Adults playing, colouring and attending preschool a growing trend
Play offers much needed stress relief and a chance to unwind
It's around this time of year that you start pushing the kids outside to play. But it's not just kids who are playing these days. Increasingly, there's a shift toward adults playing like children.
The popularity of the book is in step with a growing trend towards adults choosing to embrace their inner-child. For example, there's a new ball pit for adults in London, England. There's even a pre-school for adults in New York City.
Shimi Kang is a psychiatrist in Vancouver and the author of a best-selling parenting book called The Dolphin Way. In it, she emphasizes the value of play for both kids and adults.
"There's been a couple of factors that have come together right now in our modern world that can explain why something like these adult colouring books or adults going back to play would be so appealing and would be kind of spreading so fast so I think it has the potential to be transformative," she said.
Kang said there's still a stigma attached to the idea of doing something children are supposed to do, but she's excited about the newest developments in adult play.
Kang frequently prescribes play to her clients as a form of stress relief, which she says is a health epidemic. Play stimulates the frontal lobe of our brain - the area responsible for abstract and creative thinking.
"When these individuals are colouring in this book they can become absorbed in that activity, time can pass you know they may not realize that twenty minutes or an hour has gone by," she explained. "That's a meditative experience that's a mindfulness experience, you can't multitask when you're actually playing in an unstructured way."
While there's growing research on the value of adults playing to relieve stress, Kang believes there's another major factor to consider.
"We're seeing in fact a generation of individuals who actually played less in childhood. The average millennial let's say had less play than the baby boomer did when they were children and play is intuitive, we're naturally drawn to it."
While we may be naturally drawn to it, Kang says most people don't have the time to seek out forms of adult play like recreational sports leagues or art classes. Which is why a colouring book is the perfect option.
"As our lives have become busier there's less time to naturally fit these things in and in my opinion that's where this appeal comes from, so these activities can really provide an outlet a venue of things that were naturally probably more part of our day to day lives even 10 years ago."