11/06/2026
INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PLAY · 11 JUNE 2026
Play is not just for children.
It never was.
On protecting something we were taught to outgrow.
Today's theme — Protect play, protect childhood — is right. Children deserve unstructured time, safe spaces, and the freedom to be curious without a performance outcome attached.
But here is the question I carry into my work every day: what happens to that same brain after childhood ends?
The neuroscience is clear. The brain systems that make play generative — curiosity, prediction, openness to surprise — don't retire at 18. They get suppressed. By performance culture. By the grammar of productivity. By the quiet social agreement that serious adults don't play.
"Play is not what we grow out of.
It is what we are trained to abandon."
I research adult playfulness — not as recreation, but as a measurable developmental capacity. Researchers like René Proyer, Garry Chick and Sharon Shen have shown we can quantify playfulness as a stable adult trait. What's less studied is whether re-activating it in the Third Age — the active, capable decades from roughly 60 to 80 — can actually protect the cognitive, physical, and emotional capacities that determine how we age.
That's what I'm building toward: an intervention using scuba diving as an embodied playful environment, measuring whether restored playfulness predicts healthier aging outcomes across the WHO's Intrinsic Capacity framework.
If we protect play in childhood because it builds the brain's ability to stay open, learn, and adapt — then protecting it across the lifespan is not indulgence. It is population health.
Today I celebrate not just the right of every child to play. I celebrate the right of every human — at 7, at 47, at 77 — to remain curious, alive to surprise, and not yet finished becoming.
Humanity deserves that right across the whole span of a life.
