Play and Well-Being in Children’s Life

Abstract

While describing play, the developmental and the cultural approach can be distinguished. They can be placed on a continuum and they are complementary. In play practice, they often are mixed up. Children are familiar with both. There are different forms of play that more or less are linked to the age of children. Children’s play can be influenced: it can be promoted and it can be inhibited. The factors of promotion and inhibition can be linked on to the promotion or inhibition of children’s well-being. While some basics of well-being have to be realized before children are able to play, several aspects of play do contribute to children’s well-being, more especially to children’s subjective well-being.

1 Introduction

It is not the aim of this chapter to contribute to the discussion on the definition of play, neither the objective is to offer an overview of Huizinga’s, Piaget’s, Vygotsky’s, and Sutton-Smith’s theories of this world. However, this chapter clarifies what is meant by children’s play.

Later, different kinds of play and the effects of play for children will be described, ending with an overview of elements that promote or inhibit children’s play.

The second part of this chapter will focus on the relationship between children’s play and children’s well-being. The intent is to describe moments and situations and contexts where play and well-being meet each other, where they influence each other.

2 Play: Two Approaches in One Concept

In general two approaches to play can be distinguished. Play can be seen as:

• Characteristic of children’s being related to development of several qualities (the developmental approach)

• Characteristic of human beings related to enjoying life, being creative without a productive objective (the cultural approach)

There is a great consensus that both approaches are complementary, while the developmental approach is more typical for children’s behavior and the cultural approach is for all human beings. However, most of the authors have a special interest for one of the aspects.

The first approach is based on a vision on children’s development stressing children’s need to find their own place in the surrounding world. In Vygotsky’s terms, it is a “corollary of a basic instinctive trait of human nature, namely, the instinctive motivation to seek social contact and maintain part of the (social cultural) world with others” (Van Oers 2011). This world is – at his birth – an unknown environment in which he has to position himself. It includes that the environment has to be explored – the material world in all his aspects – the smell; the color; the weight; the feeling; how to handle it; how to use it; how sturdy it is; how soft and strong are water, earth, wind, and fire; how are animals and plants, etc. Also the social world has to be explored: how important are other people, how to contact them, how to please them, how to convince or dominate them, how to love them, etc. And within this environment, even the child has to explore himself: his possibilities; his limits; how strong, fast, creative, and kind he is; and what are his capacities to interact with the environment.

This process of giving meaning to himself and the environment is very important as such, but at the same time a lot of capacities and characteristics are developed: as there are the development of the intelligence, of the motor and the sensory-motor skills, of social skills, of the self-esteem, etc. Of course in this development – besides play – also the biological evolution and genetic factors have a lot of influence. But to play stresses the agency of children in this development: while playing children contribute to their own development (Elbers 2011), children are participating in their development. And that is in the relation to well-being very important.

In educational contexts – where external inputs are dominating – this process is conducted to well-defined objectives, for example, to the development of musical qualities or to a sport or to an empathic attitude (with varying success). Most of the time (during leisure and in periods that adults do not use to say what the child has to do), the child is the actor in the playing process. He decides himself what, where, with whom, how long, with what material, etc., he will play. Most of this play behavior is passing between and even during other activities: while washing themselves, while eating, while watching television, etc. They are jumping from one activity to another one, children often are doing undefined activities, and they call them “play” (Van Gils 1991). The drive to play is an intrinsic motivation: children do it because they want to do it.

The second approach starts from the definition of humans as cultural beings. Cultural behavior is very varied, but a part of it can be called play. Most known is theater: the actors in the theater are called players; also people active in sports often are players. It means that they are acting besides the daily serious reality: certain norms are not applied longer such as being productive, earning money, and respect of hierarchy. There is more space for fantasy, for fun, for humor, for enjoying, etc. Looking at these illustrations, these activities have – within our economic-oriented society – a marginal position: they are isolated within the leisure time. On the other hand, some authors plea to see play more as a quality of the way of living (Kane 2004). Especially in the last context, but within the global cultural approach, there is, next to the noun “play,” a need for an adjective – playfulness – as Huizinga also said (Huizinga 1997).

