My connections to Play

Here are two quotes that represent play in my childhood

 

 

Play was first and foremost supported by my parents. When I think back on my childhood I primarily think of home life and of playing with my sisters. MY parents taught us structure and responsibility with age appropriate chores however the majority of our time was spent playing. I recall my mom often saying in frustration when we were bothering her as children tend to do "Y'all just need to go outside and play!" She understood that all of our energy needed to be redirected into a positive and productive manner and play was that forum. My parents also understood the importance of play when ti occurs outdoors. We were often encourage to take our play outside. We were given dedicated play spaces in our home including the basement and backyard. Both were large open spaces that allowed for easy movement, creativity, and big messes! In my childhood play was an outlet for energy,creativity, development of mental and social skills and was fun.

Important play equipment from my childhood:

Play often looks different today than it did in my childhood for a couple of reasons. The first is that my generation was on of the first to have general accessibility to gaming consoles. While children enjoyed playing them from time to time they also found great pleasure in joining their friends outside for a game of hid and go seek or tag. In many cases today children will prefer to staff indoors and play a video game alone or with a friend than go outside and play wit ha large group of friends. The next significant difference is the type of play that child engage in. Play is much more supervised by adults this interferes with play in a couple of ways. The first is that children have to wait for the adult to coordinate play time weather that means a trip to the local park or coordinating with another parent for a play date. This limits the amount of play, when it occurs and the type of play. Next, when play is supervised, adults directly or indirectly interfere with the choices children make. If an adult is present a child make take fewer risks that would have helped to develop social, physical or cognitive skills. Children are more likely to run to the adults for help to solve any problems including conflict with peers rather than find a way to work through the issue and adults rarely give child the opportunity to do this on their own. Finally, when adults are supervising or coordinating play events inherently a child's selection of who to play with is influenced. If the parents of two children enjoy each others company they are more likely to provide more opportunities for those particular children to get together. There are fewer opportunities for child to go out to play and meet up with other children in the neighborhood and make social decisions independently from a larger selection of play mates.


The role of play was crucial in my childhood and really helped to prepare my for adolescence and adulthood. I learned how to get along and how to politely decline interacting with someone who I wasn't interested in engaging socially with. I learned my personal limits as well as athletic skills. My confidence and self esteem were supported by play. All of this experiences, skills, and social emotional awareness are called upon daily while navigating adult relationships and interactions in my person and professional life.

Relationship Reflection

  Relationships are important to me because they are one of the major ways that I connect to the world around me. My relationships with others have helped my to better understand myself for better or worse and given me the opportunity to grow and develop. They have taught me about the various aspects of life; public and private, work and personal.

I have three categories of relationships including family, friends, and coworkers. These three areas sum up the major aspects of my life and influence it on a daily basis.

I made my first and most important relationships with my family

 My family includes my two sisters, mother, and father. The relationship I have with my parents is great. My relationship with them has taught/shown me what a marriage can be and how a family can be raised successfully. They have shown me through their parenting how to respect children by listening and discussing as well as how to define and reiterate boundaries and their importance. My sisters were my first friends. With them and by watching them we explored the world together putting to use and testing out what we learned at home. As my peers I was able to discuss topics with them from similar points of view based on age and experience. However, as different people with different personalities and slightly different perspectives I was learned how to defend and question my ideas and challenge others in a safe environment.

Friends for 16 years!

 My relationship with my friends is a very unique one. I say this because I have a group of friends who I've known since the third grade. As the years went by the strength of our friendship ebbed and waved with the many changes in our lives and distance apart but we've always come back together and been a support system for one another. The second group of friends I met in high school. These relationships blossomed and strengthen during, between, and after classes.I consider myself extremely lucky because these two groups melted into one large group with everyone getting along,supporting one another, and most importantly having fun together.

A small sampling of my mega size group of friends and close acquaintances

                                 

The last group of relationships are the ones I have made with coworkers. I have been teaching for three years and been in two schools and I have worked with some truly amazing,talented, intelligent and patient people. I want to especially highlight the group of women who I taught with my first year. It was an extremely challenging year for many reasons with the additional hardship that it happened to be my first. I depended on those women many,many times to stay late with me to accomplish a task, to run ideas by, to vent our grievances,  and most importantly to do what they could to keep a smile on my face and a good laugh in my belly just to get through the day.

Again, just a sampling of the people who helped me survive!

                           
While we have all gone our separate ways and occasionally link back up again, I know we shared a unique experience and couldn't have asked for a better group to go through it all with. I learned more in that year that I have in the two since.

My friends are living in 4 different countries and 3 states,

Relationships are a part of the human experience that enrich the lives we live in one way or another. Each person connects with many other people in many unique ways with each person's own perspective and role within the relationship. Because the relationships and individuals are so unique in personality, desires, and perspectives challenges often arise. With these challenges comes opportunities to examine yourself and the relationship and the choices you make. Most recently I have been experiencing the challenge that many people do at my age. With all of my friends having graduated college and many in the beginning,middle or final stages of a graduate or doctoral I am finding that our career desires have spread us out all over the world. The current challenge I face is finding ways to maintain our friendships especially amid a challenging work schedule. I have experienced this on a smaller scale in college when we all went to schools in different states, however I always knew the next holiday or break that I would see them and until then there were various forms of technology to help us stay connected. Now that our schedules don't line up quite so neatly especially when you add in various time zones our friendship is going to take a lot more work to maintain.

My relationships past, and present significantly impact the work I do with children and their families. I have been exposed to many cultures from friends,classmates and my education at home and school from a young age that helps me to reserve bias and have an open mind and approach to working with families with similar traditions and ideals as well as those with very different ones. The relationships have given me unique insight to help me quickly identify where a misunderstanding is occurring and to work through it with dialogue. My past and present relationships have helped my to cultivate new relationships with the families of the children I work with witch has supported their growth exponentially.