What are your children doing this summer? If they’re like most kids across the country, their days are filled with sports practices, arts lessons and other scheduled activities.
Now ask yourself this: When was the last time your child went running out the door to start a pick-up game of basketball on the street, or ride her bicycle with no destination? When was the last time your child had no scheduled activity and had to find something to do that did not involve an electronic device?
Depending on your age, your childhood was likely quite different. Many parents today remember a time when they were responsible for entertaining themselves, when summer meant leaving the house in the morning to find a great adventure and returning home when it was dark.
Over the last 50 years, the way children play has changed dramatically and it has child development experts worried. Aside from being a pleasurable experience, play is vital to a child’s development in the areas of social interaction, problem solving, conflict resolution, self-advocacy and leadership. Children who do not play freely — without adult supervision and interference — may grow up lacking these skills, resulting in an inability to cope with situations that are inevitably part of the human experience.
“Children are almost always in the presence of adults,” according to Dr. Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. “They’re not getting into trouble and getting out of trouble, or negotiating with playmates. This can’t be taught, and it can’t be learned if adults are solving the problem for them.
“This applies to teenagers as well as younger children. Many teens today are not allowed to be off on their own.”
“The best description I’ve heard is that play is the work of childhood,” said Dr. Robert Racusin, emeritus professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Racusin practiced child and adolescent psychiatry for 35 years and often used play therapy with patients. “It’s the way that children have of cutting the world down to size.
“When you think about what the world looks like from a child’s perspective, particularly a young child, it’s a huge place. It’s overwhelming; it’s unpredictable. Play is a way of utilizing their own strength, their own internal resources — fantasy, imagination, motor skills, language skills — all to create situations where they’re in charge.”
The shift that has occurred over the past half century has largely put adults in charge of children’s play.
Many factors have contributed to the shift, which took on steam after the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh in 1981. That high-profile case ushered in an era in which the news was filled with similar stories and missing children’s faces showed up on milk cartoons. Parents were understandably alarmed, but in actuality the rate of child abductions was not and is not going up, according to the Polly Klaas Foundation, which tracks kidnapping cases.
Other factors contributing to the shift in the way children play include an increase in the number of school days, a reduction or elimination of recess, a rise in the number of working mothers and single-parent households, the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, and more pressure on students to excel at numerous activities in order to get into college.
“Sometimes in play children get lost and have to find their way home,” said Gray, a psychology research professor at Boston College focusing on children’s play and its educational value. “They will deliberately put themselves in situations where they elicit fear or have conflict with peers, and they have to figure out how to get over it.”
For example, a group of kids who want to play baseball have to agree to the rules. If, in the course of play, there is a disagreement over whether a baserunner is safe or out the kids themselves have to resolve the argument. All of the children have a stake in coming to an agreement because they want the game to continue. In the course of doing so, they learn important conflict resolution skills and whoever loses the argument learns how to deal with disappointment and move on.
It’s important to note that parents do need to play with their children, as it’s a meaningful way to connect and learn about what the child likes, dislikes and even fears.
The parent can be present and still let the child dictate the play. More importantly, parents should allow the child to fail at a task without jumping in to “fix” things. By encouraging the child to dictate the game and solve any challenges that arise, the child learns to trust him or herself.
Play can also be a way for children to reflect on his or her feelings and desires, and re-enact situations in which he or she may have felt confused or unhappy, according to Racusin.
He used the example of a young child who didn’t get dessert. That child might play out a family theme with dolls where he or she takes on the role of the mommy and scolds a doll. The child gets to experience what it’s like to be the boss, and might have the scenario come to a different conclusion.
Maybe the doll will get dessert, maybe the doll will scream at the mommy. The child is able to act through play in ways that he or she would not act in real life.
“It’s important because children need to recognize that there is more than one outcome for different kinds of social situations,” Racusin said. “They can come up with an ending where they feel less upset, or just vent.”
