Children are suffering a severe deficit of play

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play/

by martythemaniak • 13 years ago

342 180 13 years ago

Having grown up in the late 80s in an East Block country, this article resonated very strongly. Growing up in that place and time was akin to 50s America - no cable, consoles, arcades, VCRs or handhelds. We had TV, but it only had the single state broadcast channel which played only one cartoon.

The only thing to do was play which we did prodigiously - I was part of a large mix-aged group (6-12 kids, 5 years age difference) and we would play everything (sports, house, building things, demolishing things, raising stray animals, foraging fruit, fighting other kids). It was a great childhood and neither I nor my childhood friends (most of us are still friends, even across continents) would trade it for anything. Interestingly, it was almost the same childhood my mom and dad had.

My sister (the de-facto leader of our group) now has children and their childhood could not be any different - constantly shuttled from home to school to organized activity. Play only for a bit under heavily supervised conditions (ie, birthday party at another kids house) and filled to the brim with tablets, phones, computers etc.

I feel very bad for my nephew's effective lack of childhood, even more so because it seems that doing something differently is a big social taboo. My mom, siter and I have talked about this, and my sister described being almost powerless - who would they play with? Where? What are other parents going to think? etc etc.

When I go to places like rural Belize or small-town Costa Rica I see kids still playing and I wonder if that's not the best place to raise a small kid (4-10 years old).

LaGrange8• 13 years ago

Oh, I grew up in the same times, in the same general area, with just a little whee bit of difference: I'm aspergers, I'm socially anxious, and I quite clearly remember that most of the fun groups like you mention had were actually at the expense of the kids like me.

Ooops.

Also, while I didn't spend that much time among modern kids, I do see them having lots of fun (yes, with the eeevil tablets too, sometimes), and then going to organized activities that they often pick themselves and seem to enjoy more than kicking a brick or bullying (sorry, was I meant to say "fighting"? Well, I won't) another group of kids. And then they get a bit older, and find sports or creative or technical activities that were completely out of reach of most kids growing up in the magical eighties.

It's just part "our times were different", part golden age mythology. In reality, the entire concept of childhood as we modernly understand it is fairly young, and the idea that kids play and adults don't is ridiculous. Furthermore, it's just us adults judging kids to not having played enough without putting their health in danger or at least getting uncomfortably dirty.

Modern kids play. A lot. Just because they play in a way that's different from yours or bucolic paintings doesn't mean they don't actually have more fun than you did.

martythemaniak3• 13 years ago

most of the fun groups like you mention had were actually at the expense of the kids like me.

I'm sorry for your experience, but that's absolutely not what I meant, nor what happened. "Fighting" as I said there was actually things like snowball fights in the winter or paper-cone-in-tube or soft/rotten-fruit-in-sligshot fights in the summer, and always in a group-vs-group setting. I am in fact your fairly typical shy introverted bookish geek and the reason I think so highly of this type of play is precisely because it allowed me to overcome these tendencies and be a normal kid.

My real worry here isn't that kids today aren't doing the exact same things I did. It's that they don't have the option to do certain things anymore - things which may in fact be extremely valuable. What I described in my OP wasn't false, but it wasn't complete - I also spent much time playing Legos, reading books, "technical activities" with my dad's tools. Better or worse, one thing I can definitely say is my nephew has far fewer options and choices than I did at his age.

jlgreco16• 13 years ago

Oh, I grew up in the same times, in the same general area, with just a little whee bit of difference: I'm aspergers, I'm socially anxious, and I quite clearly remember that most of the fun groups like you mention had were actually at the expense of the kids like me.

It seems a rather "Harrison Bergeron" to disparage the sort of unsupervised and unrestrained play that martythemaniak is talking about just because some fraction of children are ill-equipped to participate in it.

bsullivan012• 13 years ago

I agree 100% with you. Not to go off-topic too much, and I am no doctor but I wonder if this is a reason for a stunning increase in autism cases. Maybe sitting alone, in front of the TV, game console does a trick on you when very young?

LaGrange8• 13 years ago

The reason? Like, higher diagnosis rate? Also, autism can be diagnosed by the age of 2, and practically a significant portion of cases gets identified by the age of 5-7. So, um, no, it's not video games.

speeder2• 13 years ago

I think this is more tied to reproductive practices.... I wonder if there is historical data correlating for example mental problems with monogamy.

tekalon• 13 years ago

Higher diagnosis rate, the definition of 'autism' is always expanding, parents being older when they have kids (late 20's-30's, compared to late teens/20's), possible links to pollution and environmental influence. Same can be said with ADD/ADHD (My husband has autism, and I have ADD. Neither of us did lots of tv/gaming until we were older. If anything, we gravitated to tv/games/reading/being alone/studying to avoid being around other people)

chez17• 13 years ago

I always find it interesting that nobody mentions this. Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds, they turned America in the the most litigious country in the history of mankind scaring anyone from allowing anyone ever to make a mistake or get slightly hurt, you buy your kids more screens than books, and then at the end of the day you wonder aloud why kids don't play as much?

* That was a proverbial you, no you specifically OP.

001sky3• 13 years ago

Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds

This comment is bad math, bad history, and bad analysis.

Please. Try. Harder.

[NB: GP was <10yrs old in 1990. He was not the parks comissioner of New York City in the 1990s. Etc.]

protomyth• 13 years ago

Woah, hold up there. I am a little before the OP poster (70's) and we most surely did not do what you said. It was the f'n generation before us (born in the 60's) that did the freak out and made everything "safe first". They started their crusade in the 80's and really got going in the 90's. The OP and even someone born in the 70's were a bit young for it.

Now, I do see this schedule-every-second-vibe from my generation and am not liking it one bit[1]. My younger brother is trying to find or build decent play equipment for his boy as he grows up.

1) some organized sports is fine, but this scheduling every waking minute of your child's time is psycho

L_Rahman• 13 years ago

Part of the problem is that the race for college has been pushed earlier and earlier as admissions has gotten more competitive.

Admission rates for colleges have been dropping across the board, for top tier schools even more sharply. When success in life in large part is still defined by one's undergraduate institution you can see why parents would focus on that at the expense of everything else.

I'm not a parent yet, and am not planning to be in the near future, but I've been thinking a lot about parenting now that I'm fully out of my childhood and it basically seems to come down to a bunch of tough compromises.

Zimahl2• 13 years ago

After I graduated college I worked for the same college doing IT for housing and dining. I worked with a fellow alumnus who was in a fraternity in the late 60s. He told a story about their fraternity running a paid bar in the basement every Friday and Saturday night. The brothers would drink so much that they couldn't be bothered to successfully run the bar, so they split the profits with the sorority next door and the sorority sisters would take care of everything for them.

The reason why this is relevant is that he would often rail against the same university that was cracking down on underage drinking because parents were worried about their kids. It was typically the same parents who partook in these shenanigans about 40 years before - yet didn't want their kids to have the same experience.

Talk about complete hypocrites.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

On the topic of clildren freedom and modern day restrictions etc, I always found this small article from the Austin Chronicle about life in the fifties very illuminating. It also explains the origins of the saying "This is where I came in" (and we have the same saying in my country, with exactly the same origins!):

"In today's America, where parents chauffeur kids to "play dates," only on the poorest streets do 7-year-olds still roam free ... but they don't go to movies much because tickets are so pricey ... the concession stand is even more expensive ... and you can't just walk into any movie (it might not be rated for kids) ... and you have to know the exact time a film starts ... and shopping-mall movie theatres are rarely within walking distance. Today you're blitzed by TV ad campaigns and product tie-ins in fast-food joints, so you know all about a Hollywood film before it starts ... and today's urban parents panic if their grade-school children disappear, unaccounted for, for hours on end.

