A recent school-based study in Delhi revealed a sobering reality: one in four adolescents tests positive for depression, and roughly one in seven battles anxiety. Hundreds of kilometers away in Belagavi, a separate survey of 1,400 students found that three out of four students report high levels of academic stress. Such statistics are showing up with troubling consistency across India in survey after survey of school-going students.

The instinctive response has been reactive: more crisis helplines, awareness weeks, and school counsellors. While vital and exactly why the Ministry of Education’s Manodarpan initiative exists, there may be a powerful, proactive tool sitting right outside the classroom window: play.

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, when reimagined through the lens of play, offers a useful way to understand why.

When Maslow proposed his framework in 1943, he gave us one of the most influential models for understanding human motivation and development. Its central insight remains just as relevant eight decades on: a child’s ability to learn, grow and stay well depends on whether their fundamental physical, emotional and social needs are being met, and mental health isn’t a separate, top-tier luxury; it is built from the ground up.

When schools attempt to safeguard student well-being solely through psychological interventions without a solid physical foundation, they treat the symptom while ignoring the structure that needs to be built.

Note: For this discussion, physiological and safety needs are considered together, since schools typically address both through the same mechanisms: movement, safe environments and supportive relationship.

Level 1: Fulfilling children’s physiological and safety needs through safe play, age-appropriate props and annual fitness assessments

Before a child can engage their mind or take creative risks, they must feel physically and emotionally secure. This is where movement itself becomes a critical part of the foundation. A child who runs, climbs, throws and falls (safely) is building the physiological base on which everything else stands: cardiovascular fitness, motor skills, bone density, sleep quality and healthy nervous system function. This aligns closely with NEP 2020, which places strong emphasis on sports, play, physical education and sports-integrated pedagogy as integral to whole child development.

For school leaders, this level translates into concrete decisions like safe playgrounds, age-appropriate props and equipment, protected daily activity time and annual fitness assessments as a routine practice. When a sports & P.E. program is designed to value effort, vulnerability and inclusiveness over raw athletic dominance, the school environment will automatically become one that can help reduce bullying, increase psychological safety and foster a more positive school culture.

Level 2: Creating a sense of belonging among students through a ‘sports for all’ environment

Once a child feels safe, their primary developmental drive shifts toward social connection. The playground is a powerful, organic equalizer for breaking down demographic boundaries. Structured P.E. programs can intentionally create mixed-ability teams and collaborative activities in which peer bonding occurs through shared objectives. For instance, being picked for a relay or learning to read a teammate’s activity during a kho-kho match gives a child a form of social proof that classroom seating can’t replicate. Play is where children experience inclusion that isn’t handed to them; it’s earned through participation. In fact, a 2026 study shows that school attendance increases by 20 percentage points on days when P.E. is on the timetable.

For school leaders, the belonging level is where “sports for everyone” earns its keep over “sports for an elite few.” A school that conducts sports leagues, mixed-ability tournaments and inclusive P.E. – not just elite team trials – is building belonging at scale, not just building a trophy cabinet.

Level 3: Building esteem through enough opportunities for children to play as well as hone their skills

Maslow divided esteem into two categories: self-respect and respect from others.

Play is remarkably good at both. A growing body of developmental psychology researchers studying resilience programs for adolescents has found that structured opportunities to overcome incremental challenges – the kind that sports provides constantly – often strengthen a child’s belief in their own capacity to execute the actions needed to reach specific goals. This is the psychological engine behind the confidence that actually transfers to the classroom.

For school leaders, esteem-building through sport requires designing enough levels of competition – intramural, inter-house, inter-school – where every child gets a chance to play and hone their skills, not just a select few.

Level 4: Fostering self-actualisation through purposeful play

At the peak of Maslow’s pyramid sits self-actualisation: the pursuit of one’s full potential, creativity, purpose and autonomy. It’s often treated as the most abstract level, hardest to teach. But this is where play, at its best, quietly does its most sophisticated work.

A child who has enough physical safety, belonging and esteem starts to use sport not just to fit in or to win, but to express themselves – a style of play, a leadership instinct, a strategic mind, a discipline that shows up nowhere else in their day. This is the level where sport stops being a subject and becomes a form of identity.

Experiential, sport-based learning can be one of the more realistic ways to help address complex challenges like responsible citizenship, gender equality and learning gaps among India’s young ones – precisely because it lets children practice becoming, rather than memorise a description of it.

For school leaders, this level is the hardest to institutionalise and the most important to protect. It means resisting the temptation to make every match purely about the scoreboard and instead analysing whether their sports program gives children room to lead a huddle, choose a strategy, fail at it and try something else.

Conclusion

School boards often discuss sports & P.E. as enrichment – good to have, but first to trim when the academic calendar tightens. Maslow principle, when reimagined through the lens of play, argues the opposite – ‘play is not sitting above academics on some optional shelf. It is running underneath them, level by level, holding the whole structure up.’

The pyramid offers a simple audit for school leaders who might be deciding where the next timetable hour goes.

• Is every child physically safe and active enough? (Base)
• Does every child have a team, house, or group where they’re missed if absent? (Belonging)
• Does every child get a mastery experience that’s visibly, undeniably theirs? (Esteem)
• Does the sports program leave room for children to lead, choose and express – not just compete? (Self-actualisation)

A school that can answer ‘yes’ to all four isn’t just running a sports program. It’s building a whole child development ecosystem – with movement and play at the center.