Make the kids’ summer holidays go with a bang – play together like orangutans | Helen Pilcher

The school summer holidays are upon us. Cue the annual expectation that parents will conjure up six weeks of affordable, memory-making fun while holding down a job and hanging on to their sanity. Baking, picnics and den building may be wholesome, but they also involve spending time with your children. By day four, the den starts to look less like a place of adventure and more like somewhere to hide till September.

The answer, of course, is the playdate: the socially sanctioned art of abdicating responsibility for a few precious hours so you can finish a cup of tea while it’s still warm. And it turns out that humans aren’t the only ones to have discovered the benefits of a little parental outsourcing. A recent study suggests that orangutan mothers also arrange playdates for their offspring.

Orangutans are a solitary species, with their own territories and a strong preference for personal space. Mothers give birth to a single infant, which they raise for six to seven years – all without a partner, screens or the godsend that is Bluey. Given this solitary lifestyle, you might expect the ginger giants to avoid encounters with other youngsters. Not so.

Researchers studied 30,000 hours’ worth of observations from 31 wild Bornean mother-offspring pairs and found that mums made trips into the territories of other mums who had similarly aged offspring. Then the youngsters mucked about for a bit. Then they went home.

The juveniles get the immediate reward, but for the mothers, arranging these encounters comes at a cost. Travelling to a playdate takes time and energy, leaving less of the day for feeding. Which raises the question: why bother with playtime at all?

The answer may lie in how widespread play is across the animal kingdom. Baby Barbary macaques goof around. Bear cubs rough and tumble. And it’s not just mammals. Caimans play chase, sharks mess around with beach toys and octopuses manipulate Lego bricks.

Play is particularly common among socially complex species. Here, there is rarely any obvious planning; instead, the behaviour seems to emerge naturally when adults come together. Brown bear cubs, for example, run riot when their mothers gather at salmon streams. Baby spider monkeys fool around when their mothers sit down to groom each other. It’s the equivalent of human parents meeting for a coffee or a chat, while the kids play under the table. Orangutans are different because their youngsters’ play isn’t simply a side-effect of adults hanging out – it is something that mothers make happen.

The fact that so many animals bother making time for play suggests it is far from frivolous. For young animals, it is a rehearsal for life itself. They learn how to communicate, cooperate, compete and resolve conflicts. They test their bodies, explore the rules of social interaction and push the boundaries of what they can do. This can have tangible repercussions. Brown bear cubs that play more are more likely to survive, while male bottlenose dolphins that are more playful go on to father more offspring.

But play is not just the preserve of the young. Given its importance, one of the biggest mistakes we make as humans is to assume that play belongs to childhood. Adult corvids make no such distinction when they snowboard down frozen roofs, nor do bumble bees when they roll wooden balls. In the animal kingdom, many adults continue to play long after they have mastered the skills needed to survive. Far from being a waste of time, play might help adults navigate the challenges that life throws their way.

Scientists are now finding that this idea may apply to humans too. Xiangyou “Sharon” Shen from Oregon State University and Zoe Crawley from Vanderbilt University study the psychology of playfulness in people. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they found that adults who were more playful coped better with the upheaval of lockdown. Playful people didn’t perceive the world as being less stressful or risky. Instead, they were better at finding creative ways to work around problems and remained more optimistic. As the pair put it, playful people don’t wear rose-tinted glasses. Playfulness is more like a colour spotlight that shines on some aspects of an environment but not others. Playfulness doesn’t remove stress, but it can change the way you experience it.

This doesn’t mean that we should all break out into a spontaneous game of tag. Instead, playfulness is about cultivating a flexible, curious approach to life. Play is less about what we do and more about how we do it. So, to all the parents staring down the barrel of six weeks of childcare and wondering how they will survive: don’t just arrange playdates for your children. Make room for a little playfulness yourself. Messing around is not a sign that you take life less seriously. It may be one of the things that keeps you sane.

• Helen Pilcher is a science writer and the author of This Book May Cause Side Effects