Tag: play

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Movement For All: A Call to Courageous Action

For too long, we have treated play as a luxury that kids, as well as adults, could do without. But the time has come for us to recognize why play is worth defending: It is essential to leading a happy and healthy life. 


— David Elkind

Did you know that the average american is most physically active at age 6, and by 19, about as sedentary as a 60 year old? Over the last ten years there has been a steady decline in participation in sports and physical activity among youth as well as the rise of obesity among teens and adults. Add to that — National data reveals a startling 30% of adults do not engage in any leisure time physical activity , with less than half meeting or exceeding recommendations.

To sum it up: As most people grow up they are either losing or leaving behind play and physical activity.

However, evidence clearly supports that movement and play are critical to life long, whole human health… not just for children, but teens, adults, and seniors as well. Beyond the physical benefits of strength, mobility, and dexterity, participation supports overall mental health. It has been shown to improve cognitive performance and learning, reduce the impact of stress, and support social and emotional development. It nurtures our confidence, curiosity, creativity, and sense of control. It brings us joy.

So if play is so important — why do we stop? The answer to that question is complex, and presents the problem we, as a community, need to solve together.

The Problem: Barriers to Play

There are major barriers to accessing and participating in physical activity and play. These include issues related to time, cost, location, and an individual social, emotional, and cultural context. To summarize a few of the largest, most robust issues:

COST
Inactivity has been shown to be directly linked to household income. Rising costs of equipment, league fees, gym memberships, and the costs associated with accessingquality coaching and learning tools all threaten participation.

TIME 
We live in a non-stop world. Juggling work, school, and social schedules alongside long commuting times and other obligations often prevents us from fitting in time for play. Whats worse, we keep finding ways to cut play out. By 2017, over 30,000 schools in America eliminated recess to make more time for academics.

PHYSICAL ACCESS
Even if we have the money and time, physical access is the final hurdle.As the distance required to access play resources increases (fields, equipment, gyms, parks), participation declines — transportation is directly linked back to time and money. Additionally, many schools and cities have limited programs and services, making them fewer and farther in between.

SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, CULTURAL ISSUES
Every individual brings a complex landscape of social, emotional, and cultural experiences that block participation. Having negative experiences with sports and PE in youth, limiting stereotypes around gender, race, and status, fear of discrimination, competition, and self-consciousness are just a few.

…And The Seriousness of Life

In additional to all these barriers, the largest obstacle that we all face and must overcome is that as a society we are quick to devalue play. We hold this idea that life is serious, and that we need to prepare ourselves to deal with the seriousness of life. We must work and produce and constantly improve upon our human capital potential — which seemingly leaves no room for ‘unproductive’ pursuits.

How many of you have heard discouraging little phrases such as “quit playing around and get back to work?” Employees are constantly guilted into working late hours, students wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor, and (financial, social) rewards are granted to those who work at the expense of all else.

This perception that play has limited value, combined with any of the barriers above, is a perfect recipe for a sedentary body and sick mind. As Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, expressed: the opposite of play isn’t work, it’s depression.

Our Pledge: Movement For All

Brene Brown wrote, “It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol.”

#MovementForAll is a declaration that play is a human right, necessary for whole health — both for the individual and the collective.

It is a commitment to everyone having access to lifelong, playful movement and community.

It is a call to courageous action, and a promise we make together: to teach, build, and share an integrated path we discovered that fulfills this commitment — that path being parkour.

Depending on who you asked, Parkour is a sport, an art, a discipline. Practice involves running, climbing, jumping, swinging, crawling, rolling. Players create challenges for themselves in the environments they find using nothing more than their bodies, their imaginations, and, if available, their friends. It involves facing fears and learning to take intelligent risks, as well as building resiliency through physical and mental training.

Parkour is play grown-up.

And, when compared to conventional sports and outlets for play, parkour culture and philosophy can provide the necessary elements for life-long participation: Radical Inclusion, Resourceful Generosity, and Evolving Practice.

  • Radical Inclusion. Every ‘body’ is not only invited to participate but celebrated — any ability, size, color, age. Our community strives for a space of progressive practice, respectful language, and accountability. We reject gate-keeping and body-shaming. We use movement to create unity among diverging perspectives, for movement is a language we all speak.
  • Resourceful Generosity. We crowd-source solutions and educational tools, organize free classes and events, and foster leadership among all students. We are Go Getters and Go Givers, creating and sharing so that the collective can get stronger. Together we support one another in overcoming the financial, physical, and cultural obstacles that so commonly prevent access to other activities.
  • Evolving Practice. Our play needs to grow up with us if we are to play for life. Parkour ensures lifelong participation and community by giving people permission to change their practice as they grow. From exploration to competition to maintenance and back, from strength to mobility to balance and beyond. There is no fixed set of movements that must be achieved. There is no ageing out.