You can say that, after being grown up, these activities are what rests as a remnant of a child’s past (Bergen 1998) and that nevertheless differs from it. This playing behavior is more crystallized, more circumscribed, and besides a strong intrinsic motivation, there is also an extrinsic motivation at stake.

Both approaches can be placed on a continuum with on the one hand uncertainty and improvisation and on the other hand time-related imperatives and rules; in common they have creativity, agreement, and not compulsory (inspired by Lavega 1998). On the common characteristics “commitment” could be added. We do not add pleasure not on the common characteristic nor on one of the approaches, because even if pleasure is often a quality of play, it is not always; play can also be very hard: a boy who is exercising, exploring, and developing his capacities to handle a skateboard makes a lot of efforts that are more characterized by “commitment” and by “flow” than pleasure. However, pleasure can be seen as an objective of play but in that sense we prefer the word “satisfaction”: play offers a lot of satisfaction which often can be linked to pleasure. Another common characteristic is the agency of the players. Players are active, are changing and adapting their behavior, and are filling in their activity; it is never a routinely behavior (Fig. 29.1).

Fig. 29.1

Play on the continuum improvisation – structured

2.1 Play in a Broader Context

The continuum is useful to clarify the evolution of the approach of children’s play in the last decennia. After World War 2, there was an explicit awareness on the importance of children’s play. Learning from the observations of children at play in the ruins after frequent bombing, persons such as Lady Allen of Hurtwood (1968) stimulated the organization of incidental play, playgrounds without leaders, adventure playgrounds, and neighborhood playgrounds. But this movement was not up to the trend to use play for explicit educational objectives. More attention went to organized play activities as far as they could be integrated into educational activities. This is called the pedagogization (Depaepe et al. 2008) of children’s play: the more children’s play is discovered, the more it is recuperated by adults and integrated in educational processes.

The continuum is also interesting because it clarifies the evolution of young children’s play to adult’s play. In children’s play, there is more attention for uncertainty, for exploring your capacities, and for learning, while in adult’s play, there is more exploitation of capacities. However, it is a continuum and as children can exploit their capacities, also adults can explore them, but in general there is an evolution from improvisation to organization.

Also in the pedagogical praxis, this continuum can be recognized. The educational intervention becomes – with the age of the child – more directive. It starts by stimulating children’s self-directed play for babies and toddlers, and it evolves in the direction of educational and therapeutic use of play at the age of 6 years. Roberts also notes it in terms of more assimilation in early childhood and more accommodation in middle childhood (Roberts 1980).

This approach clarifies also the perturbation when data on the evolution of children’s play are recognized. So there is the evolution of less playing in public space: in Flanders, Belgium, the presence of children in public space in their living environment was halved during the last 25 years, with an evolution from diminishing creative play categories in favor of play categories related to movement (Van Gils et al. 2008). And it is well known that during the last decennia children spend more time and on a younger age on crystallized play activities.

The concept of play, used in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (art. 31), lays on the side of crystallized behavior as it makes an explicit relation to rest and regeneration after work and to cultural activities. It might be seen as a bias of the convention. Today, a general comment on the CRC regarding play is in development. It might be expected that it will result in a more balanced attention for the developmental and the cultural approach.

2.2 Different Forms of Play

The overviews developed by Bergen (Bergen 1998) and Hewes (Hewes 2007) are interesting as starting points to get a quite general overview of different forms of play; their work has been supplemented on some points (Johnson et al 2005; Elkind 2007).

