Children are curious. They want to know.  And digital babysitting leaves that thirst for knowledge unsatiated.

Mom, why do penguins have wings?
Because they were born with them.
But, why do they have them, if they can’t fly?
Because their wings help them swim.
Why?
Because they’re like flippers in the water.
Why are they like flippers?
They just are.

This type of conversation is nothing new to parents of young children. The constant “why’s” of childhood can be exasperating, as children repeatedly push for more and more information. But despite the challenging nature of these moments, these “why” questions are actually quite important for children’s learning: They show adults what children want to learn (Callanan & Oakes, 1992), reveal what they are naturally curious about, and help them gain information about the world around them. In the example above, the child learned that penguins’ wings are not meant to help them fly at all, but to help them swim. In this case, the child’s causal questions, aimed at gaining explanations, were persistent: She wanted specific information and was unsatisfied with her mother’s initially circular answer.

Research suggests that children demonstrate these persistent questioning behaviors often, sometimes even coming up with their own answers and explanations when parents don’t give a satisfying answer (Kurkul & Corriveau, 2018). Even infants do this. Although babies can’t ask verbal questions, they use pointing gestures to request information from adults (Kovacs et al., 2014). Infants are also persistent — they continue pointing when an adult provides an unsatisfying answer to their nonverbal query (Lucca & Wilbourn, 2019).

Although asking questions is commonplace in childhood, the “new normal” brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic may affect children’s inquiries. As many news outlets and school announcements remind us, we are currently living in “unprecedented times” in the wake of the virus. How does a worldwide pandemic affect children’s questions?

The research is clear: Children ask questions about the world and persist in asking their questions when they aren’t satisfied with the answers. Why? Because children are curious and know that adults can provide them with rich information. Children’s questions become even more incredible when we open our eyes to the complexities that allow questions to flow so seamlessly from their mouths: They must identify where they need information, come up with a question to address the gap in their knowledge, and direct their query to an appropriate, knowledgeable person.

Although asking questions is commonplace in childhood, the “new normal” brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic may affect children’s inquiries. As many news outlets and school announcements remind us, we are currently living in “unprecedented times” in the wake of the virus. How does a worldwide pandemic affect children’s questions?

During stay-at-home orders, children may have fewer experiences with other children and adults. Research suggests that as preschoolers develop, they become more skilled at directing their questions to appropriate people (Choi et al., 2018). For example, they learn over time that some questions will be answered better by adults than by children. Without practice asking questions and evaluating responses from different children and adults, children may not be as well prepared to ask and answer questions.

Additionally, children are missing out on many of the stimulating experiences they had before the pandemic, experiences that prompt curiosity and questions. For example, one study found that children asked fewer questions when viewing replicas or drawings of animals than when viewing live animals in a zoo (Chouinard et al., 2007). Questions about penguins’ wings, for example, might just not get asked. Television or videos don’t promote that much inquiry, either: Young children do not learn as much from television as they do from live interactions (Anderson & Pempek, 2005). Nor do electronic toys or tablets seem to spur children’s questions as often as real interactions do (Neale et al., 2020).

How can we expose children to objects and events to stimulate their questions during quarantines? Here are several ideas you can try:

1. Demonstrate how to ask questions. Even during a pandemic, children mimic what they see. Parents who ask questions have children who ask more questions. Instead of asking simple yes/no questions, try asking open-ended questions that use why and These are questions that get children thinking. Kids learn words more successfully when the words are presented as parts of questions rather than as statements.
2. Curiosity spurs questions. Look at what your child is looking at. If you ask them a question, they might then ask you one. On a walk or in a park, ask questions about what you see. There is so much to query, for example, why do leaves fall off trees? Even watching a snow plow salt the roads can spark children’s curiosity. Why does salt make the snow melt? These experiences can elicit genuine, causal questions from children. Sometimes, children just need to be given the opportunity to ask. And we need to have the impetus to use the web to find the answers.
3. Parents’ attention enables questions. Preliminary research in our lab suggests that children are more likely to ask questions when their parents are undistracted than when the adults are using their cell phones. It’s difficult to separate work and home during the pandemic, but try to reserve some time each day that is off limits for phones. Putting your phone away can signal to children that you are available, listening, and ready to respond to their questions.

Children are curious. They want to know.  And digital babysitting leaves that thirst for knowledge unsatiated. Although the pandemic certainly raises obstacles to some of the experiences that typically stimulate children’s questions, parents have the power to increase children’s inquiry, even at home.

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The potential loss could require some children to repeat a grade. However, play with family members can stem decline and support parental mental health.