Fifty years ago, none of that was so. In the larger cities, two or three movie theatres were in walking distance of most neighborhoods. Each had but one screen. The program began with a newsreel, a few cartoons, and brief "coming attractions" (not today's compilations that tell the whole story). Then the "features" began -- plural, features, for all neighborhood theatres played double, sometimes triple, features, two or three movies for the price of one ticket. Nothing was rated, there were no sex scenes or obscenities; anyone could go to any movie. Admission price for a kid was rarely more than a quarter. Popcorn for a dime, a Coke for a nickel. They weren't supposed to sell kids tickets during school hours, but they did. As for kids roaming about -- "Go play in traffic," our parents would say, and they wouldn't be surprised if we didn't walk in 'til dinnertime, which in our immigrant neighborhood wasn't until after 7."

http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2003-08-22/174046/

deerpig• 13 years ago

You make a very good point. The Boomers (myself included) had freedom to play, explore, and get into trouble. But as a generation we have royally screwed up our own kids.

I've lived in East Asia for the last 25 years and was appalled to see what educational systems in Japan and Hong Kong did to children, and the kind of employees they make later in life.

Later I moved to SE Asia and in the countryside you still see children leading healthy childhoods, while the middle class, especially in the cities seem hellbent on screwing up their children's lives. When I first moved to Thailand things were okay, now they are terrible. Now that I live in Cambodia I am seeing the same processes happen. It's very sad.

The exception, and it's a very small exception, is in some of the International schools you see scattered around Asia. There are a few very good schools out here, where children are brought up in a mixed culture and linguistic environment, are given a great deal more freedom to explore and time to play, and choose for themselves. International schools are set primarily to educate children of expat families living abroad. But it's becoming common to see more and more local children being enrolled in the better of these schools. I know a school in Hong Kong who has had to limit the number of local children that they enroll because otherwise there wouldn't be any expat children in the school at all.

Because I so rarely visit the States, I didn't realize until the last five or six years how bad things had become. Most American children now are subject to the worst of the old American industrial education system and the worst of the eastern, the student is an open vessel for the teacher to pour his wisdom into, all in one package.

I would never raise a child in the States, because IMHO it would be tantamount to child abuse.

JoeAltmaier3• 13 years ago

Some of it was inevitable overcrowding/overbuilding of towns. We can have all the morals we can afford.

mixmastamyk• 13 years ago

I feel very bad for my nephew's effective lack of childhood, even more so because it seems that doing something differently is a big social taboo.

I don't quite understand this, could you expand it? I have a daughter and we go to the park a lot and don't own a TV and haven't noticed anyone bothered by either. In fact they are generally pleasantly surprised.

martythemaniak3• 13 years ago

That was probably too strongly worded. What I meant was that he does not have the option of playing outside, unsupervised with his peer group (5-9 year olds).

Even if you see the value in that, as the author or my family does, you would likely find it practically very hard or impossible to do, mostly because it depends heavily on other kids/parents way of thinking and expectations.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

I was born in 1984 in Turkey. We lived in an apartment building in a major downtown area. My childhood memories consist of playing with other kids in the same apartment building or the neighboring buildings. These games were almost always improvised on the spot, where someone would throw out an idea and the others in the group would build upon it. There would be rule-making and negotiation, and lots of arguments. And then we would play.

Even when we played well-known games, they had at least some element of improvisation. For example, if we couldn't pool enough money to buy a rubber soccer ball, we would find a soda can, crush it on the ground and use it as the ball. There would be rules with that, such as wearing close-toed shoes and keeping the can on the ground at all times (if it took into the air it became a sharp and dangerous projectile). The interesting thing is that these rules were invented on the spot by us kids. Parents had no involvement.

One of the major differences I noticed when I came to America for college was that, in social settings, people were utterly incapable of improvising a game from scratch. We always had to play a game that someone else had invented, such as a board game or a well-known drinking game - both of which had strict rules. And if the board game was missing a piece? It was deemed unplayable. No one tried to improvise a solution because it required outside-the-box thinking. One weekend, the guy who had all the board games went back home to visit his parents, and his door was locked. So I found a large piece of cardboard from the trashcans behind the dormitory, and some supplies, and spent an hour or so creating a board game. When I presented it to the group, people were stunned. We played for hours and I became the god damn hero.

The interesting thing is that I notice the same patterns in the workplace. But I don't want to turn this into work talk!

001sky3• 13 years ago

Playing the system. Its the new, new thing.

Casseres• 13 years ago

When I go to places like rural Belize or small-town Costa Rica I see kids still playing and I wonder if that's not the best place to raise a small kid (4-10 years old).

Interesting Idea. I'm a bit far off from having kids, but I always think about the future and how I would raise them when I do have kids. That would also be great for cultural exposure. I know I want to raise my kids to be multilingual.

Dewie• 13 years ago

Having "play" was great in my experience, and I've never been fond of the idea of a busy schedule of organized activities, but...

It seems that every time childhood comes up, people talk about how they're childhood was great and now because the kids are doing this and that, they are worse off. Of course, their childhood was the true forger of character and personhood, while the brains of kids today are just turning into slush while they hover over their iPad's (even though they themselves spent hours in front of the VCR). The author seems a good example of that (though probably more informed than average).

(Sometimes people talk about how their childhood was bad, but then they blame it on themselves, their parents, or something that is not society wide.)

Tichy6• 13 years ago

The problem is not kids hovering over their iPads. I was pestered by parents to go outside instead of playing computer games all the time (in the 80ies). But I know how important computer games where to me, so I'll fight to allow my kid to play games (most parents are actually afraid their kids get brain damage if they are exposed to computers - certainly nobody was interested in having a computer at the kindergarden of my son).

The issue is that kids don't have much spare time to do whatever they want. Their time is filled up with scheduled activities.

hrktb• 13 years ago

This would be a case of "people doing things different don't know what they miss". Some kids (future violinists or pianists for instance) spend huge amount of their childhood training and training, but there's usually enough to enjoy and enough to learn to not fall into the article's problem.

Playing under supervision is not so different, as for any group of more than a few kids, the supervisor won't be there directing every minute thing the kid does. IMO the problem the article states is less a lack of freedom than the quality of what the child does. And I don't mean quality in some elitist sense, but just in how much the kid gets from what he is doing (i.e. building towers in lego or teasing the house cat is chalenging and satisfying)

Pxtl• 13 years ago

It's actually a relatively new problem. I live in a dense university neighborhood in Hamilton, Ontario (basically Canada's Pittsburgh) and I grew up being able to run free with my friends. I mean, there wasn't much in the way of raising stray animals or amateur carpentry, but the rest of that stuff we did. Lots of unsupervised mayhem running around the area.

I watched too much TV, and the mayhem was mostly confined to our local neighborhood and the ravine nearby, but we still played.

The thing is about my area is that it was built in the '30s. Before two-car homes. This city is so dense that a kid can walk anywhere, even though it's a pretty big city.

But now, living in the same neighborhood with my own kids, the culture has changed. I'd never dream of sending my 6-year-old son out to walk to school on his own and there isn't a mob of similar kids hiking to school for him to go with, and his friends aren't really playing out front on the street - it's all scheduled playdates.

