A Place to Play: Moving Towards Fairness of Place for All Children

Contents Podcast Panelists Additional Resources Transcript In March 2024, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our third installment: “A Place to Play: Moving Towards Fairness of Place for All Children.” During the webinar, we explored the power of play in supporting early childhood development, as well as the importance of ensuring that children and caregivers have access to safe green spaces, like parks and playgrounds. Our panel of experts discussed how access to safe, stimulating, and joyful play space is not equally distributed across communities, along with strategies to work toward building a future where all children have a safe place to play. The webinar discussion has been adapted for this episode of the Brain Architects podcast. Panelists Leah Anyanwu (Moderator)Programme Specialist, Children on the Move, Children’s Learning and Development, The LEGO Foundation Cynthia Briscoe BrownAtlanta Board of Education Seat 8 At Large Kathy Hirsh-PasekProfessor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Temple University; Senior Fellow, Brookings Institute Lysa RatlifChief Executive Officer, KABOOM! Le-Quyen VuExecutive Director, Indochinese American Council Melissa Rivard  (Webinar Host)Director of Engagement Strategies, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Cameron Seymour-Hawkins (Podcast Host)Communications Coordinator, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Additional Resources Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundations of Healthy Development  Presentation Slides  Playful Learning Landscapes  KABOOM!  Atlanta Community School Parks Initiative  LEGO Foundation  Indochinese American Council  Transcript Cameron Seymour-Hawkins: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m Cameron Seymour-Hawkins, the Center’s Communications Coordinator. Our Center believes that advances in the science of child development provide a powerful source of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and their caregivers. By sharing the latest science from the field, we hope to help you make that science actionable and apply it in your work in ways that can increase your impact.  In March, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our third installment: “A Place to Play: Moving Towards Fairness of Place for All Children.” During the webinar, we explored how play and a family’s access to safe green spaces, like parks and playgrounds, support early development. Our panel of experts discussed how access to safe, stimulating, and joyful play space is not equally distributed along with strategies to work toward building a future where all children have a safe place to play. We’re excited to share part of this conversation on today’s episode of the Brain Architects podcast.   If you’re interested in in seeing some examples of community-led solutions to address gaps in play space equity presented by Lysa Ratliff of KABOOM and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Playful Learning Landscapes, we encourage you to head over to our YouTube channel to view the full webinar recording.   Now, without further ado, here’s Melissa Rivard, the Center’s Assistant Director of Innovation Strategies, who will set the stage for our conversation.  Melissa Rivard: Welcome and thank you all so much for joining us today. It’s really gratifying to have so many of you showing up for this really important topic. So thank you. I’m Melissa Rivard, Assistant Director of Innovation Strategies and I will be your host today. This webinar is part of a series of webinars that the Center on the Developing Child has hosted to examine the ways that a child’s broader environment, including the built and natural environments, as well as the systemic factors that shape them, play a role in shaping child development and health beginning before birth. Our focus today, the importance for all children to have access to stimulating joyful and safe places to play, is prompted by our focus on fairness of place as well as a desire to highlight a long standing collaboration between the Center on the Developing Child and the LEGO Foundation, and our shared belief in both the power of the early years and in the power of play to positively impact lifelong learning and health. Our moderator for the conversation is Leah Anyanwu. Leah is a program specialist at the LEGO Foundation, where she supports the Foundation’s early childhood portfolio with a focus on children displaced due to conflict and climate. Leah is a passionate educator and advocate with over a decade of experience working in education with a focus on early childhood and education systems reform. Along with Leah, we’ll be joined for this discussion by a phenomenal group of panelists who bring a wide range of expertise related to this topic. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is a professor of psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. She served as president of the International Congress for Infant Studies, was on the Governing Board of the Society for Research in Child Development and is on the board of 0 to 3. In 2010, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek founded Playful Learning Landscapes with her colleagues, an initiative that reimagines cities and public squares as places with science infused designs that enhance academic and social learning opportunities for young children. And we have Lysa Ratliff, who is CEO of KABOOM!, a national nonprofit that works to end play space inequity. Lysa is a leading national advocate for equitable access to play spaces, has been invited to speak at several White House events and engages with members of federal, state and local public offices advocating for and creating opportunities for kids to play across the nation. We’re also joined by Le-Quyen Vu, who is Executive Director of the Indochinese American Council in Philadelphia, a nonprofit working to empower disadvantaged and minoritized groups and newly arrived refugees and immigrants in their community to achieve social, economic and educational advancement and mobility. And Cynthia Briscoe Brown, a member of the Atlanta Board of Education, Seat 8 at large who’s been instrumental in passing a number of policy initiatives, such as the historic Equity Policy, the Atlanta Community School Parks Initiative and the Atlanta Public Schools Center for Equity and Social Justice. Without further ado, I am so pleased to hand the baton to you, Leah.   Leah Anyanwu: Thank you and welcome, everyone. I am so excited to hear from each of our panelists about the critical work connected to play equity and for this conversation, which centers the power of play and the importance of safe and quality play spaces. Our aspiration at the LEGO Foundation is that children become creative, engaged, lifelong learners who thrive in a constantly changing world by experiencing the benefits of learning through play. The scientific evidence around the power of play is clear and growing. In short, play is essential, everyone. Not only is play the best way for children to learn and to thrive, but play builds the foundations of lifelong learning and fosters holistic development. We’re here today because there is so much opportunity for children, families and communities when it comes to play and creating spaces that invite and enhance it at the community level in policy development and in the work that brings each of us to this conversation today. Yet we have a long way to go towards ensuring that the opportunity for quality play is equally accessible to all children, families and communities. To quote the Place Matters paper that Melissa just mentioned, “just as dimensions of the built and natural environment have been designed over time, they can be redesigned to support healthy development.” Throughout our conversation today, we will share insights from research and the field about ways to redesign, to rethink and to rebuild in pursuit of creating environments that support all children’s copy development. Now, without further ado, let’s get started. And I really want to invite Kathy to really focus first on the why. So, Kathy, good to have you here. What does this science tell us about why play matters for children, particularly young children? And ...