I am not sure about the best school policies, but I know one thing and that is children today have INADEQUATE time to play. Maybe you have to be old enough (60+) to remember playing with other kids, after school, in the evenings, and all summer. Going out into the neighborhood in which all the moms kept an eye out for behavioral challenges. In that setting, children learned independence, resilience, and settled their own disputes. I don't see this happening these days. Our children need more free play time - whenever they can get it.
100% agree!!!! School contributes greatly to a students well being and frame of mind….. I’m a nearly retired teacher on call and I am floored by what kids are expected to do all day…. Then they are carted off to after school care… then to organized athletics or dance etc. I was schooled in the 70’s and our lives were packed with free play! Incidentally we really didn’t ever hear the word anxiety/stress …. Seems it wasn’t invented for kids until much later.
Childhood has ALWAYS been stressful. How could it be otherwise when kids are entirely at the mercy of adults who may or may not be broken, dangerous people?! No, what you saw is that lots of free play ameliorates the stress of powerlessness by promoting personal confidence and mastery. Childhood will never be the completely carefree fairy tale that adults believe in (they must have amnesia to do so); the question is: What else is going on in their lives to mitigate the damage of being so powerless? These days the answer is literally nothing.
My thought and feeling here has always been that while cutting homework and having more time to play will definitely decrease mental health issues, my concern with "no adults" free play in the US is kids aren't taught to be kind to each other. It feels like American kids experience too much neglect in their early years where they are supposed to fend for themselves emotionally and this leads to them being peer-attached. Stuff like sending kids to daycare before they are interested in other children as friends, and that leads to cliques where all the kids have their self-esteem tied to being part of the group. When children reach out to adults for help with social stuff, they are told to "not tattle". There seems to be little to no effort to deal with those messed up social dynamics. I think this is also a big part of what's stressful about school for children - social dynamics that make it hard to be authentic.
Lila, I understand your concern. However, we have been very pleased to see how wonderfully kids get along with one another and help solve each other's problems in the age-mixed "Play Clubs" at schools. --https://letgrow.org/program/play-club/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw8MG1BhCoARIsAHxSiQmeitPAVVbD7aUzwaSMhH3iZqRgNCvirbgRk05heHUVQjqa_jYWa6UaAjO_EALw_wcB--The monitors are instructed not to intervene in these free play periods unless they see imminent danger. The monitors have reported that they almost never feel compelled to intervene. Yes, in today's world it is essential to have a non-interfering adult present , but that is primarily because parents today won't let their kids play without an adult present.
Therapy can be great. I've been in therapy. But prevention is always better than treatment. We should be raising kids in a humane, loving way that they don't need therapy unless something really tragic happens.
School Based Mental Health Therapist here, and when you asked if we don't prescribe play because it's free, I actually thought for a second, "yeah, maybe?! And I will definitely fix that immediately". I will say though, anecdotally, I do see less symptoms in summer sessions and increase when school approaches BUT I also see work and school avoidance as a problem more so for kids hyperconnected to social media and video games.
I am glad for the perspective you have given on the research around social media links to mental health outcomes being weak, but on a person to person basis, I see it as a huge correlation to poorer mental health. I would love so much to understand how school pressure is the source of this mental health crisis, not social media, etc.
I grew up before social media but used television a lot to help regulate my nervous system when I had no other tools (I see now with hindsight). It may be worth asking whether technology is the problem or a symptom of a need not being met “in the real world”?
"Might it be that in a capitalist society what is free is not valued precisely because it’s free, so no organized group is really pushing it?"
Let's not blame capitalism for this. Those drugs and therapy programs are not being purchased in a free market. They're being mandated by public officials and funded by taxpayer dollars. It's one of many instances of capitalism getting scapegoated for problems caused by state intervention.
Being a small-government, free-market libertarian seems to put me in the minority among child liberationists. Whatever the demographic reasons for this, I see no philosophical reason why it must necessarily be so.
Thanks, Brian. You've made a good point here. Perhaps if the customers were making the decisions rather than government and educational bureaucrats, the decisions would be better. I'm wondering what others think about this. However, I do note that most (but not all) private schools are even worse on the issues I'm talking about here than are public schools.