Part of the problem is dual-income homes. It's only three blocks to school, but I drive my kids there anyways because I'm on my way to work... my wife is already at her job by then.

And this is the best-case scenario for Canada - a dense, pedestrian-friendly, close-to-school, close-to-the park house where kids can walk to anything. It's an affluent area with no crime to speak of other than drunken students. It is quite possibly the ideal place for kids to roam free... and they still don't do it.

And compare that to the rest of Southern Ontario that is one vast ocean of suburban tract housing where there is nothing in walking distance and all the houses and shops are in an ocean of parking and wide streets that makes even your neighbor feel a little further.

henrikschroder• 13 years ago

It's only three blocks to school, but I drive my kids there anyways because
It is quite possibly the ideal place for kids to roam free... and they still don't do it.

I agree that 6 is a bit young to walk on your own, but why don't you walk with him occasionally? You can walk back, and then drive to school.

When he's 7 or 8, he should be able to walk on his own. But only if you teach him how.

jimmaswell• 13 years ago

I'm not sure about that. I was raised with the opportunity to do stuff outside with other kids and all that but it felt boring to me. Particularly it bugged me how they seemed to not stay on one thing for long or not stick to the structure of whatever we were doing. If it was up to me what to do I came up blank and just walked around until I was allowed to go back in - I couldn't think of anything interesting to do besides sometimes try to imitate stuff from the video games. In contrast at that age I found video games like Spyro the Dragon or Crash Bandicoot much more interesting and fulfilling due to how they were consistent and had more tangible rewards. I was also greatly interested in computers but didn't get one until third grade. I have doubts random physical meandering is better than technology for kids.

MrVitaliy• 13 years ago

It's virtually impossible to correlate decrease in "play time" and increase in suicide rates apart from his anecdotal evidence.

Just because kids don't play the same way you did when you grew up doesn't necessarily mean they're doing it wrong.

Tomorrow there will be a study suggesting video games are a better intellectual stimuli for growing up and yield lower rates of accidental death in children.

dragontamer2• 13 years ago

Experimental study proves that Starcraft increases cognative skills.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

Thats right, experimentally proves. They took non-gamers, forced them to play Starcraft, and then at the end of the study... their cognitive skills were measurably better.

VLM7• 13 years ago

A little bit more specifically, the exact failure mode is in properly identifying that mammals that are prevented from playing in multiple animal studies pretty much turn into complete F-ups when they become adults, and properly scientifically documents that human kids are prevented from playing more over the years while perhaps coincidentally mental illness levels have exploded in children.

So the specific failure mode is proving that totally F-ed up lower mammals equates to suicide in human teens. Probably the only really scientific conclusion you can gather is that forcing human kids (aka mammals) not to play screws them up horribly.

Well, I'd love to sit here and debate with my HN buddies but as you know the only hope for a middle class lifestyle is being in the top 5% so I gotta take off and helicopter my 2nd grade daughter from Violin lessons to Chinese lessons to Lacrosse League practice otherwise she'll never make it into Stanford.

Note I'm kidding, I don't even let my kids join organized sports, although we participate in totally dis-organized sports (aka, actually fun) at the park a couple times per week. My son's actually getting good at hitting a baseball, although no one keeps score.

konstantintin• 13 years ago

why would you not allow your kids to play organized sports?

mynewwork• 13 years ago

Most of my happiest moments as a child were while playing organized sports. I'm not sure where you're getting your idea that dis-organized sports are "actually fun" with the implication that playing on a team isn't, but you might want to reconsider.

Detrus• 13 years ago

Playing videogames prepares you for playing videogames and whatever way they manage human interaction. In the real world everything would be different and the kids won't be prepared.

I'm sure videogames will catch up by 2040. Still you'll have to exercise separately.

lmm• 13 years ago

School and organized after-school activities are nothing like anything I've experienced in adulthood.

cyanbane• 13 years ago

I always return to the question of: "Is the shorter amount of time for outdoor non-directed play bad or just different for my kids (compared to my childhood)?".

This read failed to convince me of the former. That being said, it did convince me to pick up the author's book.

JoeAltmaier3• 13 years ago

Its a change; unprecedented in the history of mankind. So don't accept it blindly. Nothing about the makeup of humans prepared them for a childhood of over-supervised planned activities and a near-total lack of open-ended peer interaction.

Its a bigger risk to just blindly forge ahead with kids addicted to chat, sugar and the internet.

VLM7• 13 years ago

The Greek Spartan child rearing model, at least for boys? Historical documents would have mentioned if Spartan men turned out completely screwed up compared to Spartan women... probably. The ancients certainly enjoyed playing the compare and contrast game with the Athenians and it never seemed to come up in the numerous differences.

Also the model probably breaks down into its not terribly clear how oversupervised Spartan boys were. Its still probably a historical model worth considering.

sologoub2• 13 years ago

Well, this is precedented in a small way - royalty. Throughout history, children of those in significant power have grown up under a microscope. Celebrity kids have a similar experience.

There are a host of other issues to contend with, my the amplification of narcissistic tendencies and lack of empathy is well documented in these cases. I can't help but wonder if the privileged children are being subjected to very similar, if diminished experience.

It should also be noted that this is not as much of a problem in poorer neighborhoods, as I see kids playing on the streets and driveways when I occasionally drive through.

eli_gottlieb2• 13 years ago

Hell, I'm an adult and I suffer a severe deficit of play.

VLM7• 13 years ago

Hackerspace = adult playground.

AznHisoka2• 13 years ago

a place where you get no exercise, are surrounded by testosterone, and get no Vitamin D doesn't sound like much of a playground :(

eli_gottlieb2• 13 years ago

Know one in the Redwood City area? I'm here for another couple of weeks.

AznHisoka2• 13 years ago

I was gonna say that kids have it easy - adults are the ones that are seriously suffering from a deficit of play.

paulhodge• 13 years ago

Join a kickball league (like through WAKA). You get all the fun & camaraderie of team sports, but no one is too serious about it, and very little skill is required. If you can hold a beer while kicking a ball then you're good.

malkia• 13 years ago

Growing up in Bulgaria (I was born 1976) I caught the last years of "communism" (there was never such thing really), but I caught a lot of good time as a kid.

A lot of the classic bulgarian kid movies were about kids roaming the streets of the city, village, forest, etc. For example the whole family goes to a tourist resort, beach, and then you see kids of different ages going together somewhere.

One of my favourite shows as a kid was Verano Azul (spanish - Blue Summer) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verano_azul) - it was very popular on Bulgaria, and it also reflected the kind of play we used to have in there.

One of my other popular shows (Blake's 7, we did not had Star Trek back then) - was also very popular - outside we would play as characters from the show - like Zen, Oracle, Blake and other characters from the show. Sometimes few, othertimes dozen, and few times we were like 40-50 kids gathered from group ages from 1st to 8 or 9th grade playing together (bullying was all the time there I guess, I've never noticed it seriously - it wasn't an open concept, neither taboo - more like unknown thing - that just happens and you deal with it. It's different now that you know it, and have a child on your own, and live in USA - like me).

As kids, often we would go to the nearest construction site (usually high-rise building in construction) and do stupid things. It was the norm to fight with sticks - plastic or wood, throw stones, rocks at each other - and almost everyday come with blood here and there (no big deal, I survived).

