Deconstruction v destruction
Release Date: September 30, 2025
Last Updated: September 4, 2025
Deconstruction or Destruction Play?
Do you have children in your setting who have the urge or compulsion to knock over someone else’s block tower? Do you instantly see this as negative behaviour?
Let’s pause for a moment and reflect. While building up structures can be fun, the benefits of deconstruction play are equally valuable and should be recognized. Knocking over a sandcastle can be incredibly satisfying, can’t it? Ever pulled the petals off a flower or stripped the bark off a stick? These acts of deconstruction are natural and often pleasurable.
Is deconstruction an URGE?
Does a child enjoy the force, momentum, energy, and noise of knocking a tower of blocks over? Do they like tearing up paper, smashing things, or pulling things apart?
As practitioners and educators, it’s important to ask ourselves: Are we meeting the child's URGES and even their frustrations?
Understanding Sensory Processing Needs
Some children seek sensory input to help regulate their nervous systems. Sensory processing is the way our brains interpret sensory information from the environment—touch, movement, sound, sight, and more. For children with sensory processing differences, certain activities, like heavy work, crashing, pulling, tearing, or smashing provide crucial sensory input that helps them feel grounded, calm, or alert.
Children who seek sensory input might be trying to fulfill a sensory need to better self-regulate. For example, a child who appears to be “acting out” by knocking over blocks might actually be seeking proprioceptive input, an internal sense of body position and movement that helps them feel more in control and calm.
Are we understanding WHY children act in certain ways?
Instead of assuming all behaviors are negative, let’s strive to understand the underlying needs behind those behaviors. Are children acting out because they need sensory input? Are they expressing frustration or overwhelm?
Are we providing opportunities for children to engage in heavy work, pushing, pulling, lifting, that can help meet their sensory needs?
Are we meeting children’s needs by providing opportunities for deconstruction as well as construction?
To demolish, smash, grate, hammer, crush, grind, and destruct, these actions are more than just chaos; they’re vital for many children’s development. Similarly, pulling apart, shredding, plucking, untangling, stripping, dissolving, melting, these are all part of exploratory, sensory-rich play that helps children understand the world around them.
At Knighton Day Nursery, a Curiosity Approach Accredited® Nursery they demonstrate how children are engrossed in the process of playing, exploring, discovering, and investigating. There is beauty in deconstruction and destruction when understood as part of natural developmental processes.
Benefits of Deconstruction Play
🔹 Development of Problem-Solving Skills:
Engaging in deconstruction play helps children develop critical problem-solving abilities as they figure out how to disassemble, break up, or knock over creations.
🔹 Transformation Schema:
The urge to explore how materials change—breaking, tearing, smashing—fosters an understanding of transformation and physical properties.
🔹 Understanding Cause and Effect:
Deconstruction play teaches children about cause and effect by allowing them to observe how their actions lead to specific outcomes.
🔹 Emotional Regulation and Resilience:
Through deconstruction play, children learn to cope with the temporary nature of their creations, fostering resilience and adaptability.
🔹 Encouraging Creativity and Flexibility:
Deconstruction encourages children to approach play with creativity and flexibility, embracing new possibilities and ideas.
Guidance and Boundaries
The Curiosity Approach® is NOT a free-for-all! Guidance and boundaries are essential within our settings. We’re not just allowing children to cause havoc or maliciously knock down every beautifully crafted creation without understanding each other’s feelings. However, it’s worthwhile to reframe our thinking: Could a child's deconstruction be an urge or even a compulsion?
Stage-appropriate Expectations
Children typically learn to deconstruct before they learn to construct. It’s a natural developmental sequence. Recognizing this allows us to better support their growth and meet their needs, whether they are the builders or the destructors
Being aware of the difference between playful, exploratory urges and disruptive behaviour enables us to provide appropriate opportunities for all children, whether they are the constructor or the deconstructor. When we understand the underlying needs, we can create environments that nurture curiosity, sensory regulation, and emotional well-being.
Final note to remember - before a child can learn to construct, they first need to experiment, explore and engage in deconstruction. Construction is about careful planning and consideration, part of cognitive development. Deconstruction is about sensory motor development, the exploration, movement and senses. What stage are your children at? Or are you just seeing it all as negative behaviour? As mindful, knowledgeable educators we can support the child and prepare the environment in readiness to meet their learning styles. We can teach when their behaviour impacts others and is not appropriate. Modelling, supporting, teaching and redirecting to a place they can ‘deconstruct.’
Let’s embrace deconstruction as a valuable part of children’s learning journey, recognising that it plays a crucial role in their development.
Written by Stephanie Bennett co founder of The Curiosity Approach®