Kind of play	Description	Age range of greatest incidence
Exploratory play/object play/sensory play	Very young children explore objects and environments – touching, mouthing, tossing, banging, and squeezing. Sensory play appears in children’s early attempts to feed themselves. As they get older, materials like playdough, clay, and paint add to sensory play experiences	0–2.5 years
Dramatic play (solitary pretense)	Many young children spend a lot of time engaged in imaginative play by themselves throughout the early childhood years. They invent scripts and play many roles simultaneously. Toys or props, e.g., dolls, cars, action figures, and cloths, usually support this kind of play. As children get older, they create entire worlds in solitary pretense	3–8 years
Construction play	Children begin to build and construct with commercial toys (LEGO, tinker toys, blocks), with found and recycled materials (cardboard boxes, plastic tubing), with a variety of modeling media (clay, playdough, Plasticine), and most of all with sand. Older children play for extended periods with recycled material (tires, shelves, rags, etc.) to build huts, castles, etc. Children across the age range engage in this kind of play by themselves and in groups, often combining it with episodes of solitary pretense or sociodramatic play	3–12 years
Physical play	Sensorimotor play begins as young infants discover they can make objects move. Physical play in the preschool years often involves rough-and-tumble play, a unique form of social play, most popular with little boys. Rough-and-tumble play describes a series of behaviors used by children in play fighting. Older preschoolers and primary school kids engage in vigorous physical activity, testing the boundaries of their strength by running, climbing, sliding, and jumping, individually and in groups. This kind of play often develops spontaneously into games with invented rules	3–12 years
Sociodramatic play, imitation, symbolic play	Pretend play with peers – children take on social roles and invent increasingly complex narrative scripts, which they enact with friends in small groups	3–12 years
Games with rules, sports games	Children begin to play formal games in social groups. These games have fixed, predetermined rules, e.g., card games, board games, traditional games, soccer, and hockey. Children also invent their own games and/or modify the rules of traditional playground games in their self-organized playgroups	5 – … years
Speech and language	Children are playing with sounds, cries, and songs: they experiment with it. While growing up, it becomes more and more complicated. Youngsters go to poems. Humor takes an important place in this category	1- … years
Computer games	Since the 1980s, also computer games take a firm place in play; keywords are violence, fantasy, pro-social behavior, eye-hand coordination, and addictive	4- … years

2.3 Effects of Children’s Play

The effects of children’s play can be ordered in four big categories; these categories are quite artificial as many times a concrete play activity has characteristics from more than one category. Not all these effects are the fruit only of children’s play; some effects also can be reached by training or by therapy. You only can estimate the extent to which they are caused by playing.

2.3.1 Sensory-Motor Development and Physical Health

Playing children develop a lot of fine and gross motor skills while running, climbing, jumping, using sticks, etc. Doing so, they are exploring and developing their sensory-motor capacities, varying from simple acts (catch a toy) to complicated actions (riding a bike). They are looking for physical challenges (yes, I can climb this tree) and for their own position compared to others (I am faster than you). They are enjoying their movements, their body, their agility, and their capacities.

At the same time, they develop their muscles, their condition, their endurance, their respiratory system, their brains, etc. It has a positive influence on health. It does not solve health problems, but it contributes to a healthy life.

2.3.2 Emotional and Psychological Development

While playing, there are a lot of emotions at stake. The most striking emotion is fun. Children are enjoying their play: they laugh and cry, they jump and sing, and they dance and have fun. They find satisfaction and express it. But to play is not always funny. There are very stressful moments, for example, the moment that the child is not sure if it is able to make a nice sand castle when the sand is always sliding away. Also the competition while playing can be hard: to lose the battle is not funny at all, but even the discussions on “what shall we play” are not always pleasant. Playing children are handling these feelings often in an “as if” situation which is safer as a “serious” competition.

To play different roles offers also possibilities to explore emotions as taking care of someone (while playing with puppets) and being angry. By imitation, children learn to understand feelings, to express them, to react on feelings of others, etc.

2.3.3 Development of Sociability and the Self

The informal social network of children refers first of all to the family and secondly to the peers (within or outside pedagogical provisions). Within these networks, children experience and develop social connectedness and at the same time awareness of themselves: the self within the social environment. This process takes place in and during all activities of children in contact with other people and, thus, not only while playing. Especially in contacts of young children with adults, there is a constantly jumping back and forth from play to reality. In the contacts with peers, there is more space for experiments with less consequences for real life. However the underlying process is as follows: children are learning to communicate, to negotiate, to please, to convince, to give, to cooperate, to resolve conflicts, to respect, to lose, to defend oneself, etc.

This learning process can be seen as a process of giving meaning, a process by which you learn about the characteristics of matter: it is difficult to catch water with your hands, a stone is hard and cold, and a car is faster than a bike. The child learns very early that sand has to be wet if you want to build a castle with it, and a child learns to ride a bike and to operate the television: so this sand, this bike, and this television have a very specific meaning for this child. At the same time, the child learns about his own skills to handle the sand, to control the bike, and to look for another TV program. The child learns if he or she is smart, fast, kind, strong, popular, etc. – the child is giving meaning.

