Educators have long insisted, “a child's play is his work.” Now accumulated research proves that if a child's job is to learn, the educators are definitely correct! Still, it can be hard for parents to understand that their toddler is having an important educational experience when their child stumbles into the living room, retrieves a toy ball from under the sofa, and licks the plastic. Or when the child spends fifteen minutes drumming on pots and pans with a wooden spoon.

Parents may think toddlers are merely making useless mischief. But by getting to know the unique texture of plastic or the sound a spoon makes hitting a pot, toddlers are actually gathering data, developing hypotheses, conducting experiments, analyzing the results, and drawing conclusions. Imagine! Every time the spoon hits the pot, Mom yells! A spoon's ability to make noise come from the pot and Mom's mouth is amazing to a toddler.

Prodding, poking, tasting, and smelling are crucial for children's long-range intellectual development. Researchers have long known that toddlers with fewer opportunities to use their senses end up less intelligent than peers who are given freer reign.

More recently, scientists have used imaging equipment to study toddlers' brains to find out exactly what happens when they engage in various kinds of play activities. The results are nothing short of amazing. Different areas of the brain respond when children engage in different kinds of exploration. When toddlers manipulate objects, brain cells and those all-important connections between them can be seen in the act of being born. They appear, grow, and proliferate. When a child is deeply engrossed in a toy, the growth of this rootlike structure speeds up, and a complex web of long thin cells emerges. As children continue to play, those cells deepen until they make permanent creases in the gray matter of the brain.