My biggest adventure by far was, when me and my one year older cousin (he was 6 or 7 then) took the road to walk from one city (Chernomoretz, Bulgaria) to another (Burgas) - here is the route on google maps - http://goo.gl/EfRMsK - It's 26km - and we walked, took some bus, did a lot of stupid things (bent signs, ate stuff that we should not do). But overall had pretty good time. We started off like 8:00-9:00AM in the morning, and showed up at my grandparents apartment somewhere in afternoon. It was all because I thought we need an important plastic truck which was there.

Then with my other grandma we went couple of times to her village in the summer, and there I would roam the village, river, forest ( http://goo.gl/8HyhbQ ) - and come back late at night, sometimes 10:00pm, sometimes 2:00am - and I was 2nd or 3rd grade.

I guess she was afraid, but one thing she knew, or kind of expected it - is that other people if told that I'm lost would look for me, scorn me if they had to.

In short: I had respect of everyone bigger than me, and everyone else too. The situation in USA currently is that the first time you open your mouth against some kid to scorn him, and you might end up in prison. And that might be the right thing to do... But it's very unhelpful, since the kids no longer respect you.

It's quite different now with our son (soon to be 6) - he grows much faster than me emotionally, intellectually - he asks things that I would've asked much later in my kids' life. On top of that he's supposed to start his real life working much older than me (if he's willing to finish uni/ etc.)

Got the "Dangerous book for Boys" and would seen read it to him. I have to learn some american stuff after all (for example I do only understand the rules of soccer and basketball) :)

VLM7• 13 years ago

Bulgaria in the 80s sounds about like suburban Wisconsin in the 80s.

One interesting observation is that many women (such as my mom) were stay at home moms or part timers at most. Despite Mom being around all the time, we roamed pretty wild. Modern standard is to have both parents work AKA latchkey kids, etc. First guess would be without Mom (and neighbor Moms) around, kids would go totally wild compared to old days. The opposite has happened, which is interesting. I know when we drove our mom nuts, we would be deported to the park, and we were hardly the only kids to drive our moms nuts and end up playing in the park.

Florin_Andrei3• 13 years ago

I'm an Eastern Bloc kid too, I can relate to a lot of what you said.

bsullivan012• 13 years ago

"In short: I had respect of everyone bigger than me, and everyone else too. The situation in USA currently is that the first time you open your mouth against some kid to scorn him, and you might end up in prison."

If it hasn't changed yet, it will soon change in Bulgaria too. Maybe not go in jail but the kid will you to "go f yourself," or throw rocks at you.

vezzy-fnord2• 13 years ago

Bulgaria and other Balkan countries are just so radically different from all perspectives compared to the USA and Western Europe, however. Socio-economical, socio-political, national psychological...

You have virtually endless freedom to roam due to a different general mindset, and quite lax law enforcement, as opposed to the ubiquitous warrior police state that is in the USA.

Florin_Andrei3• 13 years ago

Not my children.

Thanks to parental controls, they have two hours of access to the flickering rectangle during week-end days, and 1 hour Mon-Fri. Even that seems like a lot. But anyway, that's it.

Once the OS kicks them out of the session, I "kick" them out of the house (metaphorically, but on a jocular/stern tone). Go and do some mischief outside.

tedks5• 13 years ago

Great, I'm sure they'll have a lot in common with their peers and a wide familiarity with their generation's culture when it comes time for them to interact with people whose lives you don't control.

As someone who also was forbidden to engage with popular culture (for vastly different reasons but essentially the same effects), I think it's great for children to grow up alienated and unable to connect with their peer group. This forces them to develop as individuals rather than as cogs in the machine of society.

tcskeptic2• 13 years ago

A total allowance of 9 hours per week is hardly being forbidden to engage with popular culture.

Asterick6• 13 years ago

This is a nice article. I think this longform format provides a lot more substantial and stimulating topics/content than any other online websites or digital magazines. This (Aeon) and Nautilus (http://nautil.us) are probably the only two online magazines that are worthwhile to read.

diminoten• 13 years ago

Having grown up in the 90s and 00s, I disagree. I had tons of time to play, and you know what I did with it? I played. Outside at first, then video games, and I still play now and then when I find time.

I've got a 13 yr old brother and a 10 yr old sister, and they play. Anecdotally, this article is bunk. Kids play still, even if they are getting shuttled off to various practices.

As a counterpoint to the rise in mental illnesses in children, isn't our improved ability to test for illness, and our increased willingness to diagnose mental disorders as much at play as any other cause?

In the 5 or so minutes it took me to read this article, I can't help but think of this as yet another example of, "my childhood was great, the next generation lost something!" that can be seen throughout history. I'm no expert, and I know nothing more than a layman does on the topic, but in my limited experiences, I've found no such suggested problem.

I guess I just want my experience to be added to the data pile.

unimpressive• 13 years ago

I played until the other kids stopped coming outside to play. Even then I still played a little, riding my scooter around the neighborhood. But after I ran out of friends where I lived (They either got sick, moved away, or decided they were too cool for me.) I got bored sitting by myself outside and started trolling the Internet or playing video games more.

Grew up in the 2000's.

FoeNyx• 13 years ago

slightly HS : I find it difficult to start to read an article when the first image caption has such a blatant error "In the country of Le Grandes Meaulnes" ( vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Meaulnes )

(but then I remember it's hard to master a second language and that this comment is probably full of 'blatant' errors)

zwieback• 13 years ago

The pendulum is swinging back already. I think this article is a few years behind the trend. Also, the idea that US schools are just about testing, testing, testing is a bunch of Quatsch.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

look it's simple - there is a combination of fairly simple factors:

    l - parental distance (length)
    t - parental distance (time)
    F - Lord Of the Flies coefficient
    d - diversity of other children within reach

    TotalPositivePlay =   (l x t )
                          --------  raised to power of d
                             F

in short, if a group of parents take their children to a park and can see them a hundred yards off for an hour, only have to intervene once to stop them bullying the snivelly kid, and almost every race, creed and class are represented in the kids - it will be a great day out.

So build for open or natural spaces, with good lines of sight and minimal killers like cars, allow parents the time to relax and realise its ok for Jimmy to run off for an hour because the shopping can wait, and then let them teach kids not to follow their instincts but actually respect others smaller and weaker then them, we might get over our fears.

yes we lean too much to DVDs and so on. but two weeks ago my kids and I painted cardboard dragons, picked blue series from a bush, ran off and hid in the woods, fell off swings and slides, made two meals and fought with foam swords. oh and I felt I just put them in front of the TV all the time.

lighten up FFS. Cars, commuting and the easy lure of the TV has hurt how we bring up children - but they also don't feel isolated, bored, or unprepared for a rapidly changing new world.

but yes, lets cut back on the organised activites and just to to the park more often.

tudorw• 13 years ago

http://fairplayforchildren.org/ has a lot of good play related resources, it is a very small organisation so go easy on the site!

famo• 13 years ago

Kids need some or all of the following things when growing up:

- a creek or open stormwater drain to play in, be careful during rain - a field big enough to experiment with golf in without killing someone - a covert campground as a base to launch fire cracker attacks on the local youth group - somewhere to do wheelies without being hit by a car - abandoned stuff to explore, the older and dirtier the better - a haunted looking house to be scared of (containing an elderly person who occasionally appears at the window) - a beach, island or isthmus, to play Robinson Crusoe on - some dirt to create a marble obstacle course in - a hoop and stick to make running more useful - a local cop who will make you do chores for trying to steal dinner from the local prawn farm - cane fields to get lost in - loose rules to a handful of sports - a tall tree with branches overhanging a river to tie a rope swing to - some kind of farm nearby where one can meet a horse, cow, goat or sheep

I'd also like to suggest a trampoline, but I'm keeping it out of the list because you have to buy it. It is imperative though for the early stages of learning to do somersaults in mid-air.

