Schools have relegated play to the sidelines at the cost of children discovering the most basic lessons in being human: forming relationships, collaborating, imagining, creating. We often expect solutions to be complex and expensive, yet your report and the testimonies from parents affirm that something a simple as free play fulfills children's most basic needs and helps them to flourish. All the best in your continued work to spread the word on this simple cure!
Thank you, Ruth! You are SO right - play is an essential part of what it means to be human, and is crucial to kids' development socially, emotionally, physically, and mentally. The strong drive to play is present from the early stages of child development for a reason! Thank you for your comment and for your encouragement!
I'm only 14, and yet have still seen the decline of kids just being kids. When I was four and five, every afternoon, tons of the kids would meet at the park after school. A huge group would play tackle football while the rest played games like Floor is Lava on the playground. I miss those days. Kids just don't play at the park anymore. It's so good for them, though, I'm glad to see efforts being made to get back to things like that!
Gloria, your comment means so much to me! Thank you for sharing! It’s so great to hear from a person your age! It’s definitely concerning to see less unstructured play today, but young people like you can do so much to help bring it back! Advocate for screen-free, in-person play and hang out time with your peers and to your school; your voice matters! Thanks so much for the encouragement!
I’m 57 years old. That video really surprised me. There’s no playtime before school? Even in snowy weather in Maine we were outside playing before classes started and the bell rang. Only in the worst weather we would go to the gym. If I recall correctly, there was a midmorning recess and then of course, recess after lunch.
Rob, It's wild isn't it?! So many in education have lost their way - getting bogged down by achieving higher standardized test scores and the like (which in the long run often doesn't serve students as well as some think) - BUT I'm excited to see giant school districts like mine (the School District of Pickens County in South Carolina), reclaiming what was lost and truly trying to put kids' needs first. It should be that way EVERYWHERE. I'm so excited to have people like Jonathan, Lenore, Peter Gray and others on the front lines advocating for what we've lost along the way.
Well especially when you get into middle school and high school more kids are often now under slept for the morning having spent much of the past night awake on their screens. Before you didn't really have much of an incentive to stay up late whereas now many kids do. The phenomenon of going to bed early because there was no reason to stay up doesn't really exist anymore.
I grew up and live in NH now. My kids’ elementary school is now an hour longer than mine in the 80s, has way less recess, starts INSIDE, and they don’t go outside less than 20*F or in sprinkles. I’m so livid. Meanwhile, on the weekends, kids are outside skiing, ice fishing, sledding, skating all day. It’s NH, we have snow suits and boots! We even have rain coats and boots. I can’t take the wimpiness of it all. I might be quoted in the school board minutes saying that.
Yep, that is how we do it now. I had the same experience as you, but my son has no recess and only 30 minutes for lunch. Some days he has PE, but not every day. Very sad.
As a card carrying grey beard whose "kid" time was 50s 60s it's hard to grasp what this brave new world looks like. You got to school early so you could play with your friends before school started. Either by bus or like me walking, but you definitely wanted to be there well before the first bell rang so you could have fun.. No one was brought to school by a parent. That would have looked odd. And it almost goes without saying that you played after school until it got dark or you were summoned for dinner,which ever came first. And unless it was pouring rain this was all outdoors year round in Pa. That kids don't naturally have that is stunning to me.
I agree, but I think the change started with so many kids not going to a nearby school. Some of this is for good reasons, like desegregation, but it still results in a "commuter" school which doesn't foster the local ties the way a neighborhood school does.
I am not sure why it really needs involvement from either. Just declare a time before and after school as free play time. Kids do not need adults to have fun and play.
My guess is that many parents would like “free day care.”
I love the downstream impact at home! And the data is hard to refute. Thank you for your courageous leadership, Kevin! We desperately need more of that. How many school principals, heads of school, and superintendents, 10 years from now, will be proud of their decisions to allow personal devices in school and allow iPad time instead of playtime? We need change now.
I retired from teaching last year after 33 years. I constantly fought for more play time and recess, as well as other activities that provided students with time to be independent and make choices. This is one of the most effective teachers---time to play and explore. I also repeatedly brought up the fact that we needed fewer rules on the playground, so kids could figure things out. Adults should be present in case of an emergency...not to oversee every little thing. Also, time spent on socializing is not wasted time. It is some of the most important time spent in learning life skills, and figuring out how to conduct social transactions. The constriction and restriction of teachers, who are highly educated professionals, is not helping. Our kids deserve better.
Seeing these kiddos trying out new things, laughing, and interacting fills my heart! I’m actually shedding a few happy tears right now. As a retired educator with experience in secondary and graduate teacher prep, I’ll be sharing this with friends still in the field. Thanks for this beautiful evidence of what’s seemed like common sense for decades as re-embraceable in this tech-saturated world!
This sounds like what us Gen Xers used to call “recess!” We used to get 15-20 minutes of this each morning and afternoon plus more during an 1-hour lunch time. It should be standard practice today.
I was very sad to see this is no longer the case today (at least as far as I can tell).
Just burning off the extra energy and getting some exercise alone is worth the time. And it costs the school virtually nothing.
But what do parents of older kids do? We've long lamented the current state --we can't even get parents of neighborhood kids to drop the need to SCHEDULE play dates, and our daughter was treated like she was doing something wrong by just trying to drop by after school. The "just go outside and play" ethos is basically over, and parents and kids are treated as if they are doing something rude or unsafe if they try to return to it. In short: how do you help an 11 year old learn these interpersonal skills when her childhood was devoid of free play, despite our best efforts? I cannot tell you how many play dates we had to manage as neither of the kids knew how to actually PLAY together without an adult present.
I know! It's just so crazy how childhood has become one long adult-run slog! So -- some possibilities:
1 - See if your child's school will start one of these Play Clubs. They work in middle schools as well as elementary ones. The school can call it something else: The In Real Life Club. The Middle School Social Club. The Third Place Club. It should just have the same basics: some stuff to play or do things with (chalk, balls, maybe junk from home) and at least an hour of time, AND adults who do not say, "Today we're going to make pencil holders!" or, "I'm going to organize us into a soccer game!" The adults just have to basically be lifeguards -- present only for emergencies.
2 - Think beyond playing to independence: Make a date with a friend who also has a kid or kids, and send them out to run an errand together while you and the friend have coffee. Or ask them to help out with a younger neighbor, or make dinner or a cake while you are not there with them.
3 - As the note below suggests, consider Scouting. My kids were Scouts. It was great!
Yes, one of the main problems with the solutions discussed here is that they don't actually most of the youth population that seems to be suffering so greatly.
Short of changing the minds of parents in your community, the easiest way to increase the ability to socialize is through exposure to social situations. Extra-curricular activities are king in this aspect since many of them involve both unsupervised and social aspects, with socialization being made much easier by the activity also doubling as a conversation piece.
I know absolutely nothing about the social competency of your daughter, but attending lessons for social skills could be beneficial (for many kids these days) if she struggles at starting/maintaining conversations.
It's incredibly important to establish grounding anchors before puberty comes along and shakes the boat. It's always a wild ride.
As a child, I had a huge set of legos. The legos were not designed to make any specific object, they were just blocks of various sizes and other miscellaneous parts. It was up to my imagination to design whatever I envisioned with the legos. Walk into any toy store today, or browse any internet toy site, and the legos all seem to be "sets" with a defined object as the end-product: A Star Wars spaceship; a Nascar racer; a dinosaur from Jurassic Park. The sets include instructions on how to put said object together. What happened to imagination? Is it even possible to purchase a lego set that isn't specifically designed to be a pre-determined object? To allow imagination to once again be cultivated? Has play devolved into following directions? Let imaginations run wild and let kids play without adults hovering over them, supervising every move.
Yes, it is possible to buy LEGO bricks that are part of a kit. I wouldn't consider the trajectory of LEGO to be analogous to declining imagination (and even that's contestable). Attaching sets to existing intellectual properties allows for those kits to be charged at a premium. Quite simply put, they just followed the money.
Finland scores the highest in the world; they don't start school there until age seven. Then what is taught is taught deeply enough so that all can get the core of concepts and their operational use, their time in developing relational skills and understanding abstract physical laws as young children most likely supporting academic learning.