Yes, a private school can easily be worse than a public school in this way—because of the common belief in the need for tightly authoritarian control of children, a belief reinforced by the example that public schools set. Hypothetically, if the country switched overnight to an undistorted, free market in education, authoritarian schooling would persist for a while because of this cultural norm. But gradually, over time, parents would discover self-directed learning as the path of least resistance to smart, healthy, happy children.
Unfortunately, of course, the free market alone would not generate this cultural evolution as quickly as we would like, which makes advocacy such as yours crucial, too. In the meantime, public schooling arguably makes authoritarianism, not freedom, the path of least resistance for many families.
Again, thanks for your thoughts here. For the sake of non-partisanship, I removed the "capitalism" reference from the post. I don't think it added anything and may have suggested a mistaken cause of the problem.
I disagree. I think that many or most the worst features of public schooling derive fairly directly from the fact that there's so much money in them. The testing mania: a multi-billion dollar industry. Same with brain-dead curricula from the big publishers. Starting in the 1960s, these private players began to feed in a big way at the trough of public investment in education. The dynamic is the same as with Big Pharma and AIPAC: fund the congress critters' campaigns and before long systems, both private and public, will dutifully reflect the priorities of those groups and industries. It's actually pretty disingenuous to believe that our school system is really public at all, given the vast sums made off its failed methods by the education industry. This is predatory capitalism, in which the needs of capital come well before the needs of various stakeholders.
I can't think of behavior more typical of American capitalism than feeding at the trough of public money. In this country, predatory capitalists determine what the school day looks like, and that means they're largely to blame for the dreary nature of the experience. Yes, the managers of the system are selling kids out, but we specifically have a system that treats children like morons because trusting them to direct their own learning doesn't generate nearly as much profit. I don't know what an "undistorted free market in education" would look like in a country that privatizes profit and socializes risk. I think a system like Finland's is preferable to ours with its relatively more enlightened capitalism, which permits somewhat more input from actual child advocates. In education and elsewhere, it seems to me that the fewer rules placed on capitalism the worse you can expect our systems to be.
Under true capitalism, profit is earned by providing a good or service that people are willing to buy, not by securing contracts with public officials. Imagine that those providers of mental health for children had to make a sales pitch directly to parents who had the option of giving their children plenty of time to play instead. How many parents could they persuade to buy their therapy and drugs? Could they find enough customers to stay in business at such a large scale?
I think it was by the time I reached Junior High/Middle School that I'd already figured out that most of the decisions made about how to run schools were made for the administrators' convenience and not for the benefit of the students and their learning
Interesting- per “the challenge”- would an experiment like this change the potential college acceptance outcomes of the students? I get the cynicism in seeing that play is a free or significantly lower cost option that the work around of drugs, therapy, etc- but the schools are like this because that is what is required to get into a college or university, and attendance at a college or university is required to get anywhere near a “middle class lifestyle” (I do not mean a median class income- now in the US at a poverty level of about $75,000) defined as home ownership, a vehicle for each driver in the house, 2 week domestic vacation or 1 week international vacation and all those basic trappings
Hi Anna. What you express here is what many people believe. My research suggests otherwise. I have seen many kids get into excellent colleges after "unschooling" or attendance at a democratic school where the learning is self-directed and kids are free to play all day. Moreover, at least in the US, there are many routes to college. Moreover, an increasing number of companies and employers have discovered that they are better off hiring non-college young people who are highly motivated and ready to learn on the job. Apprenticeships are increasing even in traditionally white-collar areas.
Must the question of what is driving child anxiety and depression be an either/or question? Either lack of free play or social media/screens? I increasingly see this as a “both and” situation, with lack of free play and social media/screens as opposite sides of the same coin—I don’t think they are separate. Both are manifestations of a change in which childhood has become managed and structured by adults, with a focus on physical safety and productive activities (i.e. purposeful activities). There is more to it though. This change in childhood also reflects changes in adulthood, our own loss of true free time replaced by scheduled activities, constant busyness, and the way that screens have completely permeated adulthood. It’s something I’m still thinking about and thus not yet able to articulate succinctly, but I have a strong sense that the decrease in free play and the rise of screen culture are expressions of broader shift in day to day life and culture. One that is also resulting in increasing anxiety, depression, and disconnection for adults as well. And interestingly, adults too are turning to therapy and medication, rather than free play (which for an adult is any activity that might be done simply for the pleasure of it, which out a schedule or agenda or any expectation of how it might go, and that isn’t in any way “productive”).
