ABSTRACT
If play is as important to human development, adaptation and survival as recent evidence suggests, then what happens if children don’t play? This question was being posed in playwork as early as the late 1980s, and theoretical outcomes of chronic play deprivation were tentatively modelled in a developing Stimulation Theory (Hughes 1984, 1996). However, it wasn’t until empirical investigations by Huttenmoser et al., Chugani and latterly Brown and Lomax, and then Brown, were published that the devastating impacts of play deprivation predicted earlier were actually realised.
