Performance, Participation, and the Education of the Whole Child
by Kara Ashley, Director of Enrollment, Eagle Hill School, Greenwich
Christina Koch spent her childhood summers on her grandparents’ farm in Michigan, with long unstructured afternoons, open fields, and the freedom to play. This spring, she became the first woman to travel around the Moon. Her crewmate Victor Glover described the mission with language every coach would recognize: “Human spaceflight is a relay race, a baton passed from crew to crew, generation to generation.” The Artemis II crew was selected for their technical mastery, yes, but equally for their adaptability, composure under pressure, and capacity to collaborate. Those are not technical skills. They are the skills of a whole childhood, built through play.
Arts and athletics, imagination and unstructured time, are not extracurricular. They are the curriculum for human flourishing. Children today have fewer unscheduled hours than any generation before them, and the research suggests they may need them more.
PLAY AS LABORATORY
The American Academy of Pediatrics has described play as essential to development, noting that it “enhances brain structure and function and promotes executive function, the process of learning, rather than the content, which allows us to pursue goals and ignore distractions.” Mr. Rogers put it more simply: “Play gives children the chance to practice what they are learning.”
Executive function refers to the set of cognitive processes that allow us to plan, focus, adapt, and follow through. They are the foundation beneath every academic skill and one of the strongest predictors of long-term success. Its three core components areworking memory, holding multiple things in mind at once; cognitive flexibility, shifting strategy when circumstances change; and inhibitory control, resisting impulse in service of a longer goal. Alongside these, emotional regulation and academic stamina are equally essential to how children learn. Dr. Kathy
Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, describes the “6 Cs” for student success: collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creative innovation, confidence, and citizenship. Play, structured and unstructured, is one of the most reliable ways to build all of them.
THE FIRST LABORATORY
The cardboard box becomes a spaceship, the stick becomes a magic wand, rules are invented on the spot and argued over passionately. In free play, we see executive function skills actively under development. Children are practicing negotiation, turn-taking, conflict resolution, pragmatic language, emotional regulation, perspective-taking, independence, and collaborative problem-solving.
Free play is where executive function first takes root, and its developmental importance cannot be overstated. When children invent a scenario and sustain it, holding rules in mind, adapting when a playmate suggests changes, and regulating impulse and emotion to keep the game alive, they are building language development, social-emotional learning, and the cognitive foundations researchers identify as essential to academic success. The AAP affirms that play is “a singular opportunity to promote the social-emotional, cognitive, language, and self-regulation skills that build executive function and a prosocial brain.” Play is among the most serious learning a child does.
Imaginative and strategic play extend this further. Building with LEGO bricks strengthens spatial reasoning, planning, and thediscipline of iteration. Role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons build empathy and narrative intelligence, requiring players to inhabit perspectives other than their own, visualize, and make decisions under uncertainty. Strategy games strengthen forms of thinking that transfer directly to academic and professional problem-solving. Play also deepens relationships. Families who play together build a shared private language and a history of small joys. Children who spend unstructured time outdoors develop a sense of wonder and belonging in the natural world that shapes them for a lifetime.
And then there is boredom. Rather than a problem to solve, unplanned downtime is one of the most powerful gifts we can give a child. When a child says they’re bored and no one rushes to fix it, the brain goes looking for its own stimulation. The Kids Mental Health Foundation describes this as a genuine opportunity. Boredom challenges children to generate their own solutions, fueling creativity, independence, and self-directed problem-solving that structured activity rarely demands. The power of play includes the power of the unscheduled afternoon.
THE RELAY RACE
Team sports place students in one of the most cognitively demanding environments available: real stakes, real relationships, real accomplishments and disappointments. Research consistently connects physical activity to improved attention, working memory, and academic engagement. And the richest learning happens in the dynamic between players: communication, collaboration, and the trust built across a long season of showing up for one another. Students who compete together develop goal-setting, persistence, situational awareness, academic stamina, sustained attention, resilience, and the capacity to perform under pressure.
The Artemis II crew exemplifies what this preparation looks like at its highest expression: years of learning to communicate under stress, trust a colleague’s judgment, and adapt when the stakes are real. These are human skills, built across a lifetime of doing hard things alongside other people.
THE STAGE AS LABORATORY
The performing arts function as a different type of developmental laboratory. A full-scale production asks every participant tomemorize, adapt, take direction, give feedback, manage nerves, and be vulnerable in front of an audience across months of preparation. Every run-through is a repetition of working memory and a test of academic stamina. Every adjustment to a scene is cognitive flexibility in action.
Every performance is a public demonstration of emotional regulation under conditions that are entirely real. The way a community of students rehearses, disagrees, supports one another, and finally steps into the light together, builds belonging in a way few other experiences can.
The visual arts cultivate sustained attention and the willingness to make something, evaluate it honestly, and make it again, a process indistinguishable from scientific thinking. Creative writing is the practice of translating inner experience into language, a skill with lifelong relevance in every professional domain.
THE EXPLORERS
For children with dyslexia, play and performance may be where their most important cognitive strengths first become visible.Researchers at the University of Cambridge found that people with dyslexia have what they call an explorative bias: a specialization in discovery, invention, and big-picture problem-solving that represents a genuine cognitive strength, not merely a compensation for difficulty. Lead researcher Dr. Helen Taylor argues that this way of thinking is essential to teams, to organizations, and to our collective capacity to adapt. In 2022, LinkedIn recognized this directly, adding Dyslexic Thinking as an official skill on its platform, acknowledging creativity, problem-solving, and big-picture thinking as capacities the professional world actively needs.
Multiple studies have found that physical activity produces improvements in executive function in children with ADHD, includinginhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and working memory, the same capacities that play, sport, and the performing arts build inevery child. For neurodiverse learners, the field, the stage, and the open afternoon are not supplements to the real curriculum. Formany, they are where some of the most learning happens.
WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS MOST
We are raising children for a world already being reshaped by artificial intelligence. That fact intensifies, not diminishes, the case forplay. As AI accelerates its capacity to perform cognitive and technical tasks, the skills that remain irreplaceably human are precisely those built on playgrounds, fields and stages: creativity, adaptability, resilience, empathy, and the capacity to collaborate with people who see the world differently. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report names resilience and adaptability amongthe capacities employers will need most by 2030.
There is something that happens when a basketball goes through the net with a swish. Something in the feel of grass under bare feet,in the weight of a handful of mud, in the specific pride of building a fort that holds. Something in the backstage darkness before a curtain rises. These are the experiences of childhood. They are also, as both science and the space program confirm, exactly what builds the people our world needs most.
The child who builds and argues, falls down and gets up, performs and runs through the grass is doing some of the most important work of their education. They are training in the most important laboratory of all: childhood itself. That is the power of play, and it has never been more worth protecting.
SOURCES
American Academy of Pediatrics. (2018, reaffirmed 2025). The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. Pediatrics, 142(3).
Glover, V. J. (2023, April 3). Remarks at Artemis II crew announcement. NASA/Ellington Field, Houston, TX.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Nesbitt, K., Lautenbach, C., Blinkoff, E., & Fifer, G. (2022). Making schools work: Bringing the science of learning to joyful classroom practice. Teachers College Press.
Koch, C. H. (n.d.). Astronaut biography. NASA Johnson Space Center. https://www.nasa.gov
Made By Dyslexia & LinkedIn. (2022). Dyslexic Thinking recognized as an official LinkedIn skill. Made By Dyslexia campaign in partnership with LinkedIn.
Rogers, F. (2003). The world according to Mister Rogers. Hyperion.
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