Thinking of all of these things from my childhood makes me somewhat lament the fact that I now live in a tiny apartment in Sydney and hardly ever leave the city.

speeder2• 13 years ago

This is awesome.

My early childhood I was more free, the school had less rules and structure, and more importantly, I had loads of free time that my mother let me spend with my friends that lived in the same building.

I remember how we learned not only physical stuff, but also theoretical one, purely out of curiosity, like one night where we all sat on the ground, and wondered why the sky was blue even at night. (resulting into a couple of us that knew how to read go read books, so that then we could impress others with our newfound knowledge, resulting into everyone learning why the sky was blue).

Also, when I was around 5 years old, I had a female friend on school that I grew very close, we became natural leaders of our class, we were the most intelligent students (not hard when your class has 8 people, the female friend was asian, and my parents gave me lots of books since before I could read), the most playful ones (when others wanted a new game, they would ask us to invent it), and although individually we were the usual bully victims (since we were the nerdy types with glasses), we two were respected, other kids looked to us to what to do when shit happened (like when one girl got hurt by a bee, me and my female friend quickly figured how to carry her from the place where she was, and find a adult, and ice).

Also I visited her home a couple times, and although I was very young, I might say that I DID saw her as someone I wanted to be with the rest of my life.

Then the first grade came, it was in a huge school (I moved from a school with 80 students to one with 7500 students), my parents told me (correctly) that now things would be "serious" and that I would start to learn how to work (I guess, "work" as in be in a corporate environment).

Although I changed schools many times after, some things were constant:

First, I did not gave a fuck for whatever the school taught, my first 2 years (first and second grade) teachers saw me as the stupid kid (because I never finished my copy of the blackboard, getting distracted by other things, and also because I frequently failed to finish my tests on time, both situations would result into me being berated, and then me crying), when I learned to "play along" instead I became the genius (ie: all tests I had the maximum score), not because I learned what teachers taught me, but because I already (before first grade) had as hobby read the school books the fastest as I could (I love reading, sometimes I spend 3, 4 hours daily reading wikipedia, or everything linked here in HN), and because I disliked getting berated for not copying stuff or not doing homework.

But that time, I also learned that the other kids were NOT my friends, they were competitors, they were people to crush, destroy or annihilate, with better grades, or just go and punch them in the face when they piss me off and I will get away with it, because if I avoided that, they would do with me... Until the fourth grade I was bullied heavily (well, I was bullied until I left university), but on when I reached the fifth grade I started to learn that being cruel, being fearsome, destroying other people, made them bully you less... I still could not bring myself to throw a rock into a girl head (like some guy in my seventh grade class did), because I thought that going to downright evil was not the day, but doing any bullying that would not get teachers worried, was worth it, like sabotaging other people, setting them to fail, usually all that as revenge, never first strike, because then people would come for you, but revenge, ooh, that was sweet. The sweetest one was kicking a guy mouth in the middle of a group photo (all students of the school, lined up in a ramp, with all staff of the school looking, the guy was annoying me the entire day, and decided as final trick of the day, steal my hat and make me lose my balance so the photo captured me in ankward manner, and I decided that the best course of action was kick him in the mouth so hard that made him tumble down the ramp, and made all girls run around screaming in panic).

Only about 4 years ago (I am 25) now I started to realise how all this is fucked up, I became a sort of psycho, in my final school years I envied the columbine people and wanted to do the same...

Now I am playing catchup, my first kiss I was 23 (at 23 years old, is the first time that I felt for a girl what I felt for that one when I was 5/6), I left college realising that if I had not joined it in first place and instead took a job, I would be better at the job and would have more money (currently 50% of my money is to pay debt, and my net worth is deeply negative), and I have no friends (except one of the guys of the building I lived when I was 5, IF I can really consider him a friend, it is already 2 years that I don't visit him), at weekends I have nothing to do but stay at home or see my SO, when I need money for my startup, there is noone to ask, when I want to play split screen multiplayer games, there is noone to ask either, board games is a family thing only, and when former school people come to talk with me (usually because they need me...), I still feel really weird (ie: I feel lots of things, among them desire to revenge, fear, desire to murder them, ressentment, frustation...).

I feel like if my life between 8 years old and 20 years old was non-existant, like a black hole in my history, something that left more negative things in me than positive.

I wish there was a way, to do it all over again, to learn how to have friends, to have playful time with people I can trust, to not have this stupid debts, to not be unhealthy like I am now (I only learned how to eat properly recently, I am struggling very heard to get my weight below 100kg, I did managed to reach 99kg last year, but I am 118kg now), or not be weak as I am now (not having much physical play means I struggle to carry everyday items with my arms sometimes, my dad that never went to the gym and is a engineer, can carry stuff much heavier than I can, my grandpa is always much stronger than me, if he wants he can lift me! also he never went to the gym, and his hobby right now is lottery statistics, he spent most of his time of the day writing numbers in a sheet).

My first girlfriend broke with me after I told her I would not send my kids to school, no matter what. (in Brazil this is dangerous, since it is a crime and government DO arrest you if you refuse to send kids to school).

I feel like mandatory "education" is one of the most evil things you can do to a kid.

I DO prize some sort of schools, but only if the kids WANT to be there, because a school where schools don't want to be there, they use their time ruining the day of those that want. (ie: when a teacher DID managed to get my attention, usually talking about physics, someone else would be throwing erasers at the teacher, or kicking my chair, or hiding my backpack, or atheists stealing my bible and playing soccer with it, then calling themselves rational and reasonable...)

vezzy-fnord2• 13 years ago

Thank you for sharing this story.

Have you read any books by John Taylor Gatto or Charlotte Iserbyt? If not, the entire compulsory school agenda will be swiftly illuminated once you do.

dugmartin• 13 years ago

I guess my kids didn't get the memo. They had an early release today from school today and are in the backyard building a teepee out of sticks with a friend and playing a game that apparently involves a lot of running and giggles (at least that is what I hear inside in my home office).

My oldest did ask if she could play Minecraft as soon as she got home but I told her no and that she should go build something real (I guess that is where the teepee idea came from).

peterwwillis• 13 years ago

Sigh.

Without proper nutrition, they won't develop properly, to say nothing of being able to play. I know it's unrelated, but it seems like everybody wants to ignore the pink elephant in the room that American children aren't getting fed well enough. Plenty of research has shown malnutrition causes a host of issues in children that can affect them the rest of their life[4].

22 Million American children are on food stamps[1]. Keep in mind that 90% of those food stamps are redeemed by the third week of the month (the average meal per person comes out to about $1.50), and more than half of food bank customers (who come back at least 6 months out of the year) are food stamp recipients[2]. So families already can't afford to feed their kids on subsidies alone. On top of that, the cuts this November in SNAP will make that existing shortfall more drastic.[3]

I guess I just wanted to remind people that we're ignoring some bigger picture issues here, probably because they're difficult and uncomfortable. Sorry.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/11/th... [2] http://feedingamerica.org/how-we-fight-hunger/programs-and-s... [3] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3899 [4] http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/family_home/family/childcare/C...

