This is a problem that I noticed as my four children were growing up! (The youngest is now 23 years old.) Many of their friends quit imaginative play and play with toys at a very young age. Part of the problem was the over-scheduling that we see today. Since I had four children rather close together, I limited their after-school activities, so they had plenty of time for creative play, with positive effects on their abilities as adults! (I also had a pretty high tolerance for play-related clutter.)
I also teach at the college level, and I see many young adults with strikingly impoverished imaginative lives.
I also believe that the lack of play contributes to the tendency of children to grow up too soon; if all that a fourth or fifth-grader does is listen to pop music and dress to attract the opposite sex, why should we be surprised about premature sexual activity?
How about the author’s description of modern American parents:
“Behind the numbers is adult behavior as well as children’s: Parents furiously tapping on their BlackBerrys in the living room, too stressed by work demands to tolerate noisy games in the background. Weekends consumed by soccer, lacrosse and other sports leagues, all organized and directed by parents. The full slate of lessons (chess, tae kwon do, Chinese, you name it) and homework beginning in the earliest grades.”
Do more thanBehind the numbers is adult behavior as well as children’s: Parents furiously tapping on their BlackBerrys in the living room, too stressed by work demands to tolerate noisy games in the background. Weekends consumed by soccer, lacrosse and other sports leagues, all organized and directed by parents. The full slate of lessons (chess, tae kwon do, Chinese, you name it) and homework beginning in the earliest grades.”
Maybe 5% of American parents fit that description. The author must know that. But the others don’t count. They aren’t people. They aren’t “us”.
Creepy.
When I was in 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th grade all those years ago in the ’50’s, play consisted of the following from my mother: “Go outside and play.” And we did. We imagined things, we made roads in the dirt, later we had baseball and football games, we sat around bored. In other words, we were allowed to live in a kids’ world separate from adults. We were allowed to simply enjoy life and have fun. We ran around all day, we rode bikes, we looked for weird plants and ugly bugs. All of that is gone now. And it is a damn shame. Now that I am a geezer, I look back on those times as almost heaven on earth. We were free to be kids. And innocent kids at that. I spent one whole summer being Sandy Koufax. Even took one of Dad’s old T-shirts and used a crayon to put “Dodgers” and number 32 on the front. Today’s children are missing sooooo much.
No recess in elementary school? That’s just sad.
Seems like the logical outcome of control freak statist having children. You can’t just let kids have liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They’ll take stupid risk, run into bullies, play doctor with the girl next door and all that other stuff that makes rugged individuals that deplore a nanny state.
I still remember the interpersonal skills required to organize a sand-lot baseball game and to settle disagreements about whether a pitch was a strike or whether a player was safe–skills that could never have been learned in that game if an adult organized the game and called the strikes and ‘safes’.
And my children, now in their fifties, still remember my response when they complained about being bored: ‘Good. There is no greater stimulus to creativity than boredom.’
One of the founders of quantum mechanics once said: “Understanding of theoretical physics is a children’s play compared with understanding of children’s play”.
My childhood was similar to Don and Jim’s–wonderful with lots of free time and puppies. Another aspect was sharing seasonal chores with my parents. I helped husk corn for freezing, hunted mushrooms, picked berries, helped sew curtains and clothes. These things weren’t boring like making your bed because you only got to do them a few times a year. Yet each was a step in learning skills without the pressure to get an A. When I joined the Brownies at 7, they offered a sewing course, and my mom enrolled me so I would learn how to sew the “right” way. I came home after the first class and told mom that the teacher was an idiot. We had spent the whole class trimming margins from our patterns, and I already knew that the margins would fall off by themselve when you cut through the fabric they were pinned to. I don’t remember mom ever saying, Today, I am going to teach you how to sew. It was organic. Perhaps that was my first lesson in being skeptical of experts.
What’s that old refrain about what is important about real estate: location, location, location.
How about the new refrain about what is important in our kid’s lives: politicize, politicize, politicize!
The new SS: Scumbag Socialists.
“Teaching” kids to play. Sad. Truly sad.
This is utopia after 110 years of effort and about 40 years of intense cooperation and conjugation with ideas that are sugar coated toxic.
“They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.” Freud to Jung on his first visit to the US…
The antithesis of humans with rights is what?
Is the answer what they are working for?
Play is a privilege to those that think humans have no rights. Its always been with the left that if they could see some goodness in something, that they would suppress it, for good is another power in and of itself.
when you want to put people to use as a means of production, play is time wasted from what they can do for you. its all a matter of perspective, from where you choose to stand and what one must take up to stand there.
The passion for destruction is also a creative passion. Mikhail Bakunin
Play is the work of children. It’s very serious stuff. Bob Keeshan
[for those that dont know who that is, that’s captain kangaroo, and in a previous job, Clarabelle the clown]
“Play is just a natural thing that animals do and humans do, but somehow we’ve driven it out of kids.” Kathy Hirsh-Pasek (from the article)
“Kinsey’s quantitative research, and his numbers, were a perfect fit for Rockefeller to utilize the mass media to ‘shape public attitudes and conduct.’ Attitudes were changed through mass communications, which caused a rejection of chastity, self control and moral public governance, as well as increased illicit sexual conduct. ‘Social management’ of this sort was nothing less for Rockefeller than changing America’s way of life, by among other things altering what Kinsey would call ‘breeding patterns’ along an evolutionary or animalistic view of human sexual conduct.” Judith A. Reisman, PhD
“I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over the “savages”. The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down upon them.” Franz Boas
Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928…
I will shorten this to point out that children who are sexuality early on, are no longer children. Boas, Meade, Kinsey are all part of the start of the milieu that children are sexual beings and we as adults are hiding from them important stuff.
“They laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at infidelity…believe explicitly that one love will quickly cure another…adultery does not necessarily mean a broken marriage…divorce is a simple, informal matter…Samoans welcome casual homosexual practices…In such a setting, there is no room for guilt.” Meade
Samoan students that came to america and attended classes where the teachers told them things about themselves that didnt jibe gave opposition,
but she and others were there to legitimate progressive goals, and to find ways to instill the values they needed to achieve those goals (which are unchanged)
Kinsey is the most quoted justification in legal texts.
if you read: Childhood in the promised land: working-class movements and the colonies de By Laura Lee Downs
Communist schoolteacher Celestin Freinet proposed a different solution:
His solution resolved the tension between the two poles of the socialist education — play and social reality — by collapsing this tension in a wholesale denial of the necessity of play to children’s moral and cognitive development: “the child has no natural need to play; she has only the need to work” , that is, the organic need to use her potential for live in an activity that is both individual and social, that has well defined aims that are tailored to size and the possibilities for children.
Basically… [to save space]
They posited that given a choice, between real, creative action, and a mere game, a healthy child would want real (work). (the book referring to the Faucons Rouges)
Freinet created the teachers’ trade union C.E.L. (Coopérative de l’Enseignement Laé¯c) in 1924, from which arose the French teacher movement Modern School Movement (Mouvement de l’é‰cole Moderne). The goal of the C.E.L was to change public education from the inside with the co-operation of teachers.
Read about Otto Felix Kanitz
Kanitz was a proponent of the Kinderrepublik anti-authoritarian education movement.
[Lets say despite becoming a catholic he ended up at buchenwald]
Maria Assunta Isabella (better known as Bella Dodd)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd
Dodd was a graduate of New York University School of Law. She also served as head of the New York State Teachers Union. A schoolteacher and lawyer by profession, Dodd was an organizer for the CPUSA from 1932—1948, and from 1944 to ’48 sat on the CPUSA’s National Council. She was expelled from the CPUSA in 1