Brian Sutton-Smith

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

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. ”

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

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

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

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

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”