(my apologies to the international folks for having to read this rant; your children are probably better off than many of ours)

john_b• 13 years ago

I don't think the author would have any objection to your points. But malnutrition is, to a large extent, an economic problem stemming from the fact that, in most Western countries, healthy foods are generally more expensive than unhealthy ones. The author is describing a problem that is largely cultural, and which requires an entirely different approach to solve.

Daniel_Newby• 13 years ago

Your data is mostly lies. The actual fact is that, other than iodine deficiency, malnutrition has to be extreme and prolonged to cause developmental problems. Not even the worst privation of WWII in Europe caused noticeable developmental changes in children compared to the pre- and post-war cohorts.

The data on American children show the opposite of starvation. IQs continue to climb, height and growth rate remain high, and the age of puberty continues to fall. This is especially true for the "deprived" Africans in your references, who have the fastest IQ growth of any Americans and an astonishingly low age of puberty (8 and falling for girls).

Your references trot out the high rate of welfare handouts to the poorest Africans. That's because they have an average IQ below 80 and most of their jobs have been taken over by machines. This is the expected transition to a post-scarcity society.

kyberias• 13 years ago

Wait. Does the author offer any evidence for these claims: "What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it."

Just "thinking about it" proves this?

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

You have to dress "get off my lawn" up a little, or else no one will pay you any attention. The irony of "think of the children not getting enough outside time" coming from these guys, self included, who spend too much time commenting on Hacker News won't escape the astute observer either.

c2prods• 13 years ago

I'm fascinated by how schools methodically kill any sense of creativity. The OLPC team once conducted an experiment where they left a few tablets to kids who didn't know how to read nor how to use a computer. Yet, in 5 month, they learned how to hack Android and enable stuff that had been previously disabled by the OLPC team (I believe for security reasons, some sort of parental control). What this example illustrates is how schools create clone workers rather than hackers. And I strongly believe our society needs more hackers, as they apparently are the only ones to be able to foster our world's development.

route66• 13 years ago

Yes, it's only an anecdote, one of these which this kind of article provokes; nevertheless it summarizes the content nicely.

I was giving guitar lessons some 20 years ago, among my students a well-mannered and friendly little, maybe seven years of age. Being a bit shy he did not tell much about himself, but he did not study much and I tried to find out if he was bored with me or the instrument.

"It's just, that I do not have so much time to study. I also have recorder lessons on Thursday and I get some extra private lessons because it's not going so well in school"

As he continued he revealed a stunning package of forced child labour extending into the weekend. Keyboard lessons, swimming, soccer (training and competitions), judo (also contests every second weekend). Not a single free minute.

Halfway the year he stopped. On the time of the guitar lessons his parents had scheduled regular counselling with a psychologist.

This happened 20 years ago (in the Netherlands). While we tried to find a kindergarten for our oldest sun two years ago, we learned that we could opt for mathematical and English training in some of them (we live in Portugal right now).

I understand that parenting also means: offering your child a future. For some this means: education, keeping them busy, making them competitive as early as possible. Not having done "the best" for your child: a nightmare, a failure! But often doing your best is: having trust, do nothing and let things grow. No need to hack your children.

notacoward• 13 years ago

So are parents.

I'm not complaining for myself, because incomes among programmers give us much better options than most people, but I really feel sorry for people in the middle class. Two parents working to make ends meet doesn't leave a lot of time/energy for them to play either by themselves or with their children. That's part of why kids get dumped into organized but relatively low-value activities; it's the only way the parents get a break between waking and kids' bedtimes. Unfortunately, it's not good for any of them, or for society as a whole.

Tichy6• 13 years ago

True, but what puzzles me is that few people seem to object to that state of affairs. Maybe it is just that TV is that good at soothing emotions, or people are already used to being worker drones from their childhood?

shrikant• 13 years ago

"Temporarily embarrassed millionaires" syndrome?

ausjke• 13 years ago

Excellent article, can't agree with it more. What can we do about this? Home schooling them? Move to countryside and telecommute for job? I can accept either of the options, but the sad truth is that, we can not find the right communities for kids to do non-constructed play anymore, as everyone else is doing what the article describes no matter where we go and what we do. The only option is probably to have many kids so they play together within the family, while moving to countryside.

Havoc• 13 years ago

Countries with a billion USD Lego budget would go a long way in saving many social evils imo.

tedks5• 13 years ago

The author makes a good point and seemingly provides good data to support their thesis, but it doesn't overcome the bias I have against several argument templates which are almost always wrong:

* Idealization of "hunter-gatherer" societies -- this is the root of many a fad diet and self-improvement methodology, but whenever I'm faced with a choice of doing something a hunter-gatherer would have done or doing what I can do now in modernity, I almost always choose modernity. Medicine, sanitation, pooping indoors, and not dying at 20 is very appealing. The "freedom" afforded to people in the past is a great attractor (as a communist in undergrad, I'd frequently hear how people in pre-industrial societies rarely worked, and how THAT was the inflection point where everything went to shit). But ultimately, most of us agree the future is better than the past.

* Argument ad Evolution -- Evolution frequently produces working machines, but it nearly never produces optimal machines. No architect would design a building with one central support structure, and no camera-maker would occlude the light sensor with a wire. Most of the advances of human society have come from disregarding evolution and the "natural" order of things, not from adhering to them.

* "____ cannot be taught" -- in this case, creativity. Artistic schools have existed for millennia; whole areas of modernity are dedicated to creatively solving problems, and it would be very surprising if there were really no verbally expressible heuristics or even systematic exercises that lead to a person subjected to them becoming better at creating ideas. I'm not sure what the measures used in the article are, and am skeptical of them because good measures are hard to create. But I can note that society as a whole remains fairly creative, and that we haven't descended into a pit of Idiocracy as of yet.

As with most things, it's likely that some combination of the two approaches is correct. The current educational system and parental culture could probably use significant overhaul, but it's also not currently based in very much science. It's likely that whatever optimal solution exists relies on brain machinery created by evolution, but the way that machinery is honed will be by a process that has never existed in nature (similar to how the fat-creation process is honed by hyperstimulating foods). I would personally like it if the best way for education to happen were by a process that was fun, engaging, and centered around the autonomy of learners, but that may not be the case, and I'd rather have well-educated and capable future generations of humans than have humans that are as similar as possible to their ancestors.

mikevm3• 13 years ago

Medicine, sanitation, pooping indoors, and not dying at 20 is very appealing.

IIRC, the low life expectancy of hunter-gatherers is mostly due to the high infant/child mortality. You can see similar life expectancy graphs in several animal species. Basically, once you reach a certain age, you have a high probability of living up to a decently high age.

Regarding "Medicine, sanitation, pooping indoors", well, all of these became problems because of the Agricultural Revolution, where people lived in densely populated areas together with their domesticated animals. Diseases slowly spread from the animals to the humans, and the density and lack of sanitization increased mortality by helping disease spread quickly. The Agricultural Revolution also forced humans to do back breaking jobs for which our bodies were not built for (working hunched over in the fields, or carrying heavy weights on our backs), and shrunk our varied diet into mostly eating grains and grain-based foods.

So I think you should probably re-think your poor view of hunter-gatherer societies.

ordinary• 13 years ago

What's wrong with having a poor view of societies with high infant mortality?

tedks5• 13 years ago

People always quote this, and I always wonder why it makes any difference.

People in hunter-gatherer societies weren't "more healthy" than we are (as you imply in a later comment). Most people in hunter-gatherer societies died as infants. I don't consider that healthy, and I consider infants people.

On average, most hunter-gatherers died at 20. In reality, virtually all hunter-gatherers died at 0, and the few that survived might live to 60.

