#84. Schools Can and Should Be Places for Play

The origin, rationale, and experiences of Let Grow Play Club at schools

Jul 13, 2025

Dear friends,

As I have described in previous letters (e.g. Letters #2, #3, #5, & #6), play —real play, initiated and managed by the players themselves without outside interference—is how kids learn to take charge of their own lives, solve their own problems, manage their emotions, negotiate with peers, and make and keep friends. It is also how they discover and become skilled at activities they enjoy. In short, it is a big part of how children learn over time to become effective adults. Such play with peers, away from adult control or interference, is a major part of Mother Nature’s design for child development.

As I have also described in previous letters, ever since the mid 20^th century, we have, as a society, gradually removed opportunities for self-directed play and other independent activities from children’s lives. We have done so by increasing the amount of time they spend in school classrooms and doing schoolwork at home, by restricting their freedom to roam freely outdoors because of societal fears, and by shuffling them into adult-directed extracurricular activities rather than allowing them to manage their own leisure time.

In 2017 (or maybe it was 2016), I found myself discussing all this with Lenore Skenazy, in her dining room in Queens, New York. She had published her book Free Range Kids, and I had published my book Free to Learn—two very different books on the same theme, the theme that to thrive children need more freedom and independence than we, as a society, have been permitting them. Lenore’s focus was especially on the idea that parents need to be liberated from the belief that kids must be guarded every minute of the day, and my focus was especially on the idea that kids need independence to acquire the skills they need for a successful life. Our books complemented one another.

My clever way of getting to know Lenore was to invite her to give a talk at an academic conference on the value of play, which I and another professor had organized. In a parallel life, Lenore could be a standup comedian. I had never previously heard so much laughter at an academic conference. She showed, with great humor and a degree of pantomime, the absurdity of some of the fears that constrain parents from allowing their kids some independence. We soon became friends.

The Origin of Let Grow

As we talked in her dining room, Lenore and I agreed that it was not enough to just write and speak about the problem of why kids (and overburdened parents) are suffering; we should try to do something about it. An upshot of our conversation was the development of a nonprofit organization called Let Grow, dedicated to developing and promoting practical ways of bringing more play and other independent activities into children’s lives in today’s world. You can learn much more about Let Grow at its website. Lenore became and still is president of the organization. I have recently stepped down from the Board of Directors but continue to work on Let Grow projects. Even before the nonprofit was formed, we hit upon the idea that a logical place for us to put much of our efforts would be schools.

Children spend more time in school than in any other setting aside from home. School is the primary place where children meet other children and have the potential of making friends. In decades past, school was also a prime place for play. As I’ve described elsewhere, in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s, recesses were much longer and less strictly regulated by adults than they became later, and lunch periods were typically an hour long—an hour in which kids of all ages at the school were free to play and socialize. Moreover, school playgrounds then remained open after school, and many kids would stay there to play for hours before walking or bicycling home in time for supper.

The long and short of it is that Lenore and I quickly hit upon two ideas for school interventions, which we would promote through Let Grow. One idea, developed primarily by Lenore, is that which is now called the Let Grow Experience. This is an intervention easy to adopt by any teacher, at any grade level, who chooses to do so. The essence of it is this. The teacher asks each student, typically each week, to think of something they would like to do outside of school by themselves, without adult accompaniment, but have never done before. Then the students are to get permission at home from their parents to do it (or negotiate for something similar that the parents will permit), then do it, then report back in school on what they did.

This has been an extraordinarily successful assignment, adopted by hundreds of teachers throughout the country. It tends to reverse the cycle of parental restrictions on children because the parents, as well as the children, find pleasure in seeing the child’s competence. It can also improve classroom climate by bringing some of children’s out-of-school lives into the classroom, so they get to know one another not just as students in a classroom but as kids who have a life outside of school. For more about this approach to helping children overcome fears and gain independence, see Letter # 47.

The other intervention we hit upon, which was primarily my idea, is that which is now called Play Club. I developed the idea partly from my memories of mixed-age unsupervised after-school play when I was a child, partly from my memories of how beautifully mixed-age groups of kids played together at summer camps and recreation centers where I worked when I was in high school and college in the 1960s, and partly from research I had conducted on play at a democratic school where children were never segregated by age and had essentially unlimited freedom to play.

