Play positions us for resilience and survival, which can get us and our children through this pandemic.

In her creative homemade short film, The Lucky Ones, Rachel Morrison reflects on her favorite memories as a 5 year old of ice cream for breakfast and bevies of balloons. Then she segues into scenes of her 5-year-old son with cape and swords running through dunes at a nearby beach. She describes how much he, even at the young age of 5, acutely feels the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and misses his friends and teachers. This quite blissful introduction abruptly shifts as Morrison reflects on how those playful memories of her 5-year-old self were actually intimate moments with her mother in the hospital battling cancer. The pangs of isolation undercutting these reflections pivot back to her son: What will he remember of this unusual pandemic? His play on the beach with swords and capes interwoven with so much time spent with a sibling and parents, or something else?

This poignant short film captures so much about play and its evolutionary buffer. Play cements pleasant memories. Play is primal. Play is not only an expressive outlet for curating and preserving our own well-being, but also connects us with others. Play positions us for resilience and survival.

“As a society, we undervalue play.”

If this is true, why aren’t we hearing more about the value of play for children during this pandemic? Moreover, how might play be an avenue for learning or serving as a buffer against even more anticipated learning loss as the pandemic continues?

One reason is that as a society, we undervalue play. Play’s long-term benefits for economic health and general well-being are neither easy to quantify nor quantified the way, for example, we quantify metrics on the benefits of formal and structured early education (as James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, has done). Some early childhood experts are even complicit: Good intentions to elevate information and education about the types of parent interactions and environments that support early childhood development have unintentionally contributed to imposing more stress on structure and deliberateness at the cost of spontaneity.

Another reason is that we view play as a luxury, something that is frivolous and for the rich or lazy. We’ve been wired to see play as an “extra” rather than as a core ingredient. Unlike breakfast, a good night’s sleep, and tooth brushing, play is not considered a building block to healthy living.

“Play, and the habit of spontaneous play, can help support parents and children through this pandemic.”

Two years before the pandemic, in 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics for the first time published a public statement on the benefits of childhood play. They did this in part due to concerns about recommendations that tilted toward overstructured, overly formalized, and overly controlled environments for children. Managing the tension of spontaneous, unstructured play with the directive that parents hear about routine, predictability, and daily practice of positive interactions with children has and can be confusing (as I’ve previously written). Some progress has been made in addressing this tension (e.g., through initiatives such as Playful Learning Landscapes, an effort reinforce learning more naturally through public spaces and parks as locations for unfettered play).

Photo: Paige Cody. Unsplash.

COVID-19 has had and will continue to have devastating impacts on children of all ages. Parents’ loss of jobs and income, lockdowns in homes with adults who are sometimes abusive and neglectful, separation from school and early care and education, distance from peers, and disruption of monitoring by health and other professionals will have long-term negative consequences. We have many reasons to be worried about the next generation and the likely increases in socioeconomic and racial disparities. Could play be the silver lining in this gloomy scenario?

Indeed, evolution might have positioned children well: No pandemic can fully kidnap their innate imagination and impulse to play (though it can drain their capacity to embrace and enjoy it). For younger children, whether turning basements into beaches or backyards into butterfly gardens, or conjuring a new influx of imaginary friends, playful activities are stepping stones to learning in all the ways educators, economists, and developmentalists tout as predictors of long term well-being. The social skills developed with imaginary friends, and the math skills incorporated into cooking and designing beaches are seedlings of the cognitive and emotional foundations children need to thrive. Considerable research shows a variety of ways that, for example, rough-and-tumble play improves children’s social cognition, social competence, and spatial ability, and imaginative or pretend play can improve children’s creativity and psychological and moral development. In fact, childhoods that are deprived of play might be harmful to children.

“The role of intuitive play, and its place in daily habits, is more important now than ever.”

For older children, increased time in the digital world can lead to reduced physical activity and isolation. The counterbalance can be found in the ways the digital world has sparked creativity—songs, videos, new ways of communicating across large groups of peers.

The role of intuitive play, and its place in daily habits, is more important now than ever. Conventional modes of learning have been taken away from many families, with emotional and economic stress escalating as new struggles of getting food on the table, and balancing children’s schooling and work have increased. Conventional places to play may be constrained and unsafe, whether at home, at school, or in publicly available spaces.

The underlying message of the AAP in 2018 is one worth revisiting now: Play, and the habit of spontaneous play, can help support parents and children through this pandemic. This might be the moment to validate that intuitive play counts as play and play counts as learning. The good news is that this message does not have to emerge from a new committee of scientists or public health experts to inform strict protocols to succeed.

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Poverty research is prone to blind spots, especially with respect to race and racism.

Amidst the intertwined pandemics of COVID-19 and racism, something unprecedented should be happening in research on poverty and children’s development. Scholars should be looking in the mirror and starting to see their blind spots regarding race and racism. Scholars of color (who are in the minority) have been aware of this for years. Others are only just starting to see how their own training hinged on certain models that are White and WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, Democratic). They are starting to see how their own mentors reinforced privilege by allowing access to pipelines of opportunities that looked like their own. They are beginning to understand how their own research about “others” (i.e., people from places, experiences, and histories unlike their own) hinges on theories, methods, and importantly, assumptions that excluded the realities, experiences, and expertise of the very people being studied, particularly with respect to race and racism.

Blind spots are hard to see; by definition, they are about omission. Yet blind spots – such as clinical color blindness, overlooking issues of race and racism, or consigning race to a static variable – contribute to the creation of future scholarship and science, and to the fostering of explanations that can be terribly misguided. Such blind spots are harder still to address. Training and education – our typical responses — are only as effective as accepting what is reflecting back from the mirror and our efforts to continually shift and re-shift those reflections.