Move Your Way, Move With Us

So this is my call to action. I’m giving you a path to a life in play. Stand up and move. Move your way, move with us, and help us bring movement to all.

Over the last year I have been working closely with Parkour Visions, a non-profit with national initiatives to combine those values above with programs and services designed to break barriers of time, cost, and physical access. We are trying to get play back into the every day by:

These are just a few ways we have dreamed up getting more play into the everyday. However this change needs us working together if we are to create large scale cultural and societal impact. It needs new ideas, enthusiasm, and time… And, most of all, it needs you — you, choosing to show up and and be a stand for a world that embraces play as a positive, integral element of leading a whole, human life.

Help us make #MovementForAll a reality.

In 2019, Parkour Visions established the Movement For All Fund, dedicated to supporting programs and services that are breaking barriers and building bridges to play through parkour. In February, every donation is being matched up to $25,000 — that means whatever you give will be doubled! You can make a difference, and it can start here.

(PS. Always looking for collaborators — reach out!)

Financial, physical, and cultural barriers to participation.

On top of all these, there is the largest obstacle that we all face and must overcome: We as adults, and a society, are quick to devalue play. We hold this idea that life is serious, and that we need to prepare ourselves to deal with the seriousness of life. We must work and produce and constantly improve upon our human capital potential — which seemingly leaves no room for ‘unproductive’ play past childhood.

How many of you have heard or have been guilty of uttering discouraging little phrases such as “quit playing around,” or “get back to work”? It’s deeply embedded in our culture.

…And this perception combined with any of the barriers above is a perfect recipe for a sedentary and less fulfilling life. As Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, expressed: the opposite of play isn’t work, it’s depression.

The Pledge: Movement For All

Brene Brown wrote, “It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol.”

#MovementForAll is a declaration that play is a human right, necessary for whole health — both for the individual and the collective.

It is a commitment to everyone having access to lifelong, playful movement and community.

It is a call to courageous action, and a promise we make together: to teach, build, and share the path we discovered to fulfilling this commitment — that path being parkour.

For those of you unfamiliar, Parkour is a sport, …an art, …a discipline. Practice involves running, climbing, jumping, swinging, crawling, rolling. Practitioners create challenges for themselves, in the environments they find, using nothing more than their bodies and their imaginations. It involves facing fears and learning to take intelligent risks, as well as building resiliency through physical and mental training.

When compared to conventional sports, parkour culture also uniquely offers the potential for Radical Inclusion, Resourceful Generosity, and Evolving Practice.

  • Radical Inclusion. Every ‘body’ is not only invited to participate but celebrated — any ability, size, color, age. Come as you are. We offer a space of progressive practice, respectful language, and accountability. We reject gate-keeping and body-shaming. We believe in using movement to create unity among diverging perspectives, because movement is a language we all speak.
  • Resourceful Generosity. We crowd-source solutions and educational tools, organize free classes and events, and foster new leaders. We are Go Getters and Go Givers, creating and sharing so that the collective can get stronger. Together we support one another in overcoming the financial, physical, and cultural obstacles that so commonly prevent access to other activities.
  • Evolving Practice. Our play needs to grow up with us if we are to play for life. We ensure lifelong participation and community by giving people permission to change their practice as they grow. From exploration to competition to maintenance and back. There is no ageing out.

Not sure if Parkour is for you? Read why you should consider picking it up…

Move Your Way, Move With Us

To that end, I believe in combining these values with programs and approaches focused on breaking barriers and increasing access to parkour and play for all.

So this my call to you, to take action, to create for yourself and others a space where we can play for now and for life. How will you help create #MovementForAll in your city?

Join my tribe dedicated to #MovementForAll: Parkour Visions.

PKV is a non-profit focused on ensuring everyone has a path to playful movement and community through parkour! Donate to our #MovementForAll Fund to support free and affordable programs and support services promoting play, parkour, coaching, and leadership.

