1. Children will play whether they live in a suburb or a war zone. The urge is so strong that children even played in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
2. Play reflects a child’s surroundings. In the Confederate South, black children held mock slave auctions, a psychological means of coping with extreme anxiety.
3. Essential to the growing brain, play stimulates development of the cerebellum, which coordinates movement, and the frontal lobe, which regulates decision-making and impulse control.