Again: this is the "things were better in the past" / "evolution is always right" argument template, and it's virtually always wrong.

EGreg2• 13 years ago

The classroom should be inverted. Each kid should get an ipad or some other tablet, with lessons delivered at home from a marketplace of "best courses" that the schools purchase. Every school day the school could have quizzes to tedt whether the student learned the previous day. If they missed some topics or nuances, they'd get it fixed later that day in smaller classes with more individual attention. If they got everything they can just go home and enjoy the day.

The motivation for kids to learn would be that they won't have to be stuck in school all day (and be accused of having ADD) and they won't miss out playing basketball wrh their friends if they learn everything the night before. It also makes them practice autonomy, self-direction and time management, and lessons by a really good teacher can be delivered to hundreds of thousands of kids instead of 30 -- with multimedia. In addition, kids would be able to paude it, grab lunch with friends, study with friends, etc. And yet they'd still practice being accountable but on a day-by-day basis so the price of "failure" is low.

School should be for social collaboration, remedial help, and practicing. That's where the tutors should be, not at home. Home should be a place of comfort and learning. The internet contains so much information, and by integrating lessons with tablet computers, kids get to develop modern habits of researching stuff online. They might even learn to manage the ADD that comes with being on a million sites at once. If they get restless they can go play basketball or explore and do something physical outside.

Such a school will not happen, sadly, because the goal of schools is to act as a daycare center to keep kids occupied most of the day -- while both parents work. This is what "a good economy" looks like?

This is the kind of school I'd like to send my kids to. Sadly the closest approximation right now is homescholing.

betterunix• 13 years ago

"a marketplace of "best courses" that the schools purchase"

The last thing we need is more attempts to shoehorn market-based approaches to education into our schools. Ignoring the matter of corruption among the school boards that would choose such courses (take a look at how textbooks are purchased for comparison) and the matter of politcally motivated interests that would undermine whatever market you manage to set up, we do not need the sort of close-to-the-margins, race-to-the-bottom, divide-and-conquer-the-customers approach that markets produce in other fields. Markets produce the kind of results that evolution produces -- sometimes beautiful things, sometimes disgusting things.

Higher education has already been undermined by market-based approaches. By focusing on what students are willing to buy, universities have lost sight of their academic mission. You see it in CS departments, where tough courses are watered down, where theoretical topics are pushed aside to make room for vocational training. You see it in humanities departments, assuming you can even locate them. You see it in the money spent trying to make schools look like suburban malls during a time when library hours are being curtailed to "save money."

I would also be wary of creating a monoculture, where the most popular curricula become universal and everyone comes out of school with the exact same way of thinking about the world. There is something to be said for encouraging some amount of diversity in our education system -- which is what happens when teachers develop their own curricula.

EGreg2• 13 years ago

What's better, having courses delivered at home which are specifically created because of an incentive (money, wide distribution, etc.) with great production values, or having a huge proportion of the students be exposed to subpar courses delivered en masse in a classroom where everyone takes the same notes, and if they go to the bathroom or skip a class they miss something?

If there's a particular math lesson that was specially designed to teach kids in an awesome way, e.g. by an expert in teaching micro-steps one by one (and possibly be tailored to each kid through interactive features) ... why shouldn't more kids have it? Of course you should videotape it, and distribute it to as many kids as possible. And all this is possible, far more cheaply than paying an army of math teachers -- some worse than others -- to deliver "lectures" to kids sitting still 8 hours a day in class.

armenarmen• 13 years ago

in my neighborhood growing up, from time to time a parent would come and try 'coach' us during pickup football games. At this point about 1/3 of us would quit playing. Buzzkilling.

adventured• 13 years ago

I had that childhood in Appalachia in the 1980s, while still having a TV / VCR / Nintendo. During the day my mother would kick us all outside however, so I spent most of my time in the woods playing, or shooting hoops in the driveway, or playing wiffle ball and so on. Usually weekend nights were dedicated to video games, and daytime was for being outside.

Interestingly however, in the last 15 years apparently the area where I grew up has seen a substantial decline in participation by children in sports and other activities. What caused that? I can only think of three possibilities: 1) decline in parenting 2) obesity and or diet 3) cheap, plentiful digital gadgets (or a combination). Parents seem to be almost universally allowing their children to obsessively play with smart phones, tablets, etc. And many parents I know buy their kids big screen TV's for their rooms and video game consoles.

ianb3• 13 years ago

Coincidentally I just came upon the term "Concerted Cultivation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation) which describes the modern middle class typical parenting, the very thing that leaves kids with little time to play. Working back from that you get to the book Unequal Childhoods which contrasts middle class and working class parenting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_Childhoods#Parenting_St...). I find the contrast interesting:

"Concerted Cultivation: The parenting style, favored by middle-class families, in which parents encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority, and enroll their children in extensive organized activity participation. This style helps children in middle-class careers, teaches them to question people in authority, develops a large vocabulary, and makes them comfortable in discussions with people of authority. However, it gives the children a sense of entitlement.

"Achievement of Natural Growth: The parenting style, favored by working-class and lower-class families, in which parents issue directives to their children rather than negotiations, encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and do not structure their children's daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method has benefits that prepare the children for a job in the "working" or "poor-class" jobs, teaches the children to respect and take the advice of people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age."

----

When contrasted against Achievement of Natural Growth it's not so surprising that parents have decided to take another path. Simple romanticism about the past isn't really that helpful. Just kick the kid out of the house and let them play? People talk about the lack of peers that aren't similarly scheduled up, but I see kids all the time who are left free... and I'm not comfortable with how those kids are developing in that environment. Not that they aren't fine playmates, but it's not a kind of parenting I would want to imitate. And a lot of the efforts pushing for more structured time (more afterschool activities, full day kindergarten, universal preschool) are directed towards those kids that need it. But of course we all get washed up in it, even if increased structure is only needed by a segment of the population.

There are other models. Consider for instance Tools Of The Mind (http://www.toolsofthemind.org/), a preschool program that has shown surprising success. It incorporates a lot of pretend play, but adds structure to that pretend play. But it's not authoritarian structure. Adults are really important to children, we have a lot to offer. We can enhance play, get kids out of ruts, enhance the environment, help kids match up their desires with productive paths of learning. Which also means giving them independence at the right time. And sometimes at the wrong time. And sometimes kids need to be understimulated. But it's not that simple.

From the article: "You can’t teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom. Little children, before they start school, are naturally creative." I don't buy that. Teaching creativity might be going a bit far, but it can absolutely be nurtured and inspired. Children, when just left alone, DO NOT DO WELL. I know just interjecting myself in a kids play for 30 seconds, at the right time, can considerably improve the creativity of their play. My nephew has been pretty into playing with blocks lately, but kind of repeating himself. I started making a bridge with a ramp, and he's been obsessed with those forms for the last few days, trying new configurations, larger structures, bridges across corners, all sorts of stuff. Real creativity, he's not just copying what I did. But he needed a little inspiration.

Do you just let kids work out all their problems between each other on their own? Sometimes kids work things out well. Sometimes they fight, often they bully, sometimes they are deliberately cruel, or depressingly meek. Setting up a bunch of rules is a bad solution too. Never hit! Now you can't play fight with paper towel rolls. And you can't learn how to interact physically without hurting each other. Always share! Or: always ask before taking! Or: turns! But sometimes one kid really wants something, and the other kid just happens to be holding that thing. Or sometimes a kid is just immitating, they ignored the toy until they saw someone else enjoying it. But the negotiated response is more sophisticated than any rule. Ask, trade, offer, come up with a creative way to both play with the toy. Acknowledge that not all kids communicate well with language, but body language is often more than enough to work on. But this doesn't happen on its own. As the kids get older, they don't communicate constructively on their own, or resolve their own conflicts, but they can do those things. They need help. Not rules, not structures to define their interactions, but they need engaged adults (or older children).