Tipping the See-Saw
There are two types of play: child-structured and adult-structured. Gray pointed out that even the wildest-looking kinds of play have implicit rules; the difference is whether children are making and enforcing the rules, or adults are doing it for them.
John Sherman, the director of Parks and Recreation in Hanover, has more than 20 years of experience in the field, and believes that child-structured play needs a higher priority.
“People tend to have a way of putting a value on adult-structured play. If their child is taking a lesson, the parent values it more because the teacher is competent in a certain field. If your child is just playing in the woods or in the backyard, parents may not see it as having value,” Sherman said.
Sherman, who has two grown children of his own, has also noticed that parents today are reluctant to allow their children to take risks when they play.
If a parent isn’t around, the child might climb a little higher in the tree, or otherwise push her or himself a little further in some way.
“It’s important for kids to test their limits and learn what their boundaries are in a safe environment. When I was a kid, we had to play in a geographic area. We couldn’t cross the river or go to the other side of the street, for example, but within that area we were free to do what we wanted,” Sherman said.
When Fran Brokaw and her ex-husband, Dan Noseworthy, were raising their children in Thetford in the 1980s they both worked full-time, and their kids, Billy and Meredith, were largely left to entertain themselves.
“They were free-range kids and they tended to not be programmed,” Brokaw said. “They didn’t do a lot of after-school activities until high school, and that was more of their own choosing.”
Brokaw said that her parenting style was a conscious decision, based upon her own upbringing.
“I felt it was good for me to have to create my own entertainment. I spent a lot of time reading books and playing imagination games with friends, and that’s what my kids did.”
Long-Term Effects
When Meredith Noseworthy, 28, went to college in Illinois, she noticed many of her classmates were calling home a lot, and those who could went home a few times a month. Her approach was to call every couple of weeks for a substantive conversation, rather than checking in daily to let her parents know what she “ate for breakfast.” She also noticed that some of her peers were constantly leaning on their parents if they got a bad grade or faced a tough social situation.
“Being responsible for my emotions was ingrained very early on,” Noseworthy said from her home in Alabama, where she is finishing her Master of Fine Arts. “I was largely responsible for making sure I had fun rather than events being planned for me. I definitely learned responsibility and to take risks. I had to gauge where my limits were and how far I could push myself.”
Noseworthy’s experience is typical, according to Gray, who has written extensively on the correlation between children’s “free play,” adult mental wellness and self-sufficiency. He said that one consequence of a lack of child-structured play is that college students have crises over situations they should be able to cope with, including a bad grade, a break-up or everyday disappointment.
“I know of a student whose roommate called her a ‘bitch’ and she completely fell apart. People who have been playing and exploring probably would have been called names growing up, and learned to roll with the punches or respond instead of having an emotional crisis about it,” Gray said. “The person hasn’t learned how to be assertive and how to settle a dispute like that, because she always had an authority figure solving disputes.”
Beyond college, he said, young people entering the workforce too often expect and need to be told exactly what to do. Their attitude is that it’s the employer’s problem if they didn’t do the job right. In short, they lack the resourcefulness to figure things out for themselves.
“In school, if you are sufficiently compliant, you’re going to get a good grade,” Gray said. “We’ve trained initiative and creativity out of our kids.”
It Takes a Village
The shift that has occurred over the past 50 years in how children play is societal. No one parent, group of parents or even one generation engineered the change: It was brought about by numerous factors, and it’s going to take a collective effort to turn the tide.
“This won’t be solved by individual parents, but by groups of parents and communities,” Gray said. “Begin by creating a play culture within the neighborhood. If some parents don’t think it’s safe, work out an arrangement where parents can take turns being there, not to intervene, just to be there in case there’s an emergency.”
In these last few precious weeks of summer, perhaps the most loving thing we can do for our children when they pull out a smartphone, or ask to be entertained is to respond, “Go out and play!”