You may not remember your life as a three-year-old child. It’s natural — after all, that was a long time ago and life changes significantly as we age. Still, some of your most critical developmental milestones occur around that age — constructing sentences, running, engaging in make-believe and many others, including attuning to your caregivers. This lattermost process goes both ways, of course — attunement also includes the process of a caregiver focusing on a child’s vocalizations, body language and facial expression in order to understand what he or she needs, wants and feels.
Exciting new innovations in playground design and manufacturing, coupled with increasing attention on the science of play, are introducing new and beneficial ways for generations of family to develop deep, meaningful bonds through play.
Look Me in the Eye
“When mother and infant face each other — and the infant is old enough to have a nice smile — when their eyes meet there is a mutually joyful expression,” says Dr. Stuart Brown, founder and president of the National Institute for Play. “That rhythmic union is what I would call attunement.”
Any piece of playground equipment that allows for face-to-face contact — see-saw, multiple-occupancy swing, some spinners — can aid in attunement, but not all are available to a wide range of users. Swings at least allow for some level of multigenerational play, as many grandparents are able to push a baby in a bucket-style swing or (unsafely) sit on a larger swing while holding a toddler in the lap. But, this does nothing for attunement, as eye contact cannot be achieved.
Tom Norquist, senior vice president at GameTime, had long been pondering the play mechanics of traditional swings. “Having studied children swinging for years…you see that when you put a toddler in a full-bucket seat, and the adult normally pushes form behind, that interaction is not as desirable,” Norquist says. Working with his students at Auburn University’s Industrial Design Department and inspired by Brown’s book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, Norquist sought to create what his company has now revealed as the Expression Swing. “The really significant difference in this particular invention is it’s a parent-child or a caregiver-child experience,” Norquist says.
Inspired Design
The Expression Swing’s design includes a bucket seat for children with an adult swing seat that allows the caregiver and child to interact with each other and observe each other’s facial expressions during play. Additionally, it allows for what Brown describes as “3D movement.” “If you take a 14-month-old child, massive things are happening in brain development at that time,” he says. “Related to exploration and movement the child…has a lot of urge to move within 3D space, with gravity being part of the equation. The design of this swing allows the flexibility to have face-to-face mixed-age play occur in a climate of 3D movement. That is stimulatory for good things going on in the brain. If you have socially comfortable children who are safe and well fed, and they engage in 3D movement in climate of play, it lights up their brain and is incredibly good for them.”
The swing went through three years of development and rigorous safety testing before its reveal in April of this year. Norquist himself participated in the testing, putting the Expression model through its paces with his own three-year-old granddaughter. “Her favorite thing to do is to swing with Papa T.,” he says. “We look at each other, we talk, we have eye-to-eye contact — it’s very genuine and hard to describe. I can tell you emotionally it is one of the most riveting things that has happened to me in my life.”
A Larger Mission
GameTime’s Expression Swing is innovative, yet the science underpinning its emphasis on attunement, and informing its embrace of psychology, is time-tested. Its release also comes at a time when play, its benefits and the consequences of depriving a child of play is under increased scrutiny. Nature-themed and adventure playgrounds are very much in vogue, with their emphasis on organic play, problem solving and good old-fashioned utility for blowing off steam. Conversely, and simultaneously, the act of play is being suppressed in communities across the country. In January, some elementary schools in Orange County, Florida, came under scrutiny for eliminating recess in favor of more study time, leaving parents to worry over their kids getting adequate exercise or becoming too restless. Similar measures have been taken in Alabama, Wisconsin, Nevada and other states.
According to Brown, such measures are recipes for disaster. “A close look at the biology and neuroscience of play reveals it to be a fundamental survival aspect of all social mammals,” he writes in a June, 2014 blog for the National Institute for Play. “The linkages from the objective findings in animal play deprivation to the clinical findings in humans are, as yet, unproven. However, the physiology and anatomy is similar, and the inability of play-deprived animals to deter aggression or to socialize comfortably with fellow pack members is demonstrable. The remediation of these socialization deficits in the animals by inclusion of play…reveals the effectiveness of play as a means of achieving more social normalcy and nonviolent alternatives...”
To put it simply, play is important for healthy psychological development. “When a child is not allowed to play, is over-controlled by a parent, etc., and the urge to play and be free from within is stopped, whether from illness, poverty or other circumstances, there are real consequences that occur,” Brown continues in his interview with Parks & Recreation. “In an adult you can track play depravation and relate it to mood shifts, rigidity in thinking…The importance of early attunement play spans a lifetime.”
As play research and child psychology continues to inform how we view recess time and the value of a good teeter-totter session at the local park, both Norquist and Brown foresee a trend sweeping the playground equipment manufacturing industry that will beget many more mindfully created products like the Expression Swing. “GameTime has invested a tremendous amount of time and research behind the scenes, and I hope this drives other [companies] to improve methodologies to include this kind of research,” Norquist says.
Samantha Bartram is the Executive Editor of Parks & Recreation magazine.