I have a question for all the educators here, around the differences between the U.S. educational system (K-12) and that in some other parts of the world - this is based on a combination of various global stats and my experiences as a European who spent a huge chunk of my life in Asia and is now living in the U.S.
What I have observed is that globally, U.S. students frequently underperform as compared to students from other regions, and yet what I hear 'on the ground' in the U.S. is that the system is too demanding and difficult for the students. My question is: where is the mismatch?
Additional background from my own personal experience: I was educated in both the British and U.S. educational systems, and growing up had friends in both too, so I had that direct experience of seeing the systems 'side-by-side.' In high school (at a British school), the material I was learning in, for example, biology, was at least 1 year ahead of what my friends were learning in their U.S. hight school.
Amen Peter! I like that 3rd school option! (If we charged more for a school like that would people desire it more???) Thanks for continuing to provoke thoughts and reinforce/inspire our play advocacy! cheers!
I listened to your audiobook "Free to Learn" this summer and it confirmed EVERYTHING that I've been preaching from my small soapbox as a Kindergarten teacher! For the past 10 years I've watched as our incoming Kinders arrive with limited abilities to self-regulate. Worse yet, many are severely dysregulated and already display disturbingly angry behaviors. Our district invested heavily in the BIST program to support classroom management and student behavior, and while I believe it's some of the best of what's out there, it is labor intensive and disruptive for the students and adults! I would bet the future of my career (which I'm almost ready to abandon out of frustration anyway) that if we devoted as many minutes a day to allowing all of our students to play, as we already spend hand-holding these children to "teach or build" self-regulation skills for "school", ALL of our students would benefit and it would be reflected in their academic achievement too! You are absolutely correct- our public education system IS the problem and it's glaringly obvious in our early childhood grade levels from pre-k to 2nd grade. The rise of helicopter parenting and organized sports, dance, etc. it is our responsibility as schools who are entrusted with these children, that are legally mandated to attend 8 hours a day, to allow them the time to develop self-regulation skills which are essential for becoming successful members of society as well as curious, confident learners. It's not just a matter of academic instruction, it's a serious fight to create an environment that will support their human right to mental, emotional, and physical safety while supporting their abilities to reach their fullest academic potential.
Hi Peter, thank you for your articles and I whole-heartedly agree with you and yet, as my daughter soon turns 10, I have to say she and I have struggled for years, and now more than ever, to gather the conditions for her to free play with friends. Kids around her don't play, or don't know how to play, or it's the parents who don't understand that this time is needed to play - whatever the reason, both my daughter and I feel like the conditions are very rarely met, poorly valued by other parents when met, and as a mother, I am left quite tired and deprived, after 10 years, that it is such a battle. I see my 10 years old daughter facing kids the same age who only talk about their online games, YouTubers, boyfriends, kissing and almost systematically refuse to play when she asks, and I feel sad for her. Not yet 10 years old, and play is over. I can't help being sad. And so is she. Is this something you hear from other parents? How to raise "players" in a world of "YouTubers"? (I'm saying this but my daughter loves online games and YouTube, but she also loves playing tag, hide and seek and Playmobiles!) But she's increasingly isolated in this. Thanks for letting me share!
I can recommend the reading resources at grownandflown.com for every parent that wants to reframe their child success in school/college. Parents need to understand that their opinions are influencing the mental health, and they need to know when they need to act like the plant in the room, or the fly on the wall.
Giving therapy without meeting the underlying need for play seems a little like giving tutoring without meeting the need for food.
I am not sure about the best school policies, but I know one thing and that is children today have INADEQUATE time to play. Maybe you have to be old enough (60+) to remember playing with other kids, after school, in the evenings, and all summer. Going out into the neighborhood in which all the moms kept an eye out for behavioral challenges. In that setting, children learned independence, resilience, and settled their own disputes. I don't see this happening these days. Our children need more free play time - whenever they can get it.
