Quotes from Brian Sutton-Smith

I feel playful aggression is important for children because they have to deal with all kinds of anger and aggression in their lives.

For decades, there has been this assumption that children played and adults didn't. That's rubbish.

Forget about teaching the children about numbers and colors and the like, and just play with them.

It's a mistake to try to use play to deliberately foster developmental progress.

Play is always a fantasy, but once you get into the frame, it is quite real, and everything you do is real. You put acres and acres of real movement and real action and real belief in it.

To play is to act out and be willful, exultant and committed, as if one is assured of one's prospects.

A weakness of many of the self-oriented play theories is that they often sound too much like vain consumerism instead of being about the more passionate and willful character of human play, which involves a willingness, even if a fantasy, to believe in the play venture itself.

People who play are happier people. And people who don't have access to play tend to be depressed.

Children who play regularly with their peers are most likely to achieve the highest levels of adjustment as adults.

We study play because life is crap. Life is crap, and it's full of pain and suffering, and the only thing that makes it worth living - the only thing that makes it possible to get up in the morning and go on living - is play.

Play begins as a major feature of mammalian evolution and remains as a major method of becoming reconciled with our present universe.

A toy is seen both as a bauble and as an intellectual machine.

The main point for me is that toys are incredibly more important than we realized.

Once upon a time, soft toys were for babies. Now they're taken for granted as a feature of adult life.

Adults spend $500 billion on games and leisure activity each year, and some adults lament that kids get $15 billion for toys.

Research has shown that children who play often both solitarily and socially become more creative and imaginative than those whose exposure to play and toys is limited.

One thinks of toys and play as an area of great novelty and potentiality where all sorts of responses can be developed. The fact that adults are allowing their imaginations to have activity through toy kinds of objects is a further reflection of the belief in the imagination of the adult mind.

I keep trying to understand the phenomenon of why adults are so literal when children are so imaginative. Toys are a caricature of reality.

If you are going to take away war toys, then what are you to replace them with? Children need to feel courageous, brave, and assertive. They need to feel strong; that is the purpose of their play.

Puritanical attempts to cure society by taking toys away from children are hypocritical and futile.

Despite the efforts of some parents, children still tend to act out the traditional sex roles of our culture. The child's peer group may have more of an influence over this than the parents.

The parent who gets down on the floor to play with a child on Christmas Day is usually doing a most remarkable thing -- something seldom repeated during the rest of the year. These are, after all, busy parents committed to their work or their success in the larger society, and they do not have much left-over time in which to play with their children.

The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression.

The connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores.