This sense of safety, of being a step removed from reality, can also help adults cope with difficult situations. Research suggests that levels of innovation and output among engineers, designers, and other creative types can be boosted by creating a more playful, more relaxed work environment. Couples are also known to employ playful actions and language to discuss issues, such as sex or money, that might prove too awkward for serious "everyday" communication.
More generally, research indicates that play has a central role in the creation and support of intimacy. For example, research by Mark Knapp, Ph.D., now chair of the University of Texas's speech communication department, and Phillip Glenn, Ph.D., at Southern Illinois University, showed that couples often use highly personalized forms of play to enhance communication, strengthen bonds, and moderate conflict.
Knapp and Glenn report that these "personal idioms"--gestures or phrases unique to the couple--provided "playful ways of expressing a variety of ideas, including affection, confrontation, requests, sexual references, sexual invitations, and teasing insults," and generally served to promote "cohesiveness within a couple's relationship." As important, they observed, "the loss of playfulness in a marriage was strongly correlated with the onset of marital dysfunction."
innocence lost
The playful impulse is undeniably a potent force, and one capable of generating a great many benefits. Yet both research and common sense indicate that whereas playfulness may always be intrinsically rewarding, its longer-term consequences depend almost entirely on the ways in which it is experienced. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow can be achieved in variety of ways that may work against an individual's health or well-being.
Computer and video games, for example, often generate the flow experience, yet may promote a sedentary lifestyle that is largely isolated from the social contact which play once provided. Csikszentmihalyi also notes that many criminal acts, particularly those providing a high degree of excitement or risk, qualify as flow experiences. In fact, criminals often report that committing crimes yields the same sense of pleasure, confidence, and separation from mundane life that athletes may achieve in sports.
Further, just as children's play can turn cruel, so too can adult play turn oppressive, even abusive. Domineering individuals or groups can subject their unfortunate "playmates" to considerable emotional wear and tear--from insults to outright harassment--yet defend their actions as "harmless" play: "We were just playing around" or "Can't you take a joke?"
"We have a highly romanticized and idealized view of play," observes the University of Wisconsin's Duncan. "Yet play is not always the positive, creative, pure, innocent life force that people used to think it was. It can be manipulative, subversive, and even quite dysfunctional. But academics have insisted on putting play on a pedestal."
the corruption of play
Yet if academics have romanticized play as an almost sacred phenomenon, an experience undertaken solely for its own sake, most of the rest of us seem to have wandered far in the opposite direction. Adult play is now entirely secular, un-sacred. It has become a thing, a commodity, an event undertaken at a specific time, for a specific purpose. We play for a reason: to relax; to spend time with the kids; to take our mind off work. All these may be excellent objectives, but the process by which they are achieved is no longer play: True play has no end beyond itself.
The most glaring examples of this corruption of play may be sports and fitness. We no longer simply "go for a walk." Instead we try to keep our heart rate to within 60 percent of maximum. "Where play used to be flat-out nonproductive, it's now turned into some way for you to do something better, make yourself stronger, build more muscle, lose more weight," says Kenneth Gergen, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Swarthmore College. "To even think anymore about [play as] not doing anything: It's almost unimaginable!"
Our increasing tendency to "use" play has many intertwined causes, the most obvious being our chronic lack of time. Despite promises that technology and automation would shorten our work week, nearly every study suggests we're actually working more hours now than even a decade ago, and earning less real income. We've actually added nine hours of work to our work week. Polls indicate that the average American has only hours of leisure per week. "People are moonlighting, working extra hours," says Chris Smith, of the American Association for Leisure and Recreation. "And with dual-income families, mom's not there to do the housework or handle child care."
That, in turn, has had an enormous impact on the way we perceive our time. In 1983, according to one survey, 25 percent of adults reported always feeling "rushed." By 1994 the percentage had climbed to nearly 40 percent. Not surprisingly, we want to maximize every available minute: If we're playing, we better be achieving some recognizable results to justify the expenditure of time.
but is it therapy?.
Tags:
antidote,
baseball fan,
carlisle,
diversions,
dollars and cents,
flow,
hard time,
innocence,
laments,
leisure,
margaret carlisle duncan,
national pastime,
patter,
play,
professional aspect,
professional sports,
recreation,
s sports,
sport,
sweet blend,
university of wisconsin milwaukee,
white house press