100% agree!!!! School contributes greatly to a students well being and frame of mind….. I’m a nearly retired teacher on call and I am floored by what kids are expected to do all day…. Then they are carted off to after school care… then to organized athletics or dance etc. I was schooled in the 70’s and our lives were packed with free play! Incidentally we really didn’t ever hear the word anxiety/stress …. Seems it wasn’t invented for kids until much later.
Childhood has ALWAYS been stressful. How could it be otherwise when kids are entirely at the mercy of adults who may or may not be broken, dangerous people?! No, what you saw is that lots of free play ameliorates the stress of powerlessness by promoting personal confidence and mastery. Childhood will never be the completely carefree fairy tale that adults believe in (they must have amnesia to do so); the question is: What else is going on in their lives to mitigate the damage of being so powerless? These days the answer is literally nothing.
That is interesting, I have never thought of it that way before. Thanks!
The point is school is often oblivious to the stress it causes. Schools are generally archaic in their thinking and ignorant of their clients needs.
I'm not sure where I said anything that indicates otherwise.
Didn't think you did! Have a good one!
My thought and feeling here has always been that while cutting homework and having more time to play will definitely decrease mental health issues, my concern with "no adults" free play in the US is kids aren't taught to be kind to each other. It feels like American kids experience too much neglect in their early years where they are supposed to fend for themselves emotionally and this leads to them being peer-attached. Stuff like sending kids to daycare before they are interested in other children as friends, and that leads to cliques where all the kids have their self-esteem tied to being part of the group. When children reach out to adults for help with social stuff, they are told to "not tattle". There seems to be little to no effort to deal with those messed up social dynamics. I think this is also a big part of what's stressful about school for children - social dynamics that make it hard to be authentic.
Lila, I understand your concern. However, we have been very pleased to see how wonderfully kids get along with one another and help solve each other's problems in the age-mixed "Play Clubs" at schools. --https://letgrow.org/program/play-club/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw8MG1BhCoARIsAHxSiQmeitPAVVbD7aUzwaSMhH3iZqRgNCvirbgRk05heHUVQjqa_jYWa6UaAjO_EALw_wcB--The monitors are instructed not to intervene in these free play periods unless they see imminent danger. The monitors have reported that they almost never feel compelled to intervene. Yes, in today's world it is essential to have a non-interfering adult present , but that is primarily because parents today won't let their kids play without an adult present.
Therapy can be great. I've been in therapy. But prevention is always better than treatment. We should be raising kids in a humane, loving way that they don't need therapy unless something really tragic happens.
Peter, I always look forward to reading your work! As an educator, I would also be willing to put money on the school that increase free play and reduced testing would see better academic outcomes. I recently wrote about the increased "progress monitoring" in schools here https://dencham.substack.com/p/the-online-testing-of-childhood?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
I look forward to reading your research on SEL curriculum!
Thank you, Denise. I enjoyed your "progress monitoring" post.
School Based Mental Health Therapist here, and when you asked if we don't prescribe play because it's free, I actually thought for a second, "yeah, maybe?! And I will definitely fix that immediately". I will say though, anecdotally, I do see less symptoms in summer sessions and increase when school approaches BUT I also see work and school avoidance as a problem more so for kids hyperconnected to social media and video games.
I am glad for the perspective you have given on the research around social media links to mental health outcomes being weak, but on a person to person basis, I see it as a huge correlation to poorer mental health. I would love so much to understand how school pressure is the source of this mental health crisis, not social media, etc.
I grew up before social media but used television a lot to help regulate my nervous system when I had no other tools (I see now with hindsight). It may be worth asking whether technology is the problem or a symptom of a need not being met “in the real world”?
"Might it be that in a capitalist society what is free is not valued precisely because it’s free, so no organized group is really pushing it?"
Let's not blame capitalism for this. Those drugs and therapy programs are not being purchased in a free market. They're being mandated by public officials and funded by taxpayer dollars. It's one of many instances of capitalism getting scapegoated for problems caused by state intervention.
Being a small-government, free-market libertarian seems to put me in the minority among child liberationists. Whatever the demographic reasons for this, I see no philosophical reason why it must necessarily be so.
