What Good lovers know, but murderers don't know...

How to play ... fight

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sychiatrist Stuart Brown, author of the following article, discovered early in his career that becoming a mass murderer (Charles Whitman, who killed his wife and mother, then took his arsenal to the top of the University of Texas Tower and killed 14 others, while wounding 41) was associated with lifelong major play deficiency. His subsequent studies of other homicidal males revealed that they, too were very short on normal play experiences, particularly free ranging rough and tumble early playground play.

So he has since spent a long career investigating play behavior in humans and animals, discovering that what he originally thought, pre-Tower, was a fun but a very elective aspect of life, “great for kids, but not really necessary for adults” is, in fact, profoundly important behavior tied to our very survival and species' well-being.

Jake Knows

It is a few years back, and I have just ended a long road trip to a cousin’s distant Utah ranch with my dog, Jake. We are beat. But as I shut down the engine alongside the pasture where a greeting menagerie of animals and relatives are congregated and open the car door, something unexpected happens. Jake is out of the car, a blond Labrador blur. He is in a full “state” of doggie play, blasting into the maze of animals and people without hesitation. I worry about how the horses will react, but they don’t shy. In a flicker the horses are jumping and gamboling. It seems that we all— adults, kids, dogs, horses—recognize that Jake is consumed with the joy of play. All of us are caught up in this short-lived moment. All of us feel completely exuberant. We catch our breaths and laugh. The tension and fatigue of the drive has fallen from my shoulders. The kids are giggling. The rest of the day has a lightness and ease that I hadn’t felt for a long time. On that day, Jake gave a compact demonstration what years of academic and clinical research have taught me about the power of play. And it re-confirmed on an experiential and emotional level why I have established the National Institute for Play. Most obviously, it is intensely pleasurable. It energizes us and enlivens us. It eases our burdens. It renews a natural sense of optimism and opens us up to new possibilities. Those are all wonderful, admirable, valuable qualities. But that is just the beginning of the story. We are gradually discovering that play is more than what kids do for fun or adults do when their serious responsibilities have been discharged.

Challenge: So what is play?

How to make deeper sense out of it…and integrate it well into our lives, at any stage of our existence?

Play is an immensely complex subject, full of wonder and magic, yet extremely difficult to pin down objectively and thereby bring its essences into focus. And since it has been culturally hijacked, its allure and deeply significant benefits commercialized, trivialized and distorted, it is very important to clarify it.

Playful behavior is a basic component of all highly complex life, and is most evident as parenting, socialization and learning are a necessary part of a species heritage. It is a biological requirement for normal growth and development in socially gregarious mammals and though we can endure into adulthood and old age physiologically without it, it nonetheless is a fundamental survival drive built into our most crucial circuitry.

If these generalities seem over the top, or challenge your preconceptions about the importance of play, let’s take a look at just one type of play, rough and tumble play, or play-fighting.

Rough and tumble play

A look at a specific pattern of play as a focus for understanding the depth and importance pf play behavior.

It is characterized in preschool kids by chasing, wrestling, squealing, punching, diving into cardboard boxes, engaging in fantasy games, role-playing and more. It is spontaneous, is kid-driven, and is fun. The participants stay friends despite what looks to adults like chaos. It establishes the 3 “f’s” that author Vivan Paley identifies as basic..fantasy, fairness and friendship. In my own detailed reviews of the play lives of homicidal males in Texas in the late 60’s, none had engaged in the normal rough and tumble give-and-take that was the norm then in Texas playground play.

The “normal” population we interviewed and matched as closely as we could during that Texas research, provided us with a broad comparative background to the murderers. This large comparison group had experienced early play very differently. They provided our research team with rich vignettes of boisterous remembered episodes of rough and tumble play, as well as spontaneous elation as they recalled names, events and the personalities of friends with whom they had played. Not so with those who had committed murder. Their descriptions, corroborated by family members were those of significant abuse, and constricted and often humiliating memories of being outsiders, or more commonly of aggressive bullying vignettes. The majority had never experienced a true sense in childhood of really “belonging.”

A closer look at the beneficial patterns of R and T play allows other benefits to be seen that accrue and are specifically play-based. Kids comfortable with each other initiate a wide variety of exuberant play, usually beginning with spontaneous acknowledgement of each other, signaling that what they are about to engage in is play. The usual propellants within the unfolding play scenes are physical movement, and agreed upon fantasy or pretend elements. In 3-5 year old ages, for example, whether acting out super hero motifs, or making a cave and an imaginary retreat out of blankets, seeking out a natural hide-away, a whole series of negotiations, elaborations and action takes place, usually with a shape-shifting invigorating overall pretend plot.

The degree of intricacy and subtlety that emerges in groups of kids engaged in rough and tumble play, and their continuing invention of more and more complex play scenes, story forms and the self regulating processes that flow from within the groups usually does not require adult oversight to keep it within safe boundaries. This is not to say that the presence of adults within earshot or visual contact is not important, it is, but the majority of the organizing energy that keeps the essentials of R and T intact comes spontaneously from the kids themselves.