The Basic Features of Let Grow Play Club

Play Club is a program that provides an hour or more of free, self-directed play at school, either before the school day begins or right after it ends. At most schools it occurs just once a week, but my hope is that it will begin to occur more often. My ultimate hope is that schools will eventually see the light and allow children to play at school every school day from the time when school ends until parent are home from work. This would solve two problems—the problem of providing kids ample time for play and, for younger kids, the baby-sitting problem parents face when no parent is home after school.

Here are the basic design features of Play Club:

1. There are many kids with whom to play and many ways to play.

Some of the most successful Play Clubs involve as many as a hundred kids playing at once, though the number varies from school to school based largely on amount of available play space. The primary space for most schools is the outdoor playground and school yard, but some schools also open the gymnasium, the hallways between the gym and outdoors, and classrooms where puzzles, games, and art supplies may be available for those who prefer quieter play.

An essential characteristic of play is free choice, so the more choices kids have of how and with whom to play the better. Outdoors there are a wide variety of objects kids can incorporate into play: Balls of various types, jump ropes, hula hoops, and, ideally, lots of “loose parts,” including simple ones like cardboard boxes, that kids can use to build structures such as forts and towers that can be incorporated into imaginative play. Not all schools provide all this, but the closer they can approach this ideal the better.

2. Kids of all ages at the school play together.

Most Play Clubs are at elementary schools, where children from kindergarten through fifth grade (ages 5-11) all play at the same time in the same spaces. Age mixing is a crucial feature of Play Club for multiple reasons. For starters, it greatly expands the range of potential play partners. Kids, of course, can choose to play only with others near their own age, but my research and at least one published study of Play Club, shows that most kids choose to play at least some of the time with others considerably older or younger than themselves.

Older kids love little kids, and little kids are thrilled by the attention of older ones. Moreover, in age-mixed play, older children scaffold younger ones to more sophisticated or challenging levels of play, while the unbound energy and natural creativity of the younger ones helps to spark the energy and creativity of the older ones. The older kids also develop leadership and nurturing skills in interactions with younger ones. Age-mixing dramatically reduces bullying. Older kids are nicer when little ones are around—nicer not just to the little ones but even to one another (Gray, 2011). I have observed that play is more creative, more cooperative, less competitive, all-in-all more “playful,” when it is age-mixed than when all the players are about the same age.

Age mixing can be especially valuable for kids who are socially inhibited and fearful of joining in with others their own age. I have observed such kids develop confidence and social skills by playing with younger children, who adore them, before eventually moving on, maybe weeks later, to playing with age-mates. For more on the multiple values of age-mixed play see Letters #10, #11, & #12, or my published review article on the topic here.

3. Rules regulating kids’ behavior in Play Club are kept to a bare minimum.

There are generally just three rules for kids in Play Club. Don’t hurt anyone; don’t break anything valuable; and stay within the campus and building areas designated for Play Club. In schools where some kids have smartphones (primarily middle schools), a fourth rule might be no phones at Play Club. This is a time for in-person interaction in the physical world. If there are any other rules, they are made by the kids themselves in the context of their play and apply only to the group playing together.

Play is Mother Nature’s vehicle for teaching children how to regulate themselves, create rules, and resolve differences; and for that to happen adults must step back and let them work things out themselves—even when it looks chaotic or unfair, or when some kids are having trouble fitting in. It is up to the kids to work through the chaos, negotiate ways to make things fair, and discover ways of fitting in.

4. Adults do not intervene in kids’ activities at Play Club except in cases of true emergencies.

In most schools the monitors of Play Club are teachers. My biggest worry in the pioneering days of Play Club was that teachers would not be able to refrain from teaching. Play is not a time for adult teaching; it is a time for kids to discover, invent, adapt, find themselves, find their own ways, and teach one another. The message regularly given to new Play Club monitors is something like this:

“During Play Club you are not a teacher. You are like a lifeguard on an ocean beach. It is not your job to tell kids how to play, or resolve quarrels, or worry about minor injuries such as skinned knees. Your job is to step in only during a real emergency. Even when you think it’s an emergency, unless it is immediately dire, count to ten before you step in. Most often, even when it looks like an emergency, the kids will solve the problem themselves. When they solve it, they learn that they are smart, powerful, and competent; when you solve it, they learn that they are stupid, weak, and incompetent.”