We should pay extra attention to the home schooling and care of disadvantaged children during the Covid-19 crisis. Their potential loss of learning could require that some students repeat an entire grade. However, play with families, as well as government help with computer access, can help mitigate the damage.

These students are at particular risk of a ‘Covid-19 slump’ in learning compared with their middle-income peers. Addressing this danger demands government action to improve access to laptops and the internet. Parents and extended families can also help by marshalling unrealized capacities to play with and stimulate children, even while they are cooped up at home, with no museums, no park and little outside space.

Grandparents can play with children virtually

Grandparents can give parents a break by video chatting with young children to read them a story. Research shows that it works almost as well as reading in person. They can also get out the building blocks that many grandparents have at home, and young children can match what they are making at the other end – that’s good for STEM skills. At a distance, they can still create puzzles, a quiz, play games, or even visit a museum virtually and try to find an exhibit, like in the movie “National Treasure.”

At home, parents have options even in confined space. There’s building a fort in the living room, ‘hide and seek’ and organizing a treasure hunt. A bucket of soapy water, a sponge, and something to clean can keep a three-year-old entertained. Even a tiny outside space can let children to search for five sticks, different leaves left in the fall, or what’s hidden behind a blade of grass.

Cook with your child – it’s like doing chemistry – or plant something and learn about nature; learn a new word every week. Playing a board game combines lots of learning – giving everyone a turn teaches the social graces. Count the squares – that’s math. Explaining rules and moves offers language practice.

You can make daily walks more stimulating for children. In many neighborhoods, homes have put teddies in their front window so kids can go on a bear hunt. You can chalk a hopscotch court on your sidewalk for passers-by and leave a message asking children to spot something hidden outside your home.

Covid-19 slump could be worse than summer slump

We’ve known about a ‘summer slump’, experienced particularly by disadvantaged students compared with their wealthier peers, that occurs during just a couple of months of vacation. But the summer slump could be minor compared with no classes from now until at least September.

During the US summer vacation, following third grade, students lose, on average, nearly 20 per cent of their school-year gains in reading and 27 per cent of their school-year gains in math. Research shows that the loss increases with age: after seventh grade, students lose on average 36 per cent of their school-year gains in reading and 50 per cent in math.

However, these figures mask inequalities in impact: learning among most middle-class children doesn’t plummet in this way for many reasons. Typically, better-off families retain a schedule and can provide interesting summer travel. Their children are sent to soccer, drama and computer camps. They continue to read at home. Adults are often available, talking to them, playing, sharing activities. It’s not the same in homes where parents might be working two or three jobs and families don’t have diverse childcare options, or money for trips and camps.

Covid-19 is multiplying pressures on these families, bringing additional job insecurity and money worries as cramped homes are shared for homework that parents may feel ill-equipped to support. And whereas those families who lack connectivity might, before the epidemic, have gone to a coffee shop for internet access, such places are now closed.

Play with children helps stressed adults too

Playing isn’t just good for the kids – it can help parents who are stressed by extra burdens as they struggle to switch off, trying to stay on top of work at home, while schooling and feeding the children in small spaces. Reading a story can help the adults too: many of us can remember falling asleep reading to a child. That’s because it relaxes us as well, as confirmed by skin arousal tests we’ve done in the lab. The US Association for Psychological Science is urging parents, during the epidemic, ‘to care for your own mental health, because your mental health can have an impact on your kids’.

Many of these recommendations require a concerted attempt to end the digital divide and ensure that children can connect to learning opportunities. We can take a lesson from Plan Ceibal, an initiative which has ensured that every child in public education has a computer for personal use with a free internet connection and educational resources. When Covid-19 hit Uruguay, even families on very low incomes were ready with what they needed to switch to learning at home.

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Transforming supermarkets, bus stops and park benches for learning through play could cut educational gulfs between rich and poor.

In the supermarket, signs prompt parents to ask children where milk comes from. ‘Count the carrots,’ suggests another sign. At a bus stop, children complete puzzles on the back of a bench. Some play hopscotch, jumping from one foot to another. Others search for images of food and animals hidden in the metal work. They wonder why, as the day passes, the images cast different shadows on the ground. This is learning through play.

Is this the future for child development – where academic skills are built by learning through play out and about, in the community, not just in school? We think it’s possible.

Rethinking public spaces for creative learning

That’s why we’ve transformed often mundane public spaces into places of learning through play to foster interaction, conversation and real learning in areas like language, literacy and STEM subjects. Behind the fun lies a big ambition: to use the 80 per cent of waking time that children spend outside school to improve their readiness to learn, social-emotional skills, scientific curiosity and educational achievement.

““Can you spot a big one,” a picture of a giant tomato asked at the fruit and vegetable aisle. Suddenly, low income families were chatting much more.’”

