I enjoy the personal story Gray uses here to further push the point of time and time out, and how adults who have become removed from this paradox of real and unreal can “worry needlessly that children don’t distinguish fantasy from reality” (Gray). He describes how his son would pretend to be Superman, sometimes playing for longer than a day, and how this often worried one of his teachers. Gray then pointed out that his son never attempted to jump off tall buildings or stop speeding trains or anything else that Superman could do that his son could not, and that the child would always acknowledge that he had been playing when he decided to remove the cape and call time out. The importance of the real versus not real in children’s …show more content…
This comes obviously from the points that precede it. During play, one is balancing various mental rules and processes and consciousness of one’s own behaviour. The mind is obviously active and alert. The main point, however, is that it is not stressed. When playing, you are not focused on the outcome of your activity. You are not working towards a goal that you can necessarily “fail” at, and therefore that stress is gone. This state of mind is considered “flow”, where attention is focused on that activity and “there is reduced consciousness of self and time” (Gray). Studies have shown that this state is particularly useful in creative tasks, conscious decision making and the learning of new skills. However, if play does not develop to continue to demand mental focus and the activity becomes habitual for the player, the player is less likely to grow in the aforementioned categories. A person will relapse to using the easy and already known-to-work route in emergency situations. That is, a situation where failure to achieve a goal is a possible but unwanted outcome. This is often seen in schools, where children are pressured to get good grades. The process of habit then hinders experimentation, growth, and the development of new