2.3.4 Cognitive Development and Learning

The process of giving meaning is strongly connected to learning. Mostly, it is a nonformal process of learning in the sense of not intentional. But the brains have a very important function in it, and thus the development of the brains. This is the world of imitation, imagination, language, logic, etc.

While singing and reciting rhymes and while discussing and leafing through a book, they are discovering the wonderful world of words and language. They enjoy to invent new (stupid, for them funny) words and even languages. They decipher characters and affect the difference between reality and fantasy. They discover up and under, left and right, light and heavy, and cause and effect (some of the basic concepts of mathematics).

2.4 Play-Stimulating Factors

Play-stimulating factors do not function as separate factors. In fact it needs a climate, a play-promoting climate which is a complex set of many factors that have to work synchronized. To disrupt that process is easier as to build it up. Three factors can be distinguished: freedom, safe environment, and other people.

Freedom – An important play-stimulating factor, or even a condition to play, is freedom. A more concrete terminology could mention free will, autonomy, freedom of action, internal locus of control, etc. Children need the opportunity to decide themselves about their activities (Van der Kooij 2007). This freedom is strongly influenced by the living conditions. Children need to have time, space, and tolerance to play.

• 1. Children have to dispose on their time. A well-known saying said play starts where the decisions of adults about the activities of children end. To illustrate it, we refer to the place of the recess time in the school activities, to the time needed for homework, to children who have to work or who are forced to attend additional educational activities, etc. However, children are very clever to find some “loose time” between two organized activities, so they play while going to school, they play in their bed, and they even play while eating. But in order to find this loose time, there has to be some tolerance.

• 2. Children have to be allowed to play, at home, in the school, on the street, in the shopping center, in the car, etc. This freedom of choice (Van der Kooij 2007) depends on the approach of parents to play and on the approach of the educational staff and of the public opinion and the politicians; in fact it depends on the vision of adults on children and on growing up and thus on play.

• 3. Finally, children need space to play: at home, in school, in the living environment, in public space, etc. This space needs to have some qualities. It has to be varied, accessible, safe, and challenging. We are talking about toys, furniture, play equipment, light, aeration, color, etc. Some of these qualities might seem contradictory: environments that are challenging or adventurous are not without risks, and such risks might suggest insecurity. And indeed they are not safe on the same way as an elevator has to be safe: a lift should not pose a threat, through the eyes of the children a play environment should be challenging, risky. On the other hand, the risks should not be hidden and children should note the risks. There has to be a balance between safety and risks. Also, variation should not be overwhelming: too much visual, auditory, and sensory stimuli make children nervous and impede to choose a play activity.

Safe Environment: A safe environment has to be defined from both the viewpoint of adults and the viewpoint of children. For children the environment needs to have a sense of security; it means children have to feel safe. This feeling is quite different on different ages, for example, toddlers feel safe as long as a parent can be reached by calling, crying, seeing, etc. For young children, it is important that adults are within the reach; in very crowded places, the real presence of adults can be important. On the other hand, in some cases the absence of adults contributes to the safe feeling, just because of the lack of control; in this case, the term “feeling comfortable” is more in its place and is quite near to the freedom of choice mentioned earlier. And so we meet the safety paradox on children’s play. In many play activities, children are looking for some risks: they are looking for things and activities they do not know yet and they are exploring their capacities (and meanwhile confronted with their limits); it included that they take risks which they can estimate or which they cannot overview. So, from the viewpoint of children, a playful environment includes risks. But, and here the paradox is at stake, our society is more and more obsessed by safety being the absolute control over all risks and they expect the play environment should be safe on the same way as the elevator: there should be no risks at all. This approach does not fit with the children’s approach. However, the adults have much more power as the children, so a lot of play spaces and other spaces that could be made playful for children are as safe that they are boring.

The challenge is to combine the concerns of adults with the need of risks of children which can be done by avoiding all risks children cannot estimate, hidden risks on the one hand and by an attitude of adults being aware that children besides safety also need to learn to handle risks.