I have been delighted to discover that teachers adapt quite readily to not teaching! It must be a welcome vacation. Many of them report being amazed at how capable kids are at regulating themselves and resolving their own problems when they realize that no adult is going to do it for them. The monitors are also instructed to not allow themselves to be targets for tattling. When tattling does occur, the monitor’s task is to gently turn the problem back to the kid. They might say, “Well, what might you do about that?” One long-time monitor says he typically responds by saying, “Is that an adult problem or a kid problem?” This usually prompts the kid to go off either to try to resolve the problem or play with others who are less annoying.

Reports from the Field: How Is Play Club Working Out?

The first school district to adopt Play Club was a Long Island, NY, district where Michael Hynes, an intrepid advocate for making schools more kid friendly, was superintendent. He had already taken steps, along with a committed set of school principals, to improve the school climate in the seven elementary schools in his district. Among other things, he had increased the daily recess period to 40 minutes, a length about twice that of recess at most other schools. To help get Play Club started in Hynes’s schools, I met with the principals of all the schools, in a group meeting, to describe the crucial features of Play Club. Lenore and I also gave an evening talk open to parents in the district.

These pioneering Play Clubs were such a success that even before the year was over, Hynes told us, he had heard from school principals elsewhere that parents at their school were asking about it. The program quickly spread.

During the second year of Play Club in Hynes’s schools, two professors at Long Island University, Heather Parrott and Lynn Cohen, conducted a systematic study of it at one of the schools. In addition to observing Play Club sessions directly, they conducted formal interviews about its effects with samples of students from each grade level (K-5) and a sample of teachers. They also surveyed parents to get their impressions of how Play Club had affected their kids. In one of their published papers on this study, they focused especially on the age-mixed aspect of Play Club (Parrott & Cohen, 2021). I was delighted to see how the teachers, and the kids themselves, had discovered and could articulate the advantages of age mixing that I had previously written about.

In interviews, 67% of children below fifth grade reported playing with older kids. A fourth grader stated, “It feels like I’m more grown up and I feel like it’s more of a challenge for me when I’m playing a game.” A second grader stated simply that she liked playing with older kids “‘cause it’s more challengy.”

In interviews, 78% of children above kindergarten reported playing with younger kids. Consistent with my previous observations about the advantages of age mixing for those who are socially inhibited, one fifth graders said, of early experience with Play Club, “I felt lonely, but it was okay because I actually had little kids to play with.” Others spoke about how they enjoyed leading and helping younger ones in games. For example, one fifth grader reported, “I’ll help them keep score and teach them how to play.” Another, a fourth grader, said, in describing play with a younger child, “We let him take a free shot. He’s a little kindergartener and he scored. We let him score. We all jumped on him and like ‘Yay!’ It made him happy.”

All the teachers that were interviewed commented on how the older children seemed to pride themselves in being role models for the younger ones. One kindergarten teacher reported: “I used to teach fifth grade; I had never seen fifth graders behave as nicely as when they’re buddies to the kindergartners. They take on a whole new level of maturity. When they’re with their peers, I feel like they sometimes can be catty and bring each other down a little bit. When they’re the role models, they rise to the occasion.”

The researchers’ other published paper (Parrott & Cohen, 2020), based on the same study, focused more generally on the benefits that students and teachers saw in Play Club. When students were asked what they liked about Play Club, the most common response, aside from simply the fun of it, was “making friends.” Twenty-six of the 47 students interviewed mentioned making friends in response to the question. One fourth-grade boy put it this way: “You can make new friends, so you can meet new people, because if you don’t have a lot of friends, then Play Club’s the perfect place, because there’s a lot of people there. There’s a lot of people that like to play.”

Making friends. I need to bold-face that, again, for emphasis. What could be more important to a child’s healthy development (beyond the obvious needs of adequate nutrition, shelter, and care at home) than making friends? In my mind, honestly, the most important function a school can serve in today’s world is to be a place where kids can make friends. Without friends, school and everything else is more or less a waste.