Originally posted February 6, 2019 on Medium

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“(Playing in public) is a demonstration in every sense of the word: a demonstration of how easy it is to transform a public space to a play space. A demonstration of how easy it is to take a place of anonymity and change it to a place of intimacy. A demonstration of how easily we can change a no trespassing zone to a zone of shared laughter, (…) a place where we are safe enough to let ourselves be beautiful, together, in public. Easy, and, yet, when you think about it, radical.”

Bernard DeKoven, founder of Deep Fun

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Highlights from The Roots of Sport→

Unless you are a part of the niche sport of cricket, this is likely the first time you are hearing of Mike Brearley–professional cricketer, writer, and psychoanalysis. Two of his books are on my current reading list–The Art of Captaincy and On Form.

Brearley himself is an inspiration figure, described as having ‘a degree in people,’ he took on the helm of leadership and captaincy, not just for his team but for the community that he wished to see. He did not shy away from speaking his mind and taking a political stand against apartheid, and wrote extensively on the value of sport.

Recently I came across this incredible article On The Roots of Sport, penned for the British Pscyhoanalytical Society. As I try to pull excerpts to highlight I am resisting copy-pasting a sizeable chunk, so I highly recommend giving it a read (5 minutes).

On The Value of Sports

“[Through Sports] the child and the adult have to learn to cope with the emotional ups and downs of victory and defeat, success and failure. They – we – gradually manage to keep going against the odds, to struggle back to form, to recognize the risks of complacency. We have to learn to deal with inner voices telling us we are no good, and with voices telling us we’re wonderful. In sport the tendencies to triumph when we do well and to become angry or depressed at doing badly are often strong; we have to find our own ways of coping with them. Arrogance and humiliation have to be struggled against, whilst determination, proper pride and good sportsmanship are struggled towards. “

“Sport calls too for a subtle balancing of planning and spontaneity, of calculation and letting go, of discipline and freedom.”

” …having disciplined ourselves, having set ourselves according to the situation of the game, we then have to let ourselves go, trusting to our craftsmanship, skill and intuitive responsiveness, without further interference from the conscious mind. “

” The moments for the sportsman when body and mind are at one, when we are completely concentrated and completely relaxed, aware of every relevant detail of the surroundings but not obsessed or hyper-sensitive to any set of them, confident without being over-confident, aware of dangers without being over-cautious – such rare states of mind are akin to being in love. They involve a marriage between the conscious control mentioned above with the allowing of a more unconscious creativity through the body’s knowledge. “

On The Value of Movement

Frederick James Wilfred, 1955

“For those to whom sport doesn’t appeal, it seems futile, pointless. They remember hours of misery at compulsory school games on cold sporting fields. They were perhaps physically awkward, and picked last.

Yet every small child, before self-doubt, and invidious comparison with other children, gets a grip, takes pleasure in his or her bodily capacities and adroitness. […] Walking, jumping, dancing, catching, kicking, climbing, splashing, using an implement as a bat or racquet – all these offer a sense of achievement and satisfaction.

[…]

Moreover, this development in coordination is part of the development of a more unified self. Instead of being subject, as babies, to more or less random, stimulus-response movements of our limbs, we learn to act in the world according to central intentions and trajectories. We begin to know what we are doing and what we are about. “

On Sport vs Play

“Sport proper starts to emerge when competition with others plays a more central role alongside the simpler delight in physicality. ‘I can run faster than you, climb higher, wrestle you to the floor’. “

On Competition and Human Nature

“If human beings were not combative no one would have invented sport. But if human beings were not also cooperative neither team nor individual games would have come into existence. “

“The Latin etymology of both ‘rival’ and ‘compete’ reflect this fact: rivalis meant ‘sharing the same stream or river bank’, competens meant ‘striving together with’, ‘agreeing together’, as in ‘competent’. “

Sport & Self-Expression

” For many people otherwise inclined to be inhibited or self-conscious, sport offers a unique opportunity for self-expression and spontaneity. Within a framework of rules and acceptable behaviour, sportspeople can be whole-hearted. Such people – including me – owe sport a lot; here we begin to find ourselves, to become the selves that we have the potential to be. “

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Designing an Adaptive Obstacle Course

Adaptive Obstacle Course

Can we create an adaptive obstacle course where an adult with the full command of their body can run alongside a participant in a wheelchair or with a prosthetic… and both be able to have a physically challenging and engaging experience?

This was one of the most interesting design problems presented to me in the last few years.

