Below are just a few quotes on the importance of play in childhood. Play has long been recognized/quoted as an important aspect of childhood growth and development and we couldn’t agree more!
Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity.
~Kay Redfield Jamison
Contemporary American professor of psychiatry
In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior. In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.
~Lev Vygotsky
Russian psychologist
1869-1934
It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.
~D.W. Winnicott
British Pediatrician
1869-1971
The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.
~Erik H. Erikson
American psychoanalyst
1902-1994
Play, while it cannot change the external realities of children’s lives, can be a vehicle for children to explore and enjoy their differences and similarities to create, even for a brief time, a more just world where everyone is an equal and valued participant.
~Patricia G. Ramsey
Contemporary American educational psychologist
The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
~Carl Jung
Swiss psychoanalyst
1875-1961