The teachers commented on a wide variety of effects they attributed to Play Club. All six of the teachers interviewed noted that play sessions, including the 40-minute recesses as well as Play Club, enabled the children in their classes to focus better on their lessons. They also commented, sometimes elaborately, on how Play Club seemed to increase the confidence, maturity, and cooperativeness of the children in their classes. A kindergarten special education teacher believed that increased play time significantly improved the problem-solving ability of the children she was teaching. Children are continuously solving problems when they play.

Another of the early pioneers of Play Club is Kevin Stinehart, a fourth-grade teacher at a school in South Carolina. He organized the first Play Club at his school in 2019 and has been organizing and monitoring it every year since. You can see a short video of his Play Club here to get a sense of its joy. Stinehart reports that the number of behavioral problems, as indexed by number of office referrals, dropped dramatically at his school after Play Club began—to less than half of what it was before. Of course, that correlation doesn’t prove that the improved behavior was just because of Play Club, but Stinehart thinks Play Club played a large role in it. As a regular and astute observer, he finds that Play Club leads kids to be nicer to one another. In an article entitled, Why unstructured free play is a key remedy to bullying, which he published in eSchool News, he illustrated the more general point with a specific example, which I’ll quote here at length:

“A few years ago, I had a student who walked around with a chip on his shoulder. He never smiled, never laughed, and always seemed angry. He was cruel to other kids, had frequent behavior issues in class, and in the course of one week had three office referrals from three different teachers for his extreme behaviors. Other kids would label him a bully, but where they saw a bully, we as teachers saw a hurting and lonely child in need of friends. He was the kind of student who was always disciplined by losing recess time, so I eventually added it up and realized he was getting only about 30 minutes of playtime in an entire week on average.
“Realizing his lack of play and knowing play’s immense benefits, I arranged a conference with his parent and asked if I could have him join my Play Club – a one-hour afterschool club dedicated to unstructured free play. His parent agreed to let him join, and before I knew it, his first day at Play Club had arrived. I was a little nervous that his behavior issues would continue, and he would wreak havoc on my other Play Club students, but I knew play could help him, so I was committed to the process. For the first half hour of Play Club he just walked around by himself. Eventually a student kicked a ball to him, and he kicked it back. After a few more kicks, he eventually started running around and playing with the other kids. By the end of that first day of Play Club he was smiling, laughing, and playing in a healthy way—and with other kids! It was shocking to see the transformation in him after just one hour of complete unstructured free play. The teacher supervising Play Club with me had tears in her eyes at the dramatic change she was witnessing.
“Those friendships he forged in Play Club that week and in the weeks that followed helped him begin to have healthy, positive relationships and find a place in our school community. This carried over into the classroom, where he never received another office referral again all the way through his years at our school–all from having some positive play experiences that addressed the core issues of his bullying behaviors like loneliness, anger, and not feeling like he fit in.

Amen.

Concluding Thoughts

Wouldn’t it be nice if schools would offer Play Club for all students, with all the features I described, smack in the middle of the school day rather than either before or after school? There is no evidence at all that so many hours sitting in seats for lessons leads to more learning and much evidence that it impedes learning. The people making school policy are simply blind to reality. And wouldn’t it be nice if, in addition, schools regularly kept the playground and gymnasium open for play and equipped with play materials for a few hours after school? It would not be expensive. In today’s world you would need to pay at least a couple of adults to monitor for safety, but that would be a trivial cost, a tiny bite of the school budget, compared to the good it would do. Wouldn’t it be nice if policy makers would start thinking about the overall health and development of children as human beings and lose their obsession with scores on tests that measure little having to do with real life?

In my next letter I’ll continue the topic of play at school, focusing on the limitations and potentials of recess. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, if you want to learn more about Play Club or the Let Grow Experience and might want to lobby for one or both of these programs at your child’s school, the information on the Let Grow website is all free.

And now, what do you think? If your kids have been involved in the Let Grow Experience or Let Grow Play Club, what influence might that have had? What thoughts do you have about how to bring more play to schools? This substack is, among other things, a forum for discussion. Your thoughts and questions are treated with respect by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree.

Play Makes Us Human

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