Parents’ Beliefs and Attitudes About Play in Three Colombian Indigenous Communities

• In Event: 3-018 - Investigating Perceptions of Play and Learning From Children and Adults Around the World Using Mixed-Methods

Integrative Statement

Play is a childhood activity observed across cultures with important implications for learning and development (Pellegrini, 2009). However, children’s involvement in play is shaped by the activities fostered or forbidden by their communities, and parents are often the “gatekeepers” facilitating, encouraging, or prohibiting children’s participation in play (Veitch, Bagley, Ball, & Salmon, 2006, p. 384). Whether parents cultivate, accept, or discourage play is largely based on their cultural belief systems about childhood and child development, which in turn are influenced by the values, traditions, and priorities of their communities—authors have called these belief systems ethnotheories (Gaskins, 1996; Gaskins, Haight, & Lancy, 2007). Even within communities, however, parents’ beliefs can vary depending on their own experiences, goals, and education, and it is important to investigate this complexity in parents’ attitudes about play to better understand the factors shaping them.
As part of a larger ethnographic study, parents in three indigenous communities of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia were interviewed regarding their children’s play. As a changing traditional society, communities’ interactions with mainstream Colombian individuals and institutions, including formal schooling, have become more frequent in recent decades, providing a rich context to explore how sociocultural and individual influences inform their attitudes about play. Thirty parents (N = 30, 10 from each site) participated in semi-structured interviews. Mothers (n = 20) and fathers (n = 10) were asked to describe their children’s play activities, their community’s beliefs about play, and their own reactions to play. In order to understand how formal education may have shaped their beliefs, parents were also asked about their level of education and educational experiences. Emic, thematic coding of interviews was conducted using MAXQDA Standard 12 qualitative data analysis software, allowing patterns in parents’ responses to emerge from the data.
Parents shared their own and their communities’ concerns and preoccupations about play, including the importance of productivity over play, children’s safety and cleanliness, and potential spiritual consequences of disturbing the Earth through play (see Table 1). Yet they also described appropriate times for children to play and its potential developmental benefits, including positive affect, intellectual stimulation, and physical strength. Variability in parents’ responses demonstrated that play is sometimes curtailed, and other times accepted. And although parents hardly encouraged or engaged with children in play, there were indications that there may be generational changes in this respect, with parents expressing their openness to play in comparison to their own parents’ generation. Despite the distribution of educational attainment in the sample, levels of education did not appear related to more positive or negative attitudes about play. Most parents discussed concerns about play and also discussed instances when it was appropriate, regardless of level of education. Parents’ responses indicated a negotiation between traditional attitudes about play and generational changes related to children’s role in the community, education, and playful behaviors. This suggests the need to understand the complexity of parental perspectives in order to design play interventions that honor their belief systems and leverage the priorities of the local context.

Author

• S. Lynneth Solis, Harvard University
  Presenting Author