Gender stereotypes? Worry less, join in more, says world's first professor of play

Little girls in pink princess costumes and boys dressed as cowboys might strike many parents as a nightmare combination of gender stereotypes and unappealing role models. However, the Cambridge academic who has just been appointed the world’s first professor of play has a message for them: relax.

Paul Ramchandani, who was announced this week in the newly created professorship at Cambridge University, a post sponsored by Lego, believes parents should agonise less over which games and roles they should edge their child towards and devote more energy simply to playing with them.

“I don’t know of any great evidence that children taking on particular roles is good or harmful,” he said on the question of dressing up as princesses and cowboys. “A child’s view of the world might be really different from what you see as an adult, and trying to understand it from their point of view is important. Some bits of play should be just about children getting on with it.”

From January, Ramchandani will lead Cambridge’s newly established Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (Pedal), where scientists are already applying the rigours of statistical analysis and laboratory controlled trials to life’s most light-hearted activities.

The centre’s work aims to redress the dearth of scientific evidence on how play shapes a child’s development – a subject that has often “not been seen as serious enough” to warrant academic investigation, according to Professor Anna Vignoles, acting head of Pedal.

Despite children devoting a substantial proportion of their time and energy to playing, scientists are divided on whether play is critical for intellectual and emotional development or more of an evolutionary luxury – something to pass the time until life’s more serious demands kick in.

“That’s the the intriguing question for me,” said Ramchandani. “We know that play happens in [many] animal species and in all humans in all societies. But actually pinning down where it’s critical and where it’s just one of those things that just happens is really interesting.”

The one thing that has emerged from the research to date is that devoting time to playing with your child – whether because it helps shape infant brain development or simply forges strong family bonds – is a positive thing. Parents should focus on this, Ramchandani said, rather than hand wringing about the best styles of play or roles for children to engage in.

“Playing with children, being available, being involved and trying to allow children to have the time and space to play is more important than what they’re doing,” he said.

Ramchandani’s appointment comes at a time of renewed focus on the forces that shape the first years of life. Work by the US economist and Nobel laureate, James Hekman, and others has highlighted how an enriched or impoverished environment in the first three years can set a child on a trajectory towards educational and personal success or underachievement.

“The evidence is quite bleak in some ways,” said Vignoles. “You don’t want to just start children in school at the age of zero, so we need to know what the role of play is in this.”

There are strong indications, if not scientific proof, that play is important. One recent by Ramchandani found that three-month-olds whose fathers played with them and were most engaged had higher scores on cognitive tests two years later, for instance.

“There’s lots of correlational research, but is that bit of play critical or is it just associated with having a warm, secure, loving environment?” he said.

Ramchandani and the Cambridge team plan to tackle the issue through a longitudinal study of playfulness that will begin at birth – or possibly even before – and continue to early adulthood.

The centre will also assess the role of play in school and look at whether there is anything in the suggestion that play could cultivate so-called “21st-century skills”, such as creativity, problem solving and collaboration.

“You have people who are claiming that it enhances learning, that it’s important, that it’s good for children’s wellbeing,” said Vignoles. “All of that might be true, but actually there’s remarkably little evidence for that.”

The idea of learning through play has grown in popularity in primary education, but simultaneously the amount of academic testing that children are subjected to has increased, which Ramchandani is concerned about. “I don’t think the evidence is there that testing children early makes any difference in terms of improving the education of children,” he said.

When he takes up the role in January, Ramchandani will arguably have the funnest sounding job title in academia, but he describes the task ahead as “serious and really important”.

“At its heart, the driver for all of this is giving children the best start in life right from the beginning,” he said.