Thanks, Brian. You've made a good point here. Perhaps if the customers were making the decisions rather than government and educational bureaucrats, the decisions would be better. I'm wondering what others think about this. However, I do note that most (but not all) private schools are even worse on the issues I'm talking about here than are public schools.
Yes, a private school can easily be worse than a public school in this way—because of the common belief in the need for tightly authoritarian control of children, a belief reinforced by the example that public schools set. Hypothetically, if the country switched overnight to an undistorted, free market in education, authoritarian schooling would persist for a while because of this cultural norm. But gradually, over time, parents would discover self-directed learning as the path of least resistance to smart, healthy, happy children.
Unfortunately, of course, the free market alone would not generate this cultural evolution as quickly as we would like, which makes advocacy such as yours crucial, too. In the meantime, public schooling arguably makes authoritarianism, not freedom, the path of least resistance for many families.
Again, thanks for your thoughts here. For the sake of non-partisanship, I removed the "capitalism" reference from the post. I don't think it added anything and may have suggested a mistaken cause of the problem.
I disagree. I think that many or most the worst features of public schooling derive fairly directly from the fact that there's so much money in them. The testing mania: a multi-billion dollar industry. Same with brain-dead curricula from the big publishers. Starting in the 1960s, these private players began to feed in a big way at the trough of public investment in education. The dynamic is the same as with Big Pharma and AIPAC: fund the congress critters' campaigns and before long systems, both private and public, will dutifully reflect the priorities of those groups and industries. It's actually pretty disingenuous to believe that our school system is really public at all, given the vast sums made off its failed methods by the education industry. This is predatory capitalism, in which the needs of capital come well before the needs of various stakeholders.
By definition, feeding at the trough of taxpayer money is not capitalism. You can call it profiteering, but you can't accurately call it capitalism.
I can't think of behavior more typical of American capitalism than feeding at the trough of public money. In this country, predatory capitalists determine what the school day looks like, and that means they're largely to blame for the dreary nature of the experience. Yes, the managers of the system are selling kids out, but we specifically have a system that treats children like morons because trusting them to direct their own learning doesn't generate nearly as much profit. I don't know what an "undistorted free market in education" would look like in a country that privatizes profit and socializes risk. I think a system like Finland's is preferable to ours with its relatively more enlightened capitalism, which permits somewhat more input from actual child advocates. In education and elsewhere, it seems to me that the fewer rules placed on capitalism the worse you can expect our systems to be.
Forgive me, Megan, but the word "capitalism" doesn't mean what you think it means.
Enlighten me. I'm not interested in theory but how capitalism functions on the ground.
Under true capitalism, profit is earned by providing a good or service that people are willing to buy, not by securing contracts with public officials. Imagine that those providers of mental health for children had to make a sales pitch directly to parents who had the option of giving their children plenty of time to play instead. How many parents could they persuade to buy their therapy and drugs? Could they find enough customers to stay in business at such a large scale?
I think it was by the time I reached Junior High/Middle School that I'd already figured out that most of the decisions made about how to run schools were made for the administrators' convenience and not for the benefit of the students and their learning
Interesting- per “the challenge”- would an experiment like this change the potential college acceptance outcomes of the students? I get the cynicism in seeing that play is a free or significantly lower cost option that the work around of drugs, therapy, etc- but the schools are like this because that is what is required to get into a college or university, and attendance at a college or university is required to get anywhere near a “middle class lifestyle” (I do not mean a median class income- now in the US at a poverty level of about $75,000) defined as home ownership, a vehicle for each driver in the house, 2 week domestic vacation or 1 week international vacation and all those basic trappings
Hi Anna. What you express here is what many people believe. My research suggests otherwise. I have seen many kids get into excellent colleges after "unschooling" or attendance at a democratic school where the learning is self-directed and kids are free to play all day. Moreover, at least in the US, there are many routes to college. Moreover, an increasing number of companies and employers have discovered that they are better off hiring non-college young people who are highly motivated and ready to learn on the job. Apprenticeships are increasing even in traditionally white-collar areas.