In the states as I taught, it was jumping from one academic skill after another, and thinking the only respectable jobs come to those who go to college.
Tested as teens, Finland students can choose also respected trade school education while others go on to higher academics.
And, a related topic, without creating true community and joyous belonging in and outside the classroom, incessant bullying, as it can be for spectrum individuals and those who stutter, etc. has led to our "unfathomable" school shootings.
Brutally teased and ostracized your whole life, when old enough to buy a gun, a scream of gunshots ring out at the scene of the prior crimes against your right to BE: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland and Uvaldi.
I think it's highly irresponsible to blame the lack of a play-based childhood for school shootings. Bullying has consistently gone down over past couple decades. I would argue that advent of social media and the internet has given new avenues for people to insulate themselves in bubbles, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred. There is no longer a compulsion to mingle with people who might alter a rotten worldview.
Much of the ideation of violence occurs after childhood with the onset of adolescence. Childhood bullying is insufficient evidence, especially when it is not always an experience of shooters. Both of the Columbine shooters had fairly stable childhoods. Adam Lanza's last year is a total mystery, and there's not enough evidence for the Parkland and Uvalde shooters to declare childhood bullying as the root cause. This doesn't include other shooters like Elliot Rodger who had a perfectly fine childhood (his issue was he could never figure out how to eat with a silver spoon).
kids don't bully as much because schools don't tolerate it--so what kids do instead is total social ostracization. Some kids literally go all day without another kid even TALKING to them. Imagine what kind of damage that does over years.
You're totally right that shunning has become a cause of much of social exclusion in high schools. But the problem is at that age you can't force the kids to interact with each other or break up cliques like you can with elementary students.
Roping in other students to socialize with the more outcast students also seems like a violation of their own ability to freely associate.
Schools have relegated play to the sidelines at the cost of children discovering the most basic lessons in being human: forming relationships, collaborating, imagining, creating. We often expect solutions to be complex and expensive, yet your report and the testimonies from parents affirm that something a simple as free play fulfills children's most basic needs and helps them to flourish. All the best in your continued work to spread the word on this simple cure!
Thank you, Ruth! You are SO right - play is an essential part of what it means to be human, and is crucial to kids' development socially, emotionally, physically, and mentally. The strong drive to play is present from the early stages of child development for a reason! Thank you for your comment and for your encouragement!
I'm only 14, and yet have still seen the decline of kids just being kids. When I was four and five, every afternoon, tons of the kids would meet at the park after school. A huge group would play tackle football while the rest played games like Floor is Lava on the playground. I miss those days. Kids just don't play at the park anymore. It's so good for them, though, I'm glad to see efforts being made to get back to things like that!
Gloria, your comment means so much to me! Thank you for sharing! It’s so great to hear from a person your age! It’s definitely concerning to see less unstructured play today, but young people like you can do so much to help bring it back! Advocate for screen-free, in-person play and hang out time with your peers and to your school; your voice matters! Thanks so much for the encouragement!
I’m 57 years old. That video really surprised me. There’s no playtime before school? Even in snowy weather in Maine we were outside playing before classes started and the bell rang. Only in the worst weather we would go to the gym. If I recall correctly, there was a midmorning recess and then of course, recess after lunch.
Rob, It's wild isn't it?! So many in education have lost their way - getting bogged down by achieving higher standardized test scores and the like (which in the long run often doesn't serve students as well as some think) - BUT I'm excited to see giant school districts like mine (the School District of Pickens County in South Carolina), reclaiming what was lost and truly trying to put kids' needs first. It should be that way EVERYWHERE. I'm so excited to have people like Jonathan, Lenore, Peter Gray and others on the front lines advocating for what we've lost along the way.
Well especially when you get into middle school and high school more kids are often now under slept for the morning having spent much of the past night awake on their screens. Before you didn't really have much of an incentive to stay up late whereas now many kids do. The phenomenon of going to bed early because there was no reason to stay up doesn't really exist anymore.
