When did play become a privilege.
In my humble opinion (and I have been studying and working with human behaviour for almost 20 years), KIDS HAVE A RIGHT TO PLAY. Attending school is very important but if there is a truancy issue in a child taking away their RIGHT to play sport has so many potentially disastrous consequences that I struggle to begin. So where do I start. I'll keep it short and start with the headline I chose for this spot NO SPORT BAD DECISION MAKING IN THE FUTURE. Let me first clarify that title is an extreme oversimplification but I hope it got your attention. Here is what I mean.
Decision making is a complex occurrence in humans. There are many factors that are involved when it comes to making decisions in any given context. For example, there is the rational facts we can consider; there is the emotions associated with the circumstances in which we are making decisions and the context itself (e.g. placing a bet in gambling; buying a car; which school to send our children to; swinging or not at the next ball in a game). As I want to be brief, lets take the rational and emotional components of decision making. A lot has been written about this and a good synopsis is Jonah Lehrer's book How we decide or Dan Ariely's book predictably irrational. Some exceptional work in the neuroscience of decision making has been done by Benedetto De Martino, PhD.
(see his web site http://web.me.com/bendemartino/Site/Publications.html)
De martino's work of interest also in Lehrer's book indicates that decision making and emotions is that those individuals who can make better decisions in circumstances where emotions cause people to make bad decisions are the people who have better emotion regulation abilities. Where do people get this ability--well first they have to experience emotions and a wide range of them and then they have to develop appropriate abilities to then regulate this emotions.
How does sport fit into this equation then? My very own research has focused on exactly this proposition. Here is a synopsis of my masters and a section of my doctoral work. Few would deny that when you engage in sporting activity of any kind you experience the full range of the emotional spectrum. And when you experience these emotions you are forced to regulate them when participating in sport. These strategies are learned over time and become perfected such that our emotional profile can be used to our advantage. When I practiced sport psychology I helped athletes at all levels to develop and sharpen their emotion control strategies to enhance performance. What is interesting the longer you play sport the better you become. Does this translate outside sport? Indeed it does. My doctoral studies looked into this overflow of emotional control strategies from sport to real life. People who play sport or engage in physical activity of any kind and experience emotions develop better emotion regulation strategies and the ability to reflect upon their emotions and manage them accordingly. The more they do it and longer they do the better they become. The consequences I found were phenomenal, they developed a range of strategies to cope, the had better health outcomes, managed depression and anxiety better. Now I did not look into decision making abilities, however other studies have shown that people who engage in physical activity have a better mental acuity and perform better at cognitive tasks--as the saying goes an active body an active mind.
So Ms Gillard wants to stop kids from playing sport if they don't attend school. The way I see it, this could potentially lead a disastrous outcome of individuals who can no longer make good decisions because they have no idea how manage their emotions because they are unable to utilise their prefrontal cortices to contemplate their own minds because they have not had enough time to experience and manage their emotions.
A better solution for Gillard and other government policy makers would be to revisit putting sport and physical activity back in schools so it become part of the school way of life. I know from personal and professional experience that playing sport as a part of the school experience is essential; it actually saves lives. And this needs to occur as early as possible so that kids get to experience and manage their emotions to become better decision makers in the future. But the way its going, Gillard has got it wrong, take the money allocated to such this ludicrous scheme, multiply it significantly and look at the child welfare system and all the kids who actually can't make it school because they are taking care of themselves way beyond what they should and can't wait to play on the weekend sport grounds and escape their realities. I hope everyone considers these implications and I have only scratched the surface to this very backward thinking.