Must the question of what is driving child anxiety and depression be an either/or question? Either lack of free play or social media/screens? I increasingly see this as a “both and” situation, with lack of free play and social media/screens as opposite sides of the same coin—I don’t think they are separate. Both are manifestations of a change in which childhood has become managed and structured by adults, with a focus on physical safety and productive activities (i.e. purposeful activities). There is more to it though. This change in childhood also reflects changes in adulthood, our own loss of true free time replaced by scheduled activities, constant busyness, and the way that screens have completely permeated adulthood. It’s something I’m still thinking about and thus not yet able to articulate succinctly, but I have a strong sense that the decrease in free play and the rise of screen culture are expressions of broader shift in day to day life and culture. One that is also resulting in increasing anxiety, depression, and disconnection for adults as well. And interestingly, adults too are turning to therapy and medication, rather than free play (which for an adult is any activity that might be done simply for the pleasure of it, which out a schedule or agenda or any expectation of how it might go, and that isn’t in any way “productive”).
I have a question for all the educators here, around the differences between the U.S. educational system (K-12) and that in some other parts of the world - this is based on a combination of various global stats and my experiences as a European who spent a huge chunk of my life in Asia and is now living in the U.S.
What I have observed is that globally, U.S. students frequently underperform as compared to students from other regions, and yet what I hear 'on the ground' in the U.S. is that the system is too demanding and difficult for the students. My question is: where is the mismatch?
Additional background from my own personal experience: I was educated in both the British and U.S. educational systems, and growing up had friends in both too, so I had that direct experience of seeing the systems 'side-by-side.' In high school (at a British school), the material I was learning in, for example, biology, was at least 1 year ahead of what my friends were learning in their U.S. hight school.
Amen Peter! I like that 3rd school option! (If we charged more for a school like that would people desire it more???) Thanks for continuing to provoke thoughts and reinforce/inspire our play advocacy! cheers!
Thanks, Rusty. It's always great to hear from you.
I listened to your audiobook "Free to Learn" this summer and it confirmed EVERYTHING that I've been preaching from my small soapbox as a Kindergarten teacher! For the past 10 years I've watched as our incoming Kinders arrive with limited abilities to self-regulate. Worse yet, many are severely dysregulated and already display disturbingly angry behaviors. Our district invested heavily in the BIST program to support classroom management and student behavior, and while I believe it's some of the best of what's out there, it is labor intensive and disruptive for the students and adults! I would bet the future of my career (which I'm almost ready to abandon out of frustration anyway) that if we devoted as many minutes a day to allowing all of our students to play, as we already spend hand-holding these children to "teach or build" self-regulation skills for "school", ALL of our students would benefit and it would be reflected in their academic achievement too! You are absolutely correct- our public education system IS the problem and it's glaringly obvious in our early childhood grade levels from pre-k to 2nd grade. The rise of helicopter parenting and organized sports, dance, etc. it is our responsibility as schools who are entrusted with these children, that are legally mandated to attend 8 hours a day, to allow them the time to develop self-regulation skills which are essential for becoming successful members of society as well as curious, confident learners. It's not just a matter of academic instruction, it's a serious fight to create an environment that will support their human right to mental, emotional, and physical safety while supporting their abilities to reach their fullest academic potential.
Hi Peter, thank you for your articles and I whole-heartedly agree with you and yet, as my daughter soon turns 10, I have to say she and I have struggled for years, and now more than ever, to gather the conditions for her to free play with friends. Kids around her don't play, or don't know how to play, or it's the parents who don't understand that this time is needed to play - whatever the reason, both my daughter and I feel like the conditions are very rarely met, poorly valued by other parents when met, and as a mother, I am left quite tired and deprived, after 10 years, that it is such a battle. I see my 10 years old daughter facing kids the same age who only talk about their online games, YouTubers, boyfriends, kissing and almost systematically refuse to play when she asks, and I feel sad for her. Not yet 10 years old, and play is over. I can't help being sad. And so is she. Is this something you hear from other parents? How to raise "players" in a world of "YouTubers"? (I'm saying this but my daughter loves online games and YouTube, but she also loves playing tag, hide and seek and Playmobiles!) But she's increasingly isolated in this. Thanks for letting me share!
I can recommend the reading resources at grownandflown.com for every parent that wants to reframe their child success in school/college. Parents need to understand that their opinions are influencing the mental health, and they need to know when they need to act like the plant in the room, or the fly on the wall.