“The lived experience of families in poverty intersects with experiences of race, immigration status, and the structures and systems that perpetuate injustice.”

Historically, the neglect of race and racism in research on poverty and child development has been shaped by denial and fear of race — as immutable – carrying the burden of explaining poverty. This neglect is shaped by over-application of models that reinforce notions that being poor is less a condition of society and more a condition of being a member of a lesser-than-non-White group, whether Black, Latino, or indigenous in the U.S. context. And scholars with good intentions unintentionally began practicing “assimilationist” racism, preferring to ignore the issue rather than face it head on. The recent publication of Lawrence Mead’s “Poverty and Culture” in a peer-reviewed journal showed that, 50 years after Senator Daniel Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, all these blind spots are surprisingly alive and well in poverty research.

How can family and child development scholars build a dynamic and resilient world view and a professional architecture to directly address race and racism in their research? How can scholars disrupt the perpetuation of inaccurate ideologies, and recalibrate power imbalances to optimize discourse and guide policy?

First, scholarship of and for children and families should stay grounded in lived experience. Data, whether in the form of numbers or words, do not emerge free of history and context; history and context should be the starting point. The lived experience of families in poverty intersects with experiences of race, immigration status, and the structures and systems that perpetuate exclusion and racism. At the same time, lived experience is the daily routines, survival strategies and resistance to oppression that parents, caregivers, workers, educators, and children and youth engage in every day. Research on poverty should be enriched by greater integration of quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods literatures on intersectionality; racial socialization and identity; experiences of and responses to discrimination; representation, racial composition, and intergroup relations in  the contexts of work, schools, and media, and funds of knowledge and traditions of socialization in racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse communities. This list can go on. These areas of research are robust and growing, each typically with both basic developmental and applied/intervention studies. Research on mainstream poverty needs to change and view these emerging areas as core, not neglected.

Photo: Maria Oswalt. Unsplash.

Second, as scholars, we can surround ourselves in authentic ways with others who are outside our inner disciplinary circles, ask for and be open to accepting authentic critiques, and strive toward richer research questions that may generate more powerful implications. Poverty scholarship can go deeper than controls for race, considering it a fixed and context-free characteristic. How can experiences of racism at household, neighborhood, structural, or policy levels be integrated into policy research on poverty and child development? Would our proposals for anti-poverty policy be more effective if they integrated attention to racial segregation and other disparities by race in opportunity and social mobility? We can be much bolder in straying from conventional silos and daring to cross disciplines and levels of analysis. Race and racism are inherent at all layers of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, from macro-level structures to micro-level interactions. But because poverty researchers and race researchers largely do not overlap or collaborate, a number of novel questions are neglected. What would it mean to address structural sources of racism in tandem with other areas of anti-poverty policy? Can social movements change the linked and mutually reinforcing narratives around race and poverty?

Third, scholarship can and should start with understanding and questioning existing assumptions and pushing toward changing these defaults. Are we assuming that every child is born on a level playing field even though Black-White racial differences in household wealth are large and constrain the ability of Black families to respond to economic shocks? Are we naïve in assuming that enhancing income — the conventional realm of safety net policies – is enough to address intergenerational disparities of wealth, without concurrent efforts to adjust the many tax and transfer policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy?

Fourth, we can diversify the poverty policy and scholarship research “workforce.” At any established public policy and social science, population, and developmental science research conference where poverty scholars convene, you witness a sea of White people, sometimes predominantly White male people. Contrast this with convenings focused on race, ethnicity, or immigration and child development: You see scholars who are closer to representing the diversity of the United States. A much more robustly diverse pipeline of scholars across disciplines is required. Fellowship programs recently initiated by the Russell Sage Foundation, and those set up years ago by the Foundation for Child Development, the American Psychological Association, and the National Institutes of Health, are important first steps toward diversifying the pipeline of scholars, but are only a start (and will fail as a singular source of interventions). If admissions to graduate training programs; hiring processes in research institutions and universities; and the topics of research valued in curricula, departments, and peer review do not change priorities, we will continue to see the artificial and ultimately harmful divide between research on poverty and race among both scholars and scholarship.

“Are we naïve in assuming that enhancing income — the conventional realm of safety net policies – is enough to address intergenerational disparities of wealth, without concurrent efforts to adjust the many tax and transfer policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy?”

Fifth, we can be louder and more active in our universities as we pursue or engage in external funding, in our roles as peer reviewers and editors, and as participants and leaders of professional organizations. Scholars who have profited from existing systems can and should demand more change toward inclusion. This opportunity to lead brings together the substance, messages, and models, explicit and implicit, conveyed by our research. This is an opportunity to step away from privilege and question how the public profile and output of your work is framed through an anti-racist lens. This is also an opportunity to create mechanisms – publishing avenues, grants, forums for speaking engagements — that were previously closed.

Addressing race and racism in research on poverty and children’s development is going to be hard. However, the rewards will be full and rich, and will ultimately increase the impact of developmentally informed anti-poverty policies and practices. Our work will otherwise stagnate if we continue with siloed and segregated approaches, dipping into the same tools and perspectives that have shaped poverty research to date. That is, if we do not actively strive for change now, anti-racist poverty policy will not make progress. With such progress, we will be better positioned to overcome inequality in race and income, instead of chaotically reacting to public health and economic shocks like those triggered by COVID-19.

Author’s Note: We apologize for misconstrual in our use of the term “blind spot” and “color blind” that, while appeared effective at the time we composed our commentary, are also Ableist terms and can be harmful.

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