I don't really disagree with this article. But it's a critique that lacks empathy with the parental decisions that got us to where we are, and it does not respond to the concerns those parents have had. I think there's a way to achieve both, parenting isn't a choice somewhere on the line between two extremes, there's no limit to the number of novel and engaged choices available to us.

dgreensp• 13 years ago

A good preschool will teach everything you mention, while letting kids play pretty much 100% of the time, with just enough adult interaction to provide structure and guidance. It exists and no one campaigns for it to be longer or stricter. Preschool is not the problem, and I don't think it's the subject of the article. It's ages 4-18.

I don't remember any lesson that adults were to be questioned and authority challenged in my preppy, over-scheduled suburban upbringing. Mostly I just internalized the value of sitting, shutting up, doing what I was told, being smart, getting the right answer, and laboring constantly on meaningless work products.

You've identified the useful 10% or so of school and used it to argue against a straw man of no school and an idle life.

ianb3• 13 years ago

The kids in my life are young at the moment, so I'm biased towards the experiences at those younger ages – and certainly more poisonous structures lurk as they get older. On the other hand, I'm not sure why you think I'm talking about school. The article is mostly not about school, and my reaction isn't about school, it's about the hours outside of school.

And no, preschools do not generally allow children to be physical with each other, and they tend towards rule-based conflict resolution instead of direct engagement, which are some of the specific examples I brought up.

jes51992• 13 years ago

Then how do upper-class families raise children?

LekkoscPiwa• 13 years ago

Very interesting post. Wouldn't you say that this what the Arrticle Author proposes is a mixture of "Achievement of Natural Growth" with "Concerted Cultivation". Shortly speaking we let kids question authority and let them play at the same time?

Then my understanding of the article was that the very nature of homo sapiens is that before they are adults they will copy and imitate adults around them with other kids. So, just letting them do it and not interfering with the process is better than restricting it with parents guidelines, i.e. let the kids discover what adults do via play in their own way. Then main benefit being that you will not kill their natural interest in important stuff they have to learn.

My 3 year plays with the letters and numbers all the time using different toys, including one of these "kid laptops" we bought her. Just this morning she woke us up repeating alphabet after the "kid laptop". She has natural interest in it. Why? Because she is not forced to sit still in a chair and repeat the letters after a grumpy "important" adult. She would hate that then. The idea is that learning via play is not only more effective, but the natural way we homo sapiens do it. Taking it away makes us socially handicapped. As the play happens usually in cooperation with other kids. That was at least how I understood the article.

ianb3• 13 years ago

If you sat down with her and did letter flashcards, she'd probably love that too. Probably love it more! Kids do not dislike the attention of adults. Schools often manage to both ignore and constrain the child. This is what rules are so good for: they allow for disinterested control.

hoffcoder• 13 years ago

There is this oft-repeated idea in modern culture: do what you love, and love what you do. But how do you find your passion? How does a person know what to aim for in life? I think it is the extra curricular activities that you do which determine if you'd find your passion. All the time that you spend in tinkering with stuff, reading books, playing games, hanging out with friends after school is the time you could find that. It is true that those passions change with age, but with any luck and a good teacher / parent) those passions could become your vocations. I remember the intial scene of the movie 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' and realize that childhood is that time when we are free to experiment, unfettered by society's rules.

Schools teach us how to be disciplined and work hard, but a creative and a critical mind requires more to survive. It requires an atmosphere of similar kind of people, a place to keep on practicing its creativity.

pintglass• 13 years ago

We have two problems:

1. Forced activities (sports, music, dance, etc.) and having to drive and fly all over with kids for these activities. These activities do not let kids imagine or have long amounts of free-play, though the arts aren't terrible in that regard, and they do foster relationships which might help your kids make friends to go play and have free time. So it is a trade off.

2. Too much homework. When homework is 3-4 hours a night in elementary school, something is wrong. If you are a strict homeschooler that has the kids working 24/7 or have kids in a private school where they spend 3 hours doing homework too often, talk to the teachers, and if that doesn't help, consider public school.

Patrick_Devine• 13 years ago

I try to let my kids be as free range as possible. They don't watch any tv and organized play is kept to a minimum. I think it works pretty well, however any problems that come up are usually due to other people freaking out.

Either I get a lot of "you don't let your kids watch tv?!" type comments, or a random stranger will freak out because my kids are not tethered to me. I've had strangers stop while walking/riding their bike down my road and ask my daughters (the oldest is five) where they live while I'm working in the garden in the next yard over.

I honestly have no proof that raising kids like this is any better than letting them watch media or be in organized activities all the time. My reasoning is mostly based on how I was raised. I loved it and feel like I turned out reasonably well.

jes51992• 13 years ago

I love the free-range kids movement, and if I have kids I'll join it,

but I really don't understand the no-TV thing. When I was a kid I filled my room with televisions and computer monitors, and I watched two tv shows while I listened to top 40 radio while I alternated between playing Mario Bros and writing Pascal programs. It was the magic formula for helping me think clearly.

As an adult, I live in a no-TV house and I work in a quiet room on a single laptop, and I can never concentrate as well as I did back then.

hownottowrite• 13 years ago

http://archive.org/details/playman00groogoog

MichaelMoser1232• 13 years ago

Children play less on their own, because they MUST be controlled; on every level of society the level of control is tightened, everything must be regulated by some authority.

Eric Schmidt is right 'surveillance ... is the nature of our society'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/13/eric-schmidt-go...

Maybe its just that society is becoming more and more authoritarian ?

MichaelMoser1232• 13 years ago

My daughter was at a Democratic school in Israel last year, and things did not work out for us quite well for us.

One problem I see that they don't like to discipline any wrongdoings, the proper way for that is for the collective to decide at the 'commission for discipline''; my daughter was in constant terror of being referred to the 'discipline commission'; kids who where more violent generally ignored this threat, as a result there are few means of handling/discipline real offenders. In a way the result that stronger and more rowdy kids are favored and so they tend to impose their will on others.

Another problem is that somehow humans always build hierarchies, so there is no such thing as a egalitarian society, even in grade A. So unconstrained 'Bullying Betty' again tends to get her will against all others; now if her parent is a teacher in the institution than that will somehow get 'bullying Betty' another head start; In our place I could discern several hierarchies, somehow at the center there always were the kids whose parents worked at the institution.

Also kids tend to compare themselves to others, even if there are no grades they will create their own distinctions;

Now another major problem is that still kids will have to get some input from grown ups; the requirement to learn how to read and write will put you in front of a teacher; the teacher in our case would have to handle a loud class where every pupil would be on a different level ( they can walk out of classes ), I think the teacher in our case was not up to the task; now of course the results were blamed on our daughter; interestingly once she got out of the institution my daughter started to learn well.

So for me, as for other similar cases at our school the bright idea did not work out; We put our daughter into a general school, and she was thankful for the change, she does not look back;

I would say that the ideal of democratic schools is similar to the ideal of Communism: the ideal sounds great, but the implementation always turns the idea into shit.

Children are suffering a severe deficit of play

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