How ‘Play-nourished’ or ‘Play-deprived’ was your Childhood?

importance of play in early childhood

What emotion does the title of this post bring in you?

What is the first image/scene/incident/memory that comes to your mind when you think about ‘play’ in your childhood?

What/who did you often pretend as, in your childhood?

With this post, I am kick starting the new series, All about Playtime, on my blog. For three weeks, I have been thinking on what to begin the series with. I felt writing a formal post on the importance of play in early childhood, wouldn’t do justice, because there are already hundreds of articles out there on the internet about it. Instead, I want every parent and elder following this series, to begin understanding their own playtime from their childhood memories. When we can think from our shoes, as a child, we can relate it all better with our children, isn’t it?

importance of play in early childhood

You believe it or not, how and what we played as a child has an impact on who we are today. In fact, on how we perceive parenting and our children’s play. That is why, it might be essential for us to look back at our own playtime to check how nourished or deprived it was.

Let’s take a few minutes to drive our minds down our memory lanes, to the streets where we used to play as a child. I have prepared a questionnaire of 18 questions that you can ask yourself. Yes, you are not going to answer anyone else because no one else can connect incidents, emotions and impacts of your life than you yourself.

And what do we understand out of the answers we get from our memories?

Well, we may not be able to derive a direct correlation from our memories to who we are today. However, it could be a good opportunity for us to discover something about ourselves. It is not an analysis on a scale of 0 – 10 or to see what went right/wrong in your past or to check if your childhood was good/better/worse. It is simply a tool for self-contemplation.

About the questionnaire below:

Update (07/02/18): A big, big thanks and hugs to all those of you who cared to fill-in the form below. The questionnaire remains closed for submission now, though one can access the questions anytime. I shall prepare a report soon with the inputs received. 

I intend to make an informal study on this subject, out of personal interest, with no hidden motives or monetary benefits. If you would like to help my study, I request you to fill-in your honest responses below.

Here is the privacy information:

  1. I don’t ask for any of your personal information including name, age, Email ID. All responses will reach me as anonymous entries. I will not know who submitted what, trust me. In no way, either my blog or Google can track anything from your end. 
  2. I ask information on gender and time period (ex.1980s) only for analysis purpose, for example, to see if male participants played outside more than females, to see if with changing time period, playtime changed etc.
  3. You can directly fill-in the responses in the Google form below, scroll down till the end and submit. You are not required to open any other link outside of this page.
  4. I promise to keep all the responses private.
  5. You are free to edit, re-edit or wipe off your responses anytime, any number of times.
  6. If you would rather want to fill-in through Google forms than here, you can open this link.
  7. Though this blog is public, no one can see you typing or your responses except me.
  8. I plan to create a statistical report from the responses after I receive substantial data, which I shall post in the All about Playtime series on my blog. Nothing from the report shall disclose any personal experience from the responses and in no way can point to any of you directly or indirectly. For no other purpose, the report or data shall be used, unless and otherwise explicitly announced on my blog. If you want to get an E-mail notification when the report is posted, please subscribe to the blog from the right side bar (in desktop) or scroll to the bottom (in mobiles and tabs). Please note that with a site revamp, all the old subscribers of this blog are lost. So, you will need to re-subscribe now.

Scroll down within the questionnaire box above for the complete list of questions. 

Having done this assignment, if there is a thought you would like to share about, please do in the comments section below. I hope to make this series educative and meaningful in the days to come.

6 Replies to “How ‘Play-nourished’ or ‘Play-deprived’ was your Childhood?”

  1. Brings back some memories of my childhood, I was quite active during my days.

    There are many things one can learn from their children…and give them, too. That’s what creates a fulfilling relationship.

    *I couldn’t fill out the questions, as everytime I filled in any, it took me all the way down to the site. On a phone, that’s a long scroll back and difficult to follow where I was earlier 😊

    1. True, most children of our generation have had an active childhood. I am sorry about it Alok. I understand how it is on a phone. I moved my blog to self hosting three weeks ago and have been trying out different themes since then, but the responsiveness on mobile didn’t seem good enough for any of the themes, at least I wasn’t satisfied. Finally, I decided to make a minor change in the code to make the layout fit in to all the devices. Thanks for your time for having tried, that means a lot to me.

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