A serious need for free play

OP-ED | carlo rotella | Carlo Rotella

September 30, 2011|By Carlo Rotella

(Dadu shin for the boston…)

WHEN WRITING about the decline of children’s free play, it’s difficult to avoid sounding as if you’re pining for an idealized past. I sympathize with readers who glaze over when they see a sentence that begins, “When I was a kid… .’’ They know what’s coming: “…we just played outside with no adult supervision, we didn’t need electronic gadgets to amuse us or coaches to tell us how to have fun, we didn’t worry about predators or bullies or other bogeymen that fearful parents obsess about these days,’’ and so on. But it’s worth finding a way around the clichés to engage the significant truths behind them, because the subject of kids’ play is important.

Free play isn’t an “extra’’ to be squeezed in between lessons, practices, and screen time. Free play, meaning an activity chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake (and not, say, because an adult will give them some kind of credential for doing it), is what kids are designed to do.

Children, like many other young animals, learn by playing. As Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College who recently published an essay entitled “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents,’’ says, “Children come into the world ready to play. It’s part of human nature, which means that natural selection favors it. It has an important role in human survival.’’

Free play teaches children how to make decisions, solve problems, exercise self-control, follow rules, regulate their emotions, get along with others, make friends, develop interests and competencies, and, as Gray puts it, “experience joy.’’ The “free’’ part matters. There’s a deceptively big difference between being told by an adult to get in line to take your turn on the slide and learning from interaction with other kids, through trial and error and conflict and cooperation, that it’s not OK to hog the slide.

So it matters that over the past half-century there’s been a steep decline in free play by children in this country and other developed nations. Contributing factors include the increasing dominance of the car, TV, and computer; the retreat from public space and public life; more school and homework; and more lessons, travel teams and other adult-directed programs that turn activities that used to be play into something more like school.

It’s not as if children aren’t learning anything these days. They’re just learning it from adults in structured settings. We increasingly favor a toolbox model of education in which an adult expert shows a child a basic skill, positively reinforces the child’s success, introduces a slightly more advanced skill, and so on until some kind of mastery is achieved.