The team at learning toy company Click-A-Brick has praised the new ‘Play With Purpose’ fundraising campaign from Toys“R”Us and the Save the Children charity, saying it’s a brilliant and natural way to help less fortunate kids while also highlighting the importance of play in children’s lives.
As part of the Play With Purpose initiative, Save the Children sends specialized home visitors to the homes of less fortunate children to engage them in what the charity calls purposeful play. To show the importance of even just 10 minutes of purposeful play in a child’s life, the two organizations have launched a web series of vignettes.
The first video shows the impact of the program on the children of a woman named Paula who had experienced numerous hardships including homelessness. This caused her two daughters to have anger issues, which led to them constantly lashing out at one another. Save the Children sent Hollie, one of their play specialists, to Paula’s home to show her how to integrate meaningful play into her children's lives everyday. Now, Paula’s daughters have learned patience and sharing, all through meaningful play.
Jason Smith and Georg de Gorostiza, co-founders of learning toy company Click-A-Brick, which just released its 100-piece Rescue Squad set, are fans of the Play With Purpose initiative, calling it and the new video series an important reminder of how children are affected by harsh circumstances and how just a small amount of purposeful play can positively affect their emotional, physical and cognitive development and future growth.
“We’ve always been advocates for children being able to play and develop in healthy and constructive ways,” Smith said. “This Play With Purpose initiative shows just how important it is for kids to have the opportunity to play and feel like kids, especially in the harshest of conditions. Everything in their environment affects children and giving them some stability through these regular playdates is a wonderful thing. Hardships affect children even more so than adults, but they don’t have the same coping mechanisms. Play is a way for them to cope with what they’ve had to deal with and it’s obvious from this video series that it has a positive impact on them.”
The Play With Purpose campaign is meant to help some of the estimated 15.5 million youth who live in impoverished regions of the United States who may suffer from emotionally stunted growth from having to deal with extreme adversity in their lives. The campaign has a fundraising component to it for people who wish to support the initiative.
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