And those long-term playground play scholar-observers (Joe Frost, Anthony Pelligrini, Alice Meckley and others, whose legacy has so enriched our knowledge of child development as well as rough and tumble play) reveal that the by-products of R and T produce such benefits as… empathy, emotional regulation and resiliency, stress management, the capacity to take winning, losing and being included or excluded in stride.

So now, as I look at the whole subject of rough and tumble play, which includes an evolutionary as well as participation from the objective science culled from the laboratories of animal play researchers, here is what I see...

It is a specifically observable pattern (not the same in all species, but still play-fighting) present in all highly social mammals. Sergio and Vivan Pellis’s and Jaak Panksepp’s groundbreaking work primarily with rat rough and tumble play has demonstrated that without it, and it alone, rats are socially incompetent, can’t handle stress well, and have smaller executive centers (prefrontal cortices) in their brains.

So the consequences of missing of this sort of playful experience (which is natural and vigorous in all rats) are destructive. Rats in research settings deprived of the opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play show a predictable series of deficits. They grow up inflexible, can’t tell friend from foe, and are emotionally fragile. Though they can forage and usually survive physically, they do not reproduce, nor can they handle unexpected stresses that playful rats handle with ease. The deprived male rat can’t tell rump from head when approaching a fertile available female. Yes, play crafts their “social brain” particularly for mating and hierarchical rat living. (Good lovers are good players)

And Sergio and Vivien Pellis also have confirmed that the impulses that drive rough and tumble play come from these mammal’s brainstems, where survival impulses are housed. Thus the conclusion that rough and tumble play is a survival mammalian necessity living alongside other more basic survival circuits (respiration, sleep and dreams, etc.) seems warranted.

And looking at other species whose patterns of rough and tumble play are variants from those of rats, each demonstrates that its presence is a necessity for their achieving adult wholeness and competency within their particular species needs. Its species-specific benefits can be toward mating and sexual competency, or in establishing appropriate hierarchical status, but in all, it appears to offer a means of understanding the emotional context of being social, as applicable to the patterns of social survival within the peculiarities of that species.

Well, we are not rats, and our cortex is of a far different order of magnitude than other social mammals.

But…our brain stems are very similar, and the views provided me by these animal play pioneers certainly compels me to see human rough and tumble play as a necessary link to our overall social competency. Empathy, altruism, inventiveness, flexibility within group dynamics are requirements for community viability. (and therefore have been preserved by evolution for our very long term species survival?) And looking at the contributions of play over a single lifetime, it also appears to be a necessity for adequate capacity in our handling inevitable adult life stresses, and it enables us to seek out and be comfortable with novel situations that allow us to cope with a constantly challenging changing world.

Where it is not culturally suppressed, early human rough and tumble play is similar worldwide. As kids grow up, it is sculpted culturally and changes forms, and diminishes as development proceeds. But the need to play persists. We are reviewing here just this one pattern among many of play behavior. R and T evolves into competition, rule-setting, verbal jousting and a myriad of expressions, all of which are voluntary and underlain, in my opinion, by a “state” of play. In elementary school age groups, where cultural conditions foster it, and the kids have had enough play background to fully embrace it, it produces the uplifting symphony of sounds heard from most fun playgrounds world-wide.

If play, not just rough and tumble, but other forms are so important, what happens to it? Nearly every one of us starts our lives playing quite naturally. As children, we don’t need instruction in how to play. We just find what we enjoy and do it. And our social setting helps craft its forms. Whatever “rules” there are to play, we can learn from supportive adults and our playmates. From our early play we learn how the portion of the world we live in works, and how friends interact, and the consequences of unfairness or bullying. And it opens our hearts to the mystery and excitement that the world can hold in a tree house or an old tire swing. At some point, though, its naturalness can often be suppressed. (Or become culturally hijacked by commercial or other cultural pressures) Adults forget what it was like to be little and feel they must organize their kids, cut down on unstructured time, get kindergarten kids ready to read early so they can succeed in life, even though the data we now have shows that this early preschool pressure and later diminished recess times result in fewer accomplishments in the long term. But nonetheless, we are told that unstructured play and games are unproductive, a waste of time, clearly less important than activity with a specific (usually adult specified) goal.

If there is any doubt about the essential nature of play in humans, consider what life would be like without it. A life without play is pretty grim— fantasy is out…no sports, no books, no movies or art, no humor or irony. Without play, people become rigid in their thinking, stereotypical in their behavior and emotionally depressed. Ebenezer Scrooge is a good example of such a person. The truth is that play is what makes life lively. It is essential to long-term intimacy. It fosters empathy and understanding of others.

Your support in becoming a member of the National Institute for Play will help bring messages like this into public consciousness and action.

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