Romania

For the Western world, the concept of children's play in Romania toward the end of the 20th century was dominated by images of discrimination, neglect, and abuse. By organizing projects to respond to those images, we have at the same time learned some very useful lessons about the significance of play in child development.

In 1989 with the overthrow of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the world had its first graphic introduction to child abuse on a grand scale. In the years immediately following the revolution, the Western media gained access to Romania for the first time and began to discover the full horror of its state-run institutions, where more than 100,000 children lived. In the most extreme cases, children were tied in their cots for days on end and so grew up starved of the sort of basic developmental opportunities most of us take for granted.

Images of malnourished children sitting rocking, staring aimlessly into space, brought numerous well-meaning volunteers from the West, hoping to help these children recover. Many (possibly most) of those efforts ended in disappointment, for a very basic reason: a failure to identify one of the most fundamental deficits experienced by the children—namely, play deprivation, which B. Hughes describes as resulting from “a chronic lack of sensory interaction with the world.” Play deprivation is a condition that cannot be rectified solely by kindness, or a proper diet, or by being taught to speak. All of those things are important, but none will work on their own.

However, the work of the White Rose Initiative's (WRI's) therapeutic play project gave cause for hope. From 1999 onward, WRI employed a team of playworkers to work with a group of children who had been abandoned at birth and subsequently spent most of their time tied in a cot, with little positive input into their lives. Nothing else in their lives changed. The children still spent the rest of their day tied in the same cots, having little interaction with anyone else. During the first year of the project, two researchers from Leeds Metropolitan University studied the developmental changes in the children. In some cases, the changes were dramatic, providing strong evidence of the power of play as a therapeutic and developmental agent. The evidence showed a speed of recovery that was quite unexpected, and cast doubt on the “ages and stages” view of play development.

An interesting contrast is provided by the work of the Aid for Romanian Children (ARC) charitable trust. The Roma children with whom ARC works are probably the most materially deprived in Europe, and yet volunteers who run ARC's summer camps report that these are the happiest children they have ever met. The explanation for this apparent contradiction is that these children are not play deprived. They may not have computer games and expensive toys to play with, but they do have strong friendship and kinship groups. They also have free choice in their play, and a great amount of personal control over what and where they play. As a result they are highly creative in their use of junk materials, and highly active and energetic in their play.

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