Mental health is a challenge for almost everyone at the moment, but particularly for adolescents, who have had a key part of their development affected by lockdowns. Many have been stuck indoors for long periods at a time when they would usually have been out with friends.
So now that life has returned to a kind of normality, how can we help these young people to improve their wellbeing? In this webinar, sponsored by Thrive, we explore how play can boost adolescent mental health, whether it’s introduced to the classroom explicitly or is spontaneously created in the playground.
Ahead of Children’s Mental Health Week, Tes senior digital editor Simon Lock is joined by Professor Helen Dodd, of the University of Exeter; Mikaela Brown, from the Anderida Centre in East Sussex; and Vicki Williams, from Fortis Academy in Birmingham, to explore the ways play can bring these much-needed mental health benefits.
Watch the webinar:
It’s useful to begin by defining what we mean by play, says Dodd.
“For me, play is what we, as individuals, decide we’re going to do because we just want to do it,” she says.
“Play is good for all of us. When we were in lockdown, what did we do? We started doing quizzes online with our friends and online escape rooms, and things that looked a lot like play, right? So everybody plays. It feels good to do the things that you want to do just because you enjoy doing them.”
The power of play to protect mental health
Part of the power of play, she explains, is in its status as a thing that we are intrinsically motivated to do, and so “play allows us the opportunity to kind of select things that make sense of how we’re feeling”.
“Young people might use play as a way of making sense of things that are going on, as a way of expressing themselves,” Dodd says. “And anybody who works with young people knows that getting things out and having the opportunity to express is so important for mental health.
“It also allows those opportunities to sort of experiment at the edge of the comfort zone, to push the boundaries a little bit, to play with risk. And if we allow people to do that, then there’s so much to be learned in that space about what’s too much, what feels good, what doesn’t feel good, about how to assess risks, make good decisions, how to cope in those situations.”
She goes on to explore the findings of the recent British Children’s Play Survey, which focused on primary-age children, looking at how much they played, where they did it and how. One particularly interesting finding was that the average age of children’s first independent play (when they are out of the house without parental supervision) has increased, from around 9 to 11.
“I think that’s a really important finding,” Dodd says. “That means that when children are going into secondary school, they’ve actually had very little opportunity to have that independence to explore the world by themselves, to make decisions by themselves.”
Williams, meanwhile, shares how the students at her school have picked up an old favourite while working in small Thrive groups.
“For some reason, [the card game] Uno has become like a rite of passage at the moment,” she says. “It allows a lot of discussion because it’s quite a simple game to play. A pupil can sit there and talk to me or talk to the other people in the room without the pressure of eye contact, without feeling like they’re being grilled. But it’s led to a lot of openness and discussion.”
Building confidence
She also shares the story of a non-verbal child who was able to build confidence and, eventually, relationships, through games of Jenga. Likewise, says Brown, young people at her alternative provision setting have developed vital life skills through losing games of Monopoly.
“It’s a very nice way to show them how to regulate themselves as well and how to build positive relationships, which they often do struggle with,” Brown says.”Being an alternative provision, we haven’t only got young people that have got huge gaps in their learning, we’ve got students that have got huge gaps in their development through ACEs [adverse childhood experiences] and things like that.
“We’ve had young men coming to us that have a history of county lines and really quite trauma-based things in their past, and I’ve had them playing games where we’ve blindfolded them, which also embeds speaking and listening. It’s about listening to instructions or getting a student or even a teacher to create an assault course. It’s about trust.”
The panel goes on to explore topics including how play has developed in schools over the years, how less confident staff can be supported to use play in their classrooms and how to engage more reluctant students.
You can learn more about the Thrive Approach here.
