we added wooden blocks, Duplo, and of course Lego, to the mix. It wasn’t just that he loved it. I did too. There was something so beautifully relaxing about sitting on the floor and building something together.
My daughter was less enamoured of building block sets. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t love to build things. She just preferred to do it more organically - with cardboard boxes and pieces of furniture draped in blankets and pieces of fabric. Piles of wooden blocks were much more likely to secure the corner of a makeshift tent than to build a structure of their own.
Over the last decade, I’ve spent a couple of weeks each year staying with friends who have three children. With both my own children well and truly into adulthood, I relished spending time with young children again so that I could revisit the simple joy of building things with blocks. The youngest of the three children is now in his teens, but when I first met them he had just turned three. Over the years we have spent hours building things with Lego, boxes, paper, found objects from the garden, etc.
My favourite though has been Kapla blocks. These simple wooden blocks come in a single size (11.7cm x 2.3cm x 0.78cm). The smallest set includes just 15 blocks but the deluxe set includes 200 blocks and the building opportunities are limitless. I don’t know why I love it so much, but I can literally spend hours with my young friends happily building towers, houses, temples, bridges, boats, and anything else that our imagination can conjure. Unlike Lego that snaps together, the Kapla blocks need to be carefully placed so that structures are balanced. This means that occasionally a structure fails and we have to start from scratch, this time trying to make sure that we engineer it more soundly. Integrating a little bit of technology, we have also had heaps of fun using slow-mo video on my iPad to film a structure when we knock it down. It’s so much fun to see how many blocks we can remove before the structure cascades to the floor, and also to see how and where it fails.
Is there anything more fun than seeing how high you can go?
Without any formal “teaching” at all, we know instinctively that these activities are really valuable learning opportunities for the young people in our lives. There is plenty of research that clearly indicates that children exposed to free play with blocks will develop skills in all of these areas: problem solving, imagination, self-expression, mathematics, continuity and permanence, creativity, science, self-esteem, social and emotional growth, and fine and gross motor skills. But what about me? Why do I love it so much?
It turns out that there is a really interesting group, the National Institute for Play (NIFP), that has some answers. I first came across it when a friend sent me the link to this article - “My kids love building - here’s why experts say playing with them is crucial”. The author, Sophie Brickman, was writing about her experience of spending days on end engaged in block building activities whilst COVID-19 swept through the whole family. Like me, she had identified that it wasn’t just keeping her kids entertained and engaged, but she was equally soothed by it herself. She writes, “I found myself unclenching my jaws and relaxing into the play, reconnecting with some pre-Ikea self that once enjoyed focusing on a task without an end goal in mind.” One quote that was music to my ears was this from Dr Stuart Brown, founder of the NIFP.
““There is a pleasurable component for most of us in messing around with our hands. It’s an intrinsic part of our nature to enjoy hand-brain activity, which you’re doing with this construction-play. We lose that in the march towards adulthood, where it’s not quite as easy to access.””
“…messing around with our hands.” I think you can imagine my delight :)
Visiting the NIFP website, I soon found myself down a wonderful rabbit hole. They publish a monthly newsletter, Play Times. December 2024 leads with an article on the importance of adult play and discusses its benefits for cognition, mental and emotional health, and social connection. Sounds familiar, right? All the things I keep talking about here! The article also references eight different play personalities - the collector, the competitor, the creator/artist, the director, the explorer, the joker, the kinesthete, and the storyteller. This immediately reminded me of the post I wrote about Maker DNA, and in particular the idea that everyone is unique in the particular combination of activities, materials and ideas that feel playful and/or creative to them.
The article reports that one of the biggest barriers to adult play is the feeling that it’s a childish “waste of time” - that it’s not productive and therefore frivolous. In the modern world, we have so much structure and our lives feel driven by all the “shoulds” that assault us in myriad ways. Many of us feel that we are time poor, so it can be hard to give ourselves permission to play for 15 minutes, let alone for a few hours. When I visit my young friends, I’m away from all the responsibilities of home and running my business, so it’s easier to say “yes” to hours of experimenting with blocks. And I relish that time. It’s so relaxing to just create something for the sheer fun of it - in fact, usually for the sheer pleasure of bringing it crashing to the floor!
I’ve found the same feeling of playfulness in my latest embroidery piece too. It’s a piece designed by my Mum, which I’m reworking to make sure that I’m ready to teach it next year. Unlike some of my designs, there is a lot of simplicity and therefore freedom in this piece. Freedom to choose colours, stitches, and even the layout and shape of the buildings. I can’t wait to teach it because there will be so much opportunity for my students to exercise their own creative choices. And thanks to the NIFP, I can now reassure them that embracing a playful mindset with the project will not only be pleasurable, but also really good for them.
Mum’s finished piece - Denmark Dreaming
At this time of year, many of us are busily involved with the “silly season”, whatever form that takes in our particular culture or religion. In the southern hemisphere, it’s also time for the long summer holidays. May I make a gentle suggestion? If a young person in your life drags you down on to the floor to help them build a tower or two, be grateful. They are giving you the gift of play, encouraging your hand-mind connection to be creative and exploratory, and giving you a pharmaceutical-free shot of healthy goodness.
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