We need to do more than expand early education to put lower income children on a more equal footing with their peers. Our approach augments what’s often used in children’s museums, with the potential to reach greater numbers. It’s not confined to single locations that require entry payments.

Our goal is to create communities intentionally designed for learning through play by all children. We’re not trying to shove learning down children’s throats but rather to enhance cities so they’re rife with opportunity for families and children to communicate. The aim is to avoid extra financial burdens and focus on everyday facilities, such as bus stops and benches that cities already maintain.

Each initiative is evaluated, and our early findings are promising. Crucially, they suggest that such initiatives hold the promise of reducing gaps between children from underserved communities and their more affluent peers.

The supermarket becomes a fun school

Take the supermarket as a place of learning through play, for example. Before signage went up, carers and children in a low-income neighbourhood supermarket interacted considerably less well than those in a middle income supermarket. Then, we added our ‘healthy language’ signs in each store.

“Is this the future – where academic skills are built out and about, in the community, not just in school?”

‘Can you spot a big one?’ asked a picture of a giant tomato in the fruit and vegetable aisle. ‘A small one? Which ones are heavy? Or light?’ Suddenly families were chatting much more: language interactions in families from underserved neighbourhoods rose by a third. Parents described more of what they could see for their children. They asked them more questions, pointed out more products. Children did likewise for the grown-ups. And it turns out that these conversations can make all the difference in building foundations for language growth.

Increased parental interaction for lower income children 

However, there was little impact among families in the higher-end supermarket. That difference led to an intriguing outcome. There are no hard and fast rules tying conversation levels to socioeconomic status – some lower-income families talk a lot, and some higher-income families don’t. Still, there is a generally identified conversation and interaction gap between middle- and lower-income families, and it was eliminated by our supermarket learning through play experiment. Such findings suggest that transforming public spaces might help families ‘catch up’ – chipping away at educational inequities between socioeconomic groups that remain stubbornly large, despite preschool education.

The supermarket initiative is one example of the ‘Learning Landscapes’ project, begun in the United States but now undergoing experimentation internationally, from Johannesburg to London. It takes the goal of greater educational equity and combines it with the Conscious Cities movement, which aims to create more intuitive, responsive, people-centric cities. Urban areas are a good place to start learning-through-play initiatives since by 2030, 70 per cent of children are expected to be living in cities, worldwide.

Photo: Sahar Coston-Hardy.

Reduced learning through play in classrooms

 The potential benefits could be huge: much of the ‘other 80 per cent’ of children’s waking time – when they aren’t at school – is spent in the home and community. Can we design playful learning to infuse public spaces with fun, engaging and stimulating learning possibilities? Can we create playful learning piazzas? This could be an important breakthrough at a time when play is diminishing in many preschool and kindergarten classrooms.

“We’ve taken the science of learning out of the ivory tower and into the streets.”

Underpinning each initiative is the science of learning which we’ve brought out of the ivory tower and into the streets. At supermarkets in Philadelphia, the signs target language and mathematics skills. At bus stops, the puzzles build early spatial and mathematics skills. Hopscotch targets executive functions – working memory, problem-solving and planning. Shoe prints encourage children to jump, developing their abilities to control impulses and to think flexibly as they match the random patterns and find their next steps.

The ‘hidden figures’ in the bus stops’ metal work, casting different shadows on the ground, are like a version of hide and seek, promoting curiosity and exploration. They build problem solving. Spatial skills develop as children figure out how the shadows are cast upon the ground

Learning through play in hospitals, jails and streets

The possibilities are numerous. One learning through play project plans to transform hospital waiting rooms, where families are often bored for hours. Another seeks to transform jails that house new mothers, so they can play better during visits with their babies. Seattle is developing stimulating and safe sidewalks on the way to school. And yet another city is considering how we might reshape low-income housing.

These projects use public spaces to forge a suite of 21st century skills that children are expected to gain in school but may find difficult in formal settings. In ‘Parkopolis’, in Philadelphia, a life-sized, playful-learning board game aims to enrich maths and science learning opportunities by playing outside.

Children roll dice to advance around the board and draw cards that engage them in mini-games along their way. The dice include not only whole numbers but also fractions. Spaces are divided into fourths. These help children to embody the fraction learning experience that can be difficult in formal school settings.

The next step is to test these learning-through-play initiatives at scale and in conjunction with one another. That would allow us to look for neighbourhood as well as individual affects.

We’re accustomed to seeing parents and schooling as important determinants of learning opportunities. At the juncture of the global cities movement and educational initiatives, we’re on the cusp of making the most of another determinant – place and neighbourhood.

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