The challenge wasn’t just about creating an accessible play experience, but an inclusive one. Accessible play experiences enable individuals in wheelchairs or with prosthetics to use play equipment and maneuver spaces safely. Inclusive play experiences go beyond and provide opportunities for individuals of all abilities to interact and play together.

Furthermore, I’ve seen plenty of accessible play spaces that are just boring. I believe we have advanced far enough in the design world to really begin thinking about how to design dynamic surfaces and sensory-rich spaces that allow both the 3 year old to play alongside the 13 year old, by wheel or foot.

So, with the Movement Creative and in collaboration with ACG and the NYC Department of Transportation Summer Streets Initiative, I designed the pilot version of the Adaptive Obstacle Course- an all-ages, all-abilities, wheel-chair accessible ‘pop-up’ obstacle course. Each element in the course was envisioned to be easily modifiable for the user body as needed, with safety and rigging systems designed into some of the more complex obstacles requiring prolonged hanging such as our canon ball alley, monkey bars, and traverse climbing wall. I also wanted to iterate a new version of a wooden pump track, typically used by bikes, to provide a combined walking, jumping, and riding challenge.

However, for this initial pilot build we had limited funding and faced some unique challenges when moving into the construction phase, especially since this was to be a temporary (less than 12 hours) built on the streets of NYC! We were limited to bringing some of the most modular of our equipment and limiting the roll out of rigging and larger build components.

Despite the financial and timeline restrictions, our team was able to create several new obstacles, including the rumble strips and dual-balance beams, which required both foot and wheel to navigate across. These two obstacles in particular were simple to build but challenging for all participants. The lily pads also ended up being a hit, as people could choose their own way of crossing — jumping, crawling, running, or navigating around.

Our team of volunteer facilitators were also awesome, providing open-ended guidance to participants and challenging everyone to find ‘their own way’ over, under, and through our course. I deeply believe that for design to really inspire and enable play, it must be paired with a community and culture that encourages self-expression, risk taking, and freedom to ‘rewrite the rules’ together.

Adaptive Obstacle Course
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Excerpts from Playing For Our Lives→

“According to research conducted by Play England, 71% of adults say they played out in the street every day when they were children. For today’s children that figure is only 21%.”

This is one of those statistics that really hit home for me and highlights the profound change in attitude and experience of youth today. In this short article, Inez Aponte goes on to discuss the sorry state of play, the decline of the free-play childhood, and her own small act of defiance against the unhappy transformation.

No ball games sign

Inez first highlights her experiences of childhood in New York–“When I was growing up in New York in the 1970s any free space would quickly become an opportunity for play – empty lots, rooftops, alleyways, even the space between cars or on bonnets – the streets were our domain, we occupied them. Our instincts were not easily subdued and one might argue that irrepressible play spirit brought a sense of freedom into our overcrowded cities, making them a bit more human, a bit more joyful and a bit more connected.”

While this spirit is still captured in emergent modern sports such as parkour, there is no denying what she soon follows up with:

“Children are now more anxious than they were during the Great Depression or the Cold War. Under mounting pressure from educational policy makers, “childhood has turned from a time of freedom to a time of résumé building.”

In Defiance of the Decline of Play

There is a lot of gems in this short article, but a few highlights are especially around the subversive and defiant quality that play has seemed to taken on in our modern society.

“In a world where so many aspects of our lives have been commodified, spending an afternoon having fun together felt like an act of defiance. Defiance of a culture that tells us that value is determined by a price tag. Defiance of a story that tells us that we are only worth what we produce. Defiance of a system that tells us that billboards have more right to our public spaces than people. “

“…Play is our birthright. Whatever age we are, from our first to our final breath, we have a right to space and time that is free for experimentation, joy, creativity and connection, without any agenda. Our children know this as they rebel against a world dominated by test scores and spreadsheets. “

Play is Political

“Real play, like real freedom, cannot be appropriated into the corporate matrix. It is by its nature anarchic and therefore a powerful tool for social change. “

“We must occupy with play the spaces that belong to us as citizens, taking down both real and metaphorical billboards that dominate our towns and our inner landscapes. “

Join the dialogue

The world of play is exploding, with books, articles, and conferences popping up all over. From Stuart Browns book on Play to events like Counterplay and the US Play Conference. There are numerous online forums through facebook that have emerged as well, serving as spaces of exchange and conversation.

Aspen Institute Project Play
US Play Coalition + Ambassador Network
Counterplay FB group