My Connections to Play

MY CONNECTIONS TO PLAY                             

Favorite  Quotes                             

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.

Roger von Oech
Contemporary American creativity guru

When children pretend, they’re using their imaginations to move beyond the bounds of reality. A stick can be a magic wand. A sock can be a puppet. A small child can be a superhero.

Fred Rogers
American children’s television host
1928–2003

These two quotes reflect the way that I feel about play.  Necessity is definitely the mother of invention, as a child I had to create many objects to complete my play because the item that I needed; such as a kitchen set, or a new dress for Barbie, were not available to me.  Play is what encourages necessity in childhood and is what gives life to the ideals and use of imagination.  Mr. Rogers says that play is what moves a child beyond the restraints of reality.  I absolutely agree. My imagination took me on so many adventures and journeys in my younger days; I could not imagine a childhood where play wasn’t as fun as mine. Not having store bought toys allowed me to use my imagination and creativity to produce objects to complete our play themes.  I remember using leaves as cabbage and mud pies were hamburgers. We improvised when we wanted to play basketball by playing on a dirt court and nailing a bicycle rim to a board for a hoop. How many children today would know how to do that?

My parents are to thank for all of the “adventures” my siblings and I went on.  Every day we were sent outside to play.  My Mom would help us to create items when we were playing and provided us with materials with which we could make pretend objects from.  She was the best Mother a child could ask for.  My father, the stern parent, was also a firm believer in going outside to play.  I think that his motive was simply peace and quiet more than to benefit us children. However, without him forcing us to stay outside, we may have missed the opportunities we were given to pretend.  I know that the playing we were involved in as children had a large impact on our ability to create, imagine and problem solve today.

The similarity I see between children today and myself is that we all love to play.  The differences are many. When ‘thrown’ outside to play we did not argue and complain, instead we found games to play and invented what we needed to do so.  Today, children are stuck in front of game systems and televisions for longer periods of time.  They do not have to make items to play with because most of them have any toy they would like.  Instead of planning and creating items to play with, they have store bought items.  Today’s students are missing out on problem solving skills that I feel will be directly linked to the fact that they have not had the opportunity to use their imaginations to explore their environments.

Public Health Measures and the impact on Child Development

Infant mortalilty has improved dramatically since 1950.  With public health measures influencing laws, contagious diseases, and cultural norms the number of children that die before age 5 has been reduced worldwide.  One way that has helped improve the overall health of children is immunizations.  Immunization is when a small inactive virus is introduced to the body either by shot, swallowing or inhalation in order to trigger the body to create an antibody against the virus.  According to J.P. Baker in 2000, “Immunization is said to have had a greater impact on human morality reduction and population growth than any other public health intervention besides clean water”.

Thanks to immunizations the world has seen success with eradicating smallpox and polio, as well as causing an almost complete disappearance in measles.  Immunizations are not only for protecting children from the disease, but from the complications that are associated with these diseases as well.

As a parent I decided to keep my children’s immunizations on target and to have them updated as necessary.  Over the years I have heard the rumors that some immunizations were responsible for such things as autism and also resulted in childrens deaths.  However, I felt that not getting them the vaccines would be more of a risk than any complication that may occur from the vaccines.  My mother had all of us vaccinated and we all are healthy adults.  What kind of parent would I be if I did not give my own children the same consideration?

Around the world, and even among different cultures with in the U.S., there are different views on immunizations.  Also, in different countries the availability to immunizations causes many parents not to have their child immunized.   One could hardly blame parents in third world nations who are more likely to not have the opportunity to immunize their children, for not doing so.  Sometimes I think as Americans we forget that many of people around the world do not have all the conveniences that we are afforded in the United States.  Even in some of the poorest communities here in the U. S. there are families who are not able to afford medical attention for their children.  We have to understand the environment, culture and socioeconomic situation of every individual case to determine the availability to immunizations and to understand a parent’s decision to immunize their child.

For this article I have chosen to discuss immunization practices in Nigeria.  According to information I obtained from the UNICEF website and BioMed Central Infectious Diseases website, Nigeria is ranked 2^nd overall and 17^th when ranked in children under 5, in infant mortality.  The country is far behind goals set by the Millenium Development Goals Report which has set goals for all countries to reach in child immunizations.  According to the BioMed Central website, the country  may not meet the goals set for 2015, that is unless the current trend is reversed.  In Nigeria progress is slow because there is inequitable access to services and there are deficient vaccine supplies and equipments.   Because of the lack of availability to immunization services, disease trend continue.  For example,  Measles were responsible for 5 percent of deaths in children in Africa, half of these deaths occurred in Nigeria.  Nigeria is among the ten countries in the world with vaccine coverage rates below 50 percent .  In third world countries, education of mothers on immunizations is also a problem.   Although some parents might understand that the risk to their child dying is higher without the immunizations, there are either not enough of the vaccines available or the sites providing the vaccines are not within the reasonable vicinity of the family.

In closing I would like to comment on a quote from our text, “No one notices when things go right”(Bortz, 2005, p.389).  A doctor stated this as a reason why parents in America are not having their children immunized properly.  I think this is an example of our society as a whole, not only where immunizations are concerned.  We as Americans are so privileged and have come so far within a few generations that we no longer see the importance of the simple procedures that have made our lives so comfortable.  Because we are not seeing the affects first hand of diseases such as polio, small pox, diphtheria, and chicken pox we no longer fear the diseases.  Our reading for this week shared a story of chicken pox where the parents decided not to have their child immunized. Well the little girl contracted chicken pox, but was only a carrier, and when she went home her father, age 36, who had also never been immunized contracted chicken pox.  Because of complications from the chicken pox he died .  This family resided in Kansas which was one of a few states that did not require children to be vaccinated, so no one in the man’s family had ever been vaccinated.  What I learned from this week’s reading is that we could all have had this experience if vaccinations were not mandated by our states.  I don’t think that many of us would have been vaccinated if it had not been enforced. I am grateful that the government has intervened and made it possible for every child to be vaccinated her in the United States.  It is unfortunate that some parents choose not to have their children vaccinated.  I think that the quote from the doctor is most important for people who make this choice to hear.  Because we as a society are not witnessing the deaths of children due to diseases and complications from these awful diseases, they do not see the importance.  Unfortunately, they may have to witness the death of a loved one firsthand before they begin to understand. 

Njoku, Geofforey.  At a glance: Nigeria. Retrieved from Unicef.org November 12, 2010. http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/nigeria_36211.html

Berger, Kathleen. The Developing Person through Childhood.  2009. New York