The Paradox of Contemporary Play: The Dangers of Framing Play

Abstract

This paper will elaborate on the different ways play is being framed in the contemporary western world and how framing play is making it susceptible to manipulation that employs it to work in contradiction with its core purposes. The author suggests a contemporary paradox that arises in the core of early childhood education concerning child’s play. As play is a basic developmental function of mind and body common to all mammals, some important functions of play are going to be investigated. Due to the established fact that freedom to exercise play is of the outmost importance for a normal developing mammal from infancy to adulthood, this paper will focus on the reasons as to why people defy nature, by restricting its young in this basic form of activity and engagement, hindering their normal development, and ignoring that play carries vital epistemological and ontological human significance. Commercialisation of play alongside the disappearing time and space for free play in communities, at home, school and ece centres will be accounted for as reasons for an erosion of play, alongside some influential ideologies of play. Following form this the author investigates how framing play accounts for difficulties in empirical research of play, contributing to a lack of clear pedagogical, phenomenological and methodological answers about play and hence raises questions concerning a need for further phenomenological investigations of play alongside alternative methodological frameworks to ‘see’ beyond the elusiveness of play.