When was the last time you played?

Can you remember what that felt like, what you were doing, or why you chose to do it? For many adults, that question lands oddly. Play can feel distant, fuzzy, almost indulgent, as though it belongs to a different phase of life, something we were meant to grow out of once things became serious.

And yet play was never meant to be disposable.

In fact, play is so fundamental to human development that it is formally recognised as a right. Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 31 states that every child has the right to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to their age, and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts. Governments are required not just to acknowledge this right, but to actively respect and promote it.

That framing matters, because it places play alongside other core aspects of wellbeing. It is not treated as a reward, a luxury, or a bonus. It is recognised as essential.

And yet, somewhere around the age of seven, play slips quietly down the priority list.

As children move beyond early years education, play is steadily displaced in favour of what is labelled as serious learning and work. Exploration gives way to outcomes, curiosity to targets, experience to performance. This shift is so normalised that it rarely gets questioned, even though it introduces a deep contradiction at the heart of how we educate and prepare young people.

Because what we know, intuitively and repeatedly, is that play does not stop being one of the most powerful ways humans learn just because they get older.

Play is how we explore the world safely. It creates a container where mistakes aren’t failures but information, where curiosity leads rather than instruction, and where ideas can be tested without fear of consequence. Through play, we try things out, notice what happens, adjust, and try again. The learning happens in the doing, not in the explanation.

You can see this clearly in children. A child who is able to play freely, without being hurried, corrected, or constantly monitored, is continuously making sense of their experience. Through play, they process what has happened to them, explore relationships and roles, rehearse difficult moments, and integrate new information at a pace their nervous system can manage. They don’t need to narrate it or justify it. Meaning emerges as they go.

In many ways, a child at play has a greater capacity to make sense of the world than we often allow ourselves as adults.

Which makes the next part deeply ironic.

We routinely ask children and young people, often between the ages of eight and sixteen, to make decisions about their future, about who they are, what they are good at, and what they should aim for, at precisely the point where play has been most stripped from their experience. At the very moment when exploration, experimentation, and trying things on for size would be most useful, we narrow the field and demand certainty.

We ask for answers just as we remove the conditions that help those answers emerge.

Part of the problem is that we tend to misunderstand what play actually is.

My definition of play is simple. Play is an activity we engage in because we want to, with no fixed outcome. It is led by interest, desire, or curiosity, rather than obligation. It’s not driven by targets, pressure, or external reward. The moment the outcome becomes more important than the engagement, play collapses into performance.

By that definition, almost anything can be play.

Play does not have to be light, easy, or inconsequential. It can be serious work. It can be demanding, absorbing, and difficult. It can involve deep focus, frustration, effort, and persistence. What makes it play is not how it looks from the outside, but the internal experience of choice and agency.

This is where a crucial reframe helps. As Stuart Brown famously put it ‘the opposite of play is not work, it’s depression‘. Play is not the enemy of seriousness or effort. It is the enemy of numbness, rigidity, and collapse.

Work can be play when it is driven by curiosity and agency. Learning can be play when it allows room for exploration. What undermines play is not challenge, but coercion.

When we engage in something because we want to, when interest rather than fear leads the way, we access a different quality of attention. Learning becomes embodied rather than forced. Flexibility replaces rigidity. We become more able to integrate experience rather than simply perform competence.

For adults, play can be a way back into the body when we’re stuck in our heads, a way to explore emotions without needing to pin them down, a way to experiment with ideas, identities, and possibilities without the demand for certainty. It allows learning to happen sideways rather than head-on, often revealing insights that analysis alone cannot reach.

In a world that increasingly asks us to be constantly productive, regulated, and certain, reclaiming play is not indulgent, it’s deeply protective. Play was never meant to be something we outgrow.

Perhaps the more useful question isn’t why children need play, but why we decided that, just when it matters most, we no longer do.