I grew up and live in NH now. My kids’ elementary school is now an hour longer than mine in the 80s, has way less recess, starts INSIDE, and they don’t go outside less than 20*F or in sprinkles. I’m so livid. Meanwhile, on the weekends, kids are outside skiing, ice fishing, sledding, skating all day. It’s NH, we have snow suits and boots! We even have rain coats and boots. I can’t take the wimpiness of it all. I might be quoted in the school board minutes saying that.
Yep, that is how we do it now. I had the same experience as you, but my son has no recess and only 30 minutes for lunch. Some days he has PE, but not every day. Very sad.
Beautiful! It shows not all that happens as part of schooling has to be taught by a teacher with predetermined goals and methods!
As a card carrying grey beard whose "kid" time was 50s 60s it's hard to grasp what this brave new world looks like. You got to school early so you could play with your friends before school started. Either by bus or like me walking, but you definitely wanted to be there well before the first bell rang so you could have fun.. No one was brought to school by a parent. That would have looked odd. And it almost goes without saying that you played after school until it got dark or you were summoned for dinner,which ever came first. And unless it was pouring rain this was all outdoors year round in Pa. That kids don't naturally have that is stunning to me.
I agree, but I think the change started with so many kids not going to a nearby school. Some of this is for good reasons, like desegregation, but it still results in a "commuter" school which doesn't foster the local ties the way a neighborhood school does.
This is brilliant. Finding the parents and teacher who care enough to do this is challenging.
I am not sure why it really needs involvement from either. Just declare a time before and after school as free play time. Kids do not need adults to have fun and play.
My guess is that many parents would like “free day care.”
I love the downstream impact at home! And the data is hard to refute. Thank you for your courageous leadership, Kevin! We desperately need more of that. How many school principals, heads of school, and superintendents, 10 years from now, will be proud of their decisions to allow personal devices in school and allow iPad time instead of playtime? We need change now.
The data to back what kids instinctively know and what we remember is amazing!
I retired from teaching last year after 33 years. I constantly fought for more play time and recess, as well as other activities that provided students with time to be independent and make choices. This is one of the most effective teachers---time to play and explore. I also repeatedly brought up the fact that we needed fewer rules on the playground, so kids could figure things out. Adults should be present in case of an emergency...not to oversee every little thing. Also, time spent on socializing is not wasted time. It is some of the most important time spent in learning life skills, and figuring out how to conduct social transactions. The constriction and restriction of teachers, who are highly educated professionals, is not helping. Our kids deserve better.
Very, very, interesting! Congrats on making it happen!
A mom at our kids’ school started a play club once a week after school, and we all love it. It’s my kids’ favorite day of the week— and no wonder.
Seeing these kiddos trying out new things, laughing, and interacting fills my heart! I’m actually shedding a few happy tears right now. As a retired educator with experience in secondary and graduate teacher prep, I’ll be sharing this with friends still in the field. Thanks for this beautiful evidence of what’s seemed like common sense for decades as re-embraceable in this tech-saturated world!
Thanks for being an educator -- and for sharing this piece! And for tearing up when you see how much kids can do when we let them!
This sounds like what us Gen Xers used to call “recess!” We used to get 15-20 minutes of this each morning and afternoon plus more during an 1-hour lunch time. It should be standard practice today.
I was very sad to see this is no longer the case today (at least as far as I can tell).
Just burning off the extra energy and getting some exercise alone is worth the time. And it costs the school virtually nothing.
But what do parents of older kids do? We've long lamented the current state --we can't even get parents of neighborhood kids to drop the need to SCHEDULE play dates, and our daughter was treated like she was doing something wrong by just trying to drop by after school. The "just go outside and play" ethos is basically over, and parents and kids are treated as if they are doing something rude or unsafe if they try to return to it. In short: how do you help an 11 year old learn these interpersonal skills when her childhood was devoid of free play, despite our best efforts? I cannot tell you how many play dates we had to manage as neither of the kids knew how to actually PLAY together without an adult present.
I know! It's just so crazy how childhood has become one long adult-run slog! So -- some possibilities:
1 - See if your child's school will start one of these Play Clubs. They work in middle schools as well as elementary ones. The school can call it something else: The In Real Life Club. The Middle School Social Club. The Third Place Club. It should just have the same basics: some stuff to play or do things with (chalk, balls, maybe junk from home) and at least an hour of time, AND adults who do not say, "Today we're going to make pencil holders!" or, "I'm going to organize us into a soccer game!" The adults just have to basically be lifeguards -- present only for emergencies.
