These days, resilience is needed more than ever, and one simple, underrecognized way of supporting healthy and resilient child development is as old as humanity itself: play. Far from frivolous, play contributes to sturdy brain architecture, the foundations of lifelong health, and the building blocks of resilience, yet its importance is often overlooked. In this podcast, Dr. Jack Shonkoff explains the role of play in supporting resilience and five experts share their ideas and personal stories about applying the science of play in homes, communities, and crisis environments around the world.

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Sally Pfitzer, host: Welcome to the Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m your host, Sally Pfitzer. Our Center believes that advances in science can provide a powerful source of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and families. We want to help you apply the science of early childhood development to your everyday interactions with children and take what you’re hearing from our experts and panels and apply it to your everyday work.

So in today’s episode, we’re going to get serious about the topic of play. For children, play is a fundamental building block of child development, but its role in supporting resilience is often overlooked. And after the past few years, we surely need resilience now more than ever! For me, as a former preschool teacher, I’m especially excited about this episode and speaking with today’s experts, because I’ve seen first-hand how important play is for young children’s development. But what can science tell us about it? And what can be done to support more play in everyday life, even in crisis contexts? In this podcast, we’ll dive into the science of play and resilience, and then we’ll explore how people are using that knowledge to support child development around the world. To explain the science, we’ll start with Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Professor of Child Health and Development and the Director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. So Jack, what do we mean by resilience and what do we know about how people develop it?

Jack Shonkoff: What we mean by resilience is that we’re talking about the ability to do well, the ability to cope, the ability to overcome hardship, or adversity, or threat to your well-being. So the key about resilience is it doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

Resilience is something that you actively build, and you build it in the context of relationships in an environment that helps you learn how to cope with challenges, cope with stress, cope with hardships. And it starts very early. It starts in infancy. And infants need to have some sense of participation in that.

But also, you don’t do it totally on your own. You need the support and the security, when you’re a baby, of adults who basically help provide a manageable environment in which you can learn resilience. So, if stresses and threats are overwhelming, they can overwhelm the system. And you don’t really get a chance to build resilience. If every time something happens that challenges you, somebody jumps in to protect you, that’s not good for you either because you have to build that yourself.

So the environment has a lot to do with how you develop resilience and skills, but so does your own activity on the environment, your own sense of being a player rather than just a receiver.

But no two children are the same, even children in the same family, growing up in the same environment. From birth, children differ in how adaptable they are. If you go into a newborn nursery in a hospital, the nurses who work there can tell you about how those babies are all different from each other. Some kids are just more easygoing, constitutionally. Some kids roll with the flow, a little bit easier than others. So in a sense, we don’t all start off with the same way of reacting to stress or hardship.

Sally: That’s great. And thinking about how resilience is built, are there specific building blocks that you need to think about? In this case, could you talk a little bit more about how play might support those building blocks?

Jack: Play, by definition, is an interactive process or a kind of self-directed process. It’s not by chance that all children, regardless of where they live in the history of the species, use play as a way to develop skills. It’s the way children learn to master their environment. And they learn to try things out. They test things. They test limits. It’s driven by curiosity, and it’s driven by an inborn drive to master the environment.

And if you think about what resilience is all about, resilience is mastering your environment. It’s building the skills to be able to cope, building the skills to have strategies, to deal with your own reactions, be able to have some control over what’s going on around you. And none of that would develop as well as it does if you depended on just being taught how to be resilient. No. Your ability, your natural ability to play, is one of the most important strategies that we have developmentally to build resilience in the face of adversity.

Sally: So, what is the science that underlines this connection between healthy development and how play supports it?

Jack: God, there are mountains of science that help us to understand the process of development. And three princ...