Exploring the Term: “Children’s Play”

The word “play” is, as play expert Brian Sutton-Smith (2005) explains, “a highly complicated phenomenon and has never yet been adequately explained in any agreeable scientific terms. On the other hand, the one thing that most scholars do agree about (and then forget) is that play is primarily intrinsically motivated . . . play is fun” (p. xiii). Elkind (2003) agrees that play does not have an aim other than the child enjoying the experience. As Johnson et al. (2005) state, “When playing, children are in a special state of being in which they are not concerned about adult evaluations of them or achieving an external goal. They are in a blissful state of play in which external pressures do not matter” (p. xviii).