2 - Think beyond playing to independence: Make a date with a friend who also has a kid or kids, and send them out to run an errand together while you and the friend have coffee. Or ask them to help out with a younger neighbor, or make dinner or a cake while you are not there with them.
3 - As the note below suggests, consider Scouting. My kids were Scouts. It was great!
Yes, one of the main problems with the solutions discussed here is that they don't actually most of the youth population that seems to be suffering so greatly.
Short of changing the minds of parents in your community, the easiest way to increase the ability to socialize is through exposure to social situations. Extra-curricular activities are king in this aspect since many of them involve both unsupervised and social aspects, with socialization being made much easier by the activity also doubling as a conversation piece.
I know absolutely nothing about the social competency of your daughter, but attending lessons for social skills could be beneficial (for many kids these days) if she struggles at starting/maintaining conversations.
It's incredibly important to establish grounding anchors before puberty comes along and shakes the boat. It's always a wild ride.
As a child, I had a huge set of legos. The legos were not designed to make any specific object, they were just blocks of various sizes and other miscellaneous parts. It was up to my imagination to design whatever I envisioned with the legos. Walk into any toy store today, or browse any internet toy site, and the legos all seem to be "sets" with a defined object as the end-product: A Star Wars spaceship; a Nascar racer; a dinosaur from Jurassic Park. The sets include instructions on how to put said object together. What happened to imagination? Is it even possible to purchase a lego set that isn't specifically designed to be a pre-determined object? To allow imagination to once again be cultivated? Has play devolved into following directions? Let imaginations run wild and let kids play without adults hovering over them, supervising every move.
Yes, it is possible to buy LEGO bricks that are part of a kit. I wouldn't consider the trajectory of LEGO to be analogous to declining imagination (and even that's contestable). Attaching sets to existing intellectual properties allows for those kits to be charged at a premium. Quite simply put, they just followed the money.
Finland scores the highest in the world; they don't start school there until age seven. Then what is taught is taught deeply enough so that all can get the core of concepts and their operational use, their time in developing relational skills and understanding abstract physical laws as young children most likely supporting academic learning.
In the states as I taught, it was jumping from one academic skill after another, and thinking the only respectable jobs come to those who go to college.
Tested as teens, Finland students can choose also respected trade school education while others go on to higher academics.
And, a related topic, without creating true community and joyous belonging in and outside the classroom, incessant bullying, as it can be for spectrum individuals and those who stutter, etc. has led to our "unfathomable" school shootings.
Brutally teased and ostracized your whole life, when old enough to buy a gun, a scream of gunshots ring out at the scene of the prior crimes against your right to BE: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland and Uvaldi.
I think it's highly irresponsible to blame the lack of a play-based childhood for school shootings. Bullying has consistently gone down over past couple decades. I would argue that advent of social media and the internet has given new avenues for people to insulate themselves in bubbles, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred. There is no longer a compulsion to mingle with people who might alter a rotten worldview.
Much of the ideation of violence occurs after childhood with the onset of adolescence. Childhood bullying is insufficient evidence, especially when it is not always an experience of shooters. Both of the Columbine shooters had fairly stable childhoods. Adam Lanza's last year is a total mystery, and there's not enough evidence for the Parkland and Uvalde shooters to declare childhood bullying as the root cause. This doesn't include other shooters like Elliot Rodger who had a perfectly fine childhood (his issue was he could never figure out how to eat with a silver spoon).
kids don't bully as much because schools don't tolerate it--so what kids do instead is total social ostracization. Some kids literally go all day without another kid even TALKING to them. Imagine what kind of damage that does over years.
You're totally right that shunning has become a cause of much of social exclusion in high schools. But the problem is at that age you can't force the kids to interact with each other or break up cliques like you can with elementary students.
Roping in other students to socialize with the more outcast students also seems like a violation of their own ability to freely associate.
https://x.com/egreghost/status/1827880128203874402
Social media and the internet does offer an escape for those are socially ostracized, but some paths are definitely darker than others.