Other Children: The presence of other children is a very stimulating factor for children’s play. Of course children also are playing alone, but playing with other children offers more opportunities, because there are more ideas about what to do. The social interaction of children enlarges the play opportunities, the challenges, and the variety of play. Other children make the play environment a lot more challenging and attractive. So other children are not only important for the development of social attitudes but also for the fun of play.

2.4.1 Play-Inhibiting Factors

The play-inhibiting factors that can be identified directly are a lot of persons hindering children to play (parents, teachers, neighbors, etc.), lack of time (other activities have priority), and lack of space (also here, other activities have priority). The very concrete implementation of these factors varies from child to child. They are difficult to handle because they mostly have underlying structural causes.

The structural causes at the base of the inhibiting factors are (Lester and Russel 2008):

• Environmental stress due to poverty: Family stresses, housing conditions, poorer social networks, and outdoor physical environment do not support playing. A lot of poor children were complaining about not having the opportunity to play (computer) games, because their parents were always on the computer.

• Culture of fear and risk aversion: Fewer children per family make children more valuable; society entrusted parents with more responsibility, better information about risks and how to avoid risks. Most attention goes to safety in traffic and social safety.

• Inappropriate design of the public space with more attention for economic goals as with human well-being: Also specific provisions as recreation areas and parks are not always welcoming for playing children.

• Difficulty to be part of society in the public realm: Children have to stay indoors and have limited options for meeting up and hanging out with friends. This has to do with the culture of fear and with the inappropriate provisions.

• Commercialization of play: You have to pay to visit indoor playgrounds; creation of crazes and combining commercial initiatives with play are not negative as such (some initiatives are very creative and playful) but quite expensive (video games).

• Climate of priority of intentional learning activities to activities without clear (educational) objectives because of the utility orientation of our society: In order to prepare children to live in this utility-oriented society, all their activities have to contribute to useful capacities. This prioritizing is based on the belief of education and the manufacturability of children.

• Institutionalization of childhood: More institutions are created to organize childcare and child education, first of all because of economic reasons (both parents have to work), secondly for safety reasons (culture of fear), and only in third place because of children’s needs.

3 Play and Well-Being

To organise the reflections on the relation of play and well-being, it is helpful to distinguish objective and subjective conditions of well-being (Ben-Arieh et al. 2001). There are some basic conditions of children’s well-being that can be observed and compared to each other and that are not related to feelings. The subjective well-being “acknowledges that individuals evaluate the quality of their own live” (Lester and Russel 2008). Within this group, three broad themes emerge: emotional well-being, psychological well-being, and social well-being. This can be illustrated by looking for play in some extreme bad situations of objective well-being: in such situations, children simply do not play. On the other hand, once children are playing, this play behavior contributes to their (subjective) well-being. But as this subjective well-being has different components, the relations of play with well-being will not always be the same.

3.1 Play and Objective Well-Being

Factors such as poverty (housing, environment, social network) are recognized as having a strong negative influence on objective well-being and affect in a negative direction the play: in certain circumstances, they make play impossible. A child who is starving will not play, neither will a very ill child, but every parent knows that when the child is playing again, it is recovering. Expecting – on the other hand – the child’s play should have a constructive influence on such factors would be very naive. It seems to suggest that child’s well-being has to reach a basic level before play comes into the game and that from that point, it has even a positive impact on (subjective) well-being. This suggestion might refer to the hierarchy of needs, as Maslow describes (Maslow 1970): In his approach the need to play is not situated at the basic needs at the bottom of his pyramid.

But there are also very bad living conditions in which play opportunities can have an important role. UNICEF – see the numerous illustrations on the Internet – increasingly understands that in major disasters, such as earthquakes and war, play still is possible and even that children need to play in such situations. Play opportunities offer them the chance to give the disaster a place in their own experience. One can also think that the game is the perfect distraction from the disaster, but more important is the process of giving meaning. In the terminology of Maslow, this is a part of “self-actualization.” Play gives children the opportunity to contribute to their self-actualization; it is the instrument at their disposal to master (partly) their own development and to contribute to their own process of growing up and to their actorship/agency. In this case of objective negative well-being, play is turning it over into possibilities to develop subjective well-being.

A similar approach can be recognized in play therapy in which play is the tool to unlock some entries to (subjective) well-being.

3.2 Play and Subjective Well-Being

3.2.1 Play and Emotional Well-Being

The contribution of play to well-being is quite well known. It is applied in many commercials with images of laughing, singing, and dancing children. It is the play behavior endlessly observed and photographed by parents (and grandparents); it is the classic image of happy children, which is often recognized as the externalization of well-being.

And while playing, children often feel happy; they enjoy life, their body, their capacities, and their environment. They are very concentrated, they push their limits, they acquire their world, and they make fun.

It is a more instantaneous approach of child well-being, focusing on the mental well-being, feel good status, and happiness. It is a status that can be recognized by satisfaction, enjoyment, internal rest, showing vitality, openness to the environment, spontaneity, positive feelings about yourself, etc. This aspect of well-being is often the only aspect that is taken into account when talking about children’s play, but the relation between play and well-being is more fascinating especially when other characteristics of play activities are coming on the scene: the efforts play is asking, the discomfort, and even frustrations provoked by play. More concrete, children can feel very tired while digging holes and walking with the dolls, they do not feel fine when they fail to climb a tree or build a tree house, when they lose a game, when they are bored at the end of an activity, when they are hurt, etc., but however it is part of the game.

On the other hand, also well-being is influencing children’s play. Freedom (free will, autonomy, freedom of action) as a play-stimulating factor is an important aspect of subjective well-being: in enjoying freedom, play and well-being are both stimulated.

3.2.2 Play and Psychological Well-Being

To illustrate the psychological well-being, the concept of resilience is very helpful. This concept helps to deepen the idea of self-actualization related to well-being. This multifaceted concept refers to the capacity to do well in the stressful situations. With Vellacot (2007), we prefer to use this concept here in a more general context (not only in stressful situations) meaning and focus more on the genesis of resilience and thus to the dynamics of the development of every child (Van Gils 2005). In the image “la casita de la resiliencia” (Vanistendael and Lecomte 2002) (house of resilience), five rooms (factors) can be recognized: the base of the resilience of a person is the fundamental acceptance of the person which is the core of the social network. It is the base of every well-being: every child needs at least one person by whom he is accepted unconditionally and who is accepted by the child to be such a person. Another layer is the capacity to discover sense and meaning. The creation of the concept of resilience is strongly influenced by observing children growing up into strong persons in spite of extreme situations of adversity they experienced; in such situations, to discover your potential of meaning is so inspiring. To discover meaning is what every child is doing from the beginning of his life until his death: in this case, we do not restrict “to discover meaning” to the ultimate sense or nonsense of life but we include the sensory-motor activities by playing, the linguistic activities by experiencing with sounds and words and sentences, the ethical exploration on the value of interpersonal relations, etc. – all these are activities that children do while playing. The third layer is composed by self-esteem skills and competencies and humor. These are the results of the supporting social network and the discovering of sense in interaction with each other and with genetic predisposition. Under the roof, attic is space for any other experiences to be discovered. Where the whole concept of resilience is referring to well-being, especially the roof of discover meaning, refers to children’s play.

An interesting characteristic of this resilience concept is that it takes into account how children are developing and how children are important and active partners on their development (Van Gils 2005), especially by giving meaning on which play plays a very important role (Van Gils 1995) (Fig. 29.2).

Fig. 29.2

House of resilience

It does not mean that children are able to give meaning all by themselves and independently from others in every situation. In a lot of situations, children need some support. Play therapy can help children to overcome some problems of giving meaning by offering them some incentives to express their feelings or to tell some experiences or situations they were not able to sort out properly. Play provisions as toy libraries, play work, and childcare also support children by enriching their environment with material and immaterial incentives, by offers of play leaders, and not at least by bringing together several children that all are potential playmates. And at last also parents stimulate children’s play by giving them appropriate playthings and time and place to play.

3.2.3 Play and Social Well-Being

The higher mentioned aspects of well-being are more focused on the child as an individual. But a human being is more than an individual; it is also a social being. So, also social well-being needs to be discussed. Aspects of social well-being often cited are supportive relations and belonging (Barry et al. 2009). How are these related to play?

Even while play is not always a social activity, it is quite often an occupation in which other children and/or adults are involved. Especially other children (peers) play an important role. They are partners in the activity. While playing, they are negotiating about how the activity will be organized: with what material and where and how, etc. Especially in the self-directed play, but also in games, this process of negotiating is going on during the whole activity; it is even part of the play activity. The process of giving meaning as higher described is here also at stake. Children need other children to compare themselves to, to get feedback, to build a realistic self-image, to join forces, to deal with the fun, to be courageous in exploring and transcending limits, to imitate, and to pick up knowledge. The social aspects of play offer the opportunity to develop social capacities and to deal with several feelings which both open the door for supportive relations and for feelings of belonging.

The same feelings of belonging children have when they are playing with their parents. It opens the parent-child relation to aspects as relaxation, unintentional education, etc. It contributes to the quality of the relation in line with mutual loyalty and belonging together.

Children living in poverty are complaining about their isolation at school and on the streets, of having no friends to play with, or, even worse, of being bullied. They feel quite uncomfortable with it. A similar isolation and connected feelings children living in poverty have regarding the access of play and other leisure opportunities. For that reason, they are looking for peers, congeners to play with. Children can find them in clubs, organizing aside of childcare initiatives, and also in play provisions. Young people who do not live anymore under the wings of their parents are organizing their own activities. They find each other at school and on the street and they organize their meetings and leisure activities themselves, with the well-known so-called nuisance. It does not mean that children are not able to play alone, but playmates are enriching the play environment and create more play opportunities. However, poverty is influencing play opportunities.

Another aspect and contact point of play and social well-being is the development of a peer play culture. Play culture refers first and foremost to games that during a period are very popular. There are folkloric games as playing with marbles, knucklebones, knock chestnut, and rope jumping that appear and disappear; the rules are changing a little bit, but the games remain recognizable. Other elements of the play culture are influenced by (new) popular toys as the hula hoop and skating (different forms) or by popular culture as songs, clothes, decoration of bikes, comics, and books. And there are also the fruits of the technological evolution (Lester and Russel 2008): games, computers, mobile phones, MP3, etc. Commercial impact in these cannot be denied. A quite different aspect of the play culture are the public spaces where children and young people meet each other: they claim the ownership on a corner where they meet before to bike together to school, or on certain place in the train station, or on the market place. Once again such claims are not always appreciated by other people, but exactly these conflicts confirm their own identity. The whole play culture (the difference with child culture or youth culture is not easy to make) expresses the need for a common group identity, different from adults, different from other age groups, and different from groups with another ethnic and/or social background. This is very explicit for young people in the age that they are looking for their own place in the society and that they want to belong to the society, without accepting all the roles and rules the society is prescribing.

4 Conclusions

• 1. Play and well-being are both multifaceted realities; both can be described, but to define them definitely seems to be impossible. Play is difficult to define, because it includes very different appearances and at the same time the subjective elements (intentions, experiences) are very hard to be observed. And well-being too has so many subjective connotations, and it is, unlike playing, not describable in terms of behavior. The concreteness of both is different. The consequence is that to describe the relation of well-being and play is a big challenge.

• 2. Well-being is influencing children’s play, because a basic dose of well-being is necessary to permit children to play. This dose has to do with health: a starving child or a very ill child will not play. Play as such will not contribute to these basics of well-being.

• 3. Children’s play is influencing children’s well-being as play is their way of being: the dynamic in children’s lives is in their play. By playing, they are who they are, giving meaning to themselves in the world/society, and they become who they are by developing their capacities and their relations. These aspects belong to subjective well-being, more especially to the psychological well-being.

• 4. Looking at the play-stimulating factors, they are aspects of children’s well-being too. Freedom, safe environment, and other children are positive factors both in well-being and in play stimulating especially as it concerns the spontaneous self-directed play and the relation to subjective well-being in all these aspects. It illustrates how children – while playing – contribute to their own development, including their well-being. It is a tool they deserve themselves. It does not mean that they realize it as individuals or as social category; undoubtedly, children need and mostly enjoy some support by parents, play leaders, etc., as long as they do not inhibit play: they belong to the play environment.

• 5. Not all play behavior is contributing to well-being. Sometimes, at the personal level, play is frustrating and at that inhibits children’s well-being. Play can also be destructive at the social level: vandalism, bullying, etc., cannot be considered contributions to well-being, neither for the actors of it nor for the victims.