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With heightened expectations and a shortage of time, parents sometimes overlook the need, and benefits, of play, according to the chief executive of the IPPA.

WHEN IRENE Gunning started a playgroup at her home in a new Dublin housing estate in the 1970s, she remembers a mother saying as she left her three-year-old child in: “Now Irene, I don’t want my daughter just playing, she can do that at home. I want her to learn.”