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Play can become problematic when a child is given too much or too little freedom. For example, in instances of play described in Playing in Industrial Ruins play can be problematic if a child is exposed so possible hazard or learns about something that is not necessarily good to know yet. By this I mean getting injured, or seeing people use drugs or are violent etc. However, if a child is overly sheltered, they will not know enough about the world. Play can allow children to learn many lessons such as how to interact and socialize with others, how to resolve conflict, and how to share and be empathetic.

Through play, children experiment with different adult roles.  For fun, they manipulate the behaviors, actions, and ideas in adult interactions. However, when pretending to wear the shoes of an adult, children start to understand a lot of the problems that adults face in everyday life. They initially have fun, later realizing that their role models are actually in situations that are not fun at all. Playing cops and robbers becomes upsetting because the cops start to abuse their power. Through play, children start to realize this, and it can actually be damaging to children.

We touched on this in class. When gender is added to play it changes how we view this innocent act. It adds rules to something that is suppose to be free and chaotic. Boys should only play with action figures and should play rough, pull hair, get dirty. Girls should only play with dolls and should stay inside unless they're playing something light like hopscotch or jump rope something that involves a song. When these lines are crossed children are judged and reprimanded. Like when my male cousin would play barbies with me, other family members would whisper behind our backs and when my female cousin wouldn't the same family would talk. It is breaking social norms that confine us into a gender binary that only fullfills its "traditional" roles of dainty women and manly men. 

Is there such a thing as too much freedom in play? The posting “Play” by the student writing as “Free Rein” in which she shares her memories of her own childhood experience of playing, suggests to me that perhaps there is such a thing as too much. This idea contrasts with those expressed by Tim Edensor and  his co-authors in the the chapter of their work, “Urban Wildscapes”, from “Playing in industrial ruins”. Edensor celebrates play in chaotic, unsupervised environments, but Free Rein’s account of her own childhood experience challenges the notion that the most productive play arises when children are free from supervision and the usual constraints of regulated environments.

Pretend Play: Key to Imagination

Why do children pretend play?

On serendip.com, a website where students post about their childhood play, both a US girl AntoniaAC and a Chinese girl Iridium reported they have pretend played in their childhood.

“We were warriors”, said AntoniaAC, “Amazonian women with super strength and with a knack for vanquishing demons, rebuilding destroy villages (mud homes), and soldiers in a forgotten war.”

As we seen in many of the readings, there are quite a few issues that result from play. For one, adventurous and dangerous play may promote the continuation of dangerous/ illegal actions. This is especially in the case of young teens who are very attracted to this type of rebellious play. While going out of one's boundaries is important, encouraging actions that may be detrimental to one's self and/ or society is not something to take lightly.

Drifting away from play in humans, play can also be problematic and a bit confounding in animals. Play in animals often leads to the death of the young, due to some risk taking action. This is another example of how play can be problematic. 

As a child, starfish loved to enact elaborate scenes with the magic of make-believe. She and her playmates would adopt roles, embodying “feuding sorcerers” one day and “magical princesses” the next (starfish). Sometimes they were parents and kids, doctors and patients, or even non-human creatures that would travel through galaxies near and far. In her words, imaginative play was “rewarding” and all she needed was “nothing more than my own imagination to carry them out successfully” (starfish). This ideal notion of the power of children’s imagination is what most adults recall when they think about childhood, and about their current creative capabilities in comparison.

In her post “Childhood ’play’” LiquidEcho wrote that, in her experience, imagination is an essential factor of her “play”. But playing digital games like cellphone games or CD games make her feel shamed because according to her, they’re lack of imagination. She does see the positive point of this rapidly developing era that it makes her able to adapt to new things or shifts easily. But gaining this ability of flexibility, she only gives credit the time period when the traditional games shifting to the new type of games, not this new type of game itself.

       When I look back to my childhood, one thing I notice is that all the used-to-be-fun games seem no longer funny. I went to visit my uncle’s family two weeks ago, children burst into laugh when their youngest sister replied everything “mama.” They made fun of president candidates as I used to do when I was in primary school. Every game when I just involved into, I thought I would never get tired of it. Chinese chess, never! Monopoly, never! Jump-rope, never! Chicken vs. Hawk, never ever! Then I left them behind with the excuses of “I am getting older, no more excitement for those games,” though I know because I think they are silly, by heart.