Self-Regulation, Creative Play, and Television

“Self-regulation is a critical skill for kids.
Unfortunately, most kids today spend a lot of
time doing three things: watching television,
playing video games and taking lessons. None
of these activities promote self-regulation.”

- Alix Spiegel

Unplug Your Kids has a very interesting post about an
NPR article and interview. In this NPR article,
Alix Spiegel describes how creative play is essential
for the development of self-regulation and
“executive function”.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514&sourceCode=RSS

Here’s a quote from this article:

It turns out that all that time spent playing
make-believe actually helped children develop a
critical cognitive skill called executive function.
Executive function has a number of different elements,
but a central one is the ability to self-regulate.
Kids with good self-regulation are able to control
their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and
exert self-control and discipline.

We know that children’s capacity for self-regulation
has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of
self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in
which psychological researchers asked kids
ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises.
One of those exercises included standing perfectly
still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn’t
stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it
for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds
could stand pretty much as long as the researchers
asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment.
But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National
Institute for Early Education Research says, the
results were very different.

Today’s 5-year-olds were acting at the level of
3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds
were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old
60 years ago,” Bodrova explains. “So the results
were very sad.”

“Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important.
Poor executive function is associated with high
dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good
executive function is a better predictor of success
in school than a child’s IQ. Children who are able
to manage their feelings and pay attention are better
able to learn. As executive function researcher
Laura Berk explains, “Self-regulation predicts
effective development in virtually every domain.”

Alix Spiegel then goes on to explain why it is that
researchers believe that it is creative play that
is crucial to the development of self-regulation and
“executive function”.

For more on the importance of self-regulation see:

Self-Discipline May Beat Smarts as Key to Success - Washington Post

High IQ: Not as good for you as you thought  - Cognitive Daily

Does TV displace Creative Play?

Well as a matter of fact is does:

“The results also showed that for seven- to 12-year-olds,
the more TV they watched, the less time they spent doing
homework, and among kids of all ages — especially among
those younger than five — more TV meant significantly
less creative play.”

http://www.medpagetoday.com/tbprint.cfm?tbid=2621

Update I: Fairies and Philosophy about CSS Parenting

Update II:  Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control about Tools of the Mind