Download the entire post as PDF >
A Tribute to Stuart Brown, MD,
and The National Institute for Play
by Michael Mendizza
I got a call from my chief of service saying that I was to organize an investigation and find out why a twenty-five-year-old man, who by then had been identified as Charles Whitman, after killing his wife and mother, would shoot thirty-one people, killing nineteen, off the Texas University tower, then the largest mass murder in the United States. This was 1966, three years after the Kennedy motorcade, and Governor Connelly wanted to know what would produce this kind of tragedy.
What came out of the extensive personal interviews was that Whitman’s father sustained overcontrol and abusive family domination which meant that Charles had not ever been free to engage in spontaneous play. The commission appointed by the Texas Governor agreed that the lack of play was a significant element that led to Whitman’s inability to control and deal with his (diary confirmed) violent impulses.
The next year I headed a team that interviewed twenty-six incarcerated murders in the Huntsville State Prisons and compared them to a large matched cohort that were part of an on-going state survey that included all the young male murderers in the state of Texas. Over 90 percent of the murderers, whether they came from upper-class economic circumstances or were in a state hospital system revealed high levels of play deprivation.
If the adult culture is play-deprived, which is pervasive in Western Europe and the United States, then that adult culture is not going to allow the natural evolution of authentic play to develop in children. We see this all around us. Spontaneous (self-organized) free play in childhood has been systematically replaced by adult organized activities (and that has been replaced by technology).
Stuart Brown, M.D.
Author, PBS Producer, and Founder of the National Institute for Play
Interview with Michael Mendizza
In the mid 90s, collaborating with Joseph Chilton Pearce, physicist David Bohm and original play researcher Fred Donaldson, I had one of those flashes, an insight that ‘play’ was one of the most misunderstood activities in all of human development, yours and mine. I contacted Joe Pearce and he confirmed, decades earlier he had a similar insight.
Authentic Play, as opposed to cultural games and contests, is the over-arching umbrella in which all learning takes place. Play is the act of learning itself. Play with each stage of development involves a different type of activity. The early child plays or learns in a very different way than the middle child plays and learns, and certainly different from the late child and adolescent. Each stage of development has its own block of intelligence and abilities which are offered to us rather genetically. The development of which we do through play.
…read the entire post on ttfuture.org
m