ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

“In 1966, when psychiatrist Dr. Stuart Brown was assigned to a commission to investigate what led University of Texas student Charles Whitman to kill 12 people in one of the country’s first mass shootings, Brown and his colleagues considered many different aspects of Whitman’s background. The student had access to firearms at home; he had witnessed abuse while growing up; and he had a difficult relationship with his father.

But Brown was struck by one other factor that came up in the commission’s discussions: Whitman had experienced play deprivation, or an ‘almost complete suppression of normal play behavior,’ as the commission put it, while growing up.”

So begins an article in the Hechinger Report by Jackie Mader.

She goes on to explain, “In the years after the shooting, he and a team of researchers interviewed men who were incarcerated in the Texas Huntsville Prison for homicide. When the researchers compared information about the inmates’ childhoods with a population outside the prison, they found that the comparison group could provide abundant examples of free play in childhood, while the group inside prison largely could not. ‘The parallelism between their play deficiencies, and the objective problems in forming trusting social bonds with others seems very significant.’”

Brown, the founder and past president of the National Institute for Play, cautions against drawing conclusions about outcomes for children who experience a lack of play, but offers that numerous studies since the Texas tragedy all point to the fact that humans “have an innate need to engage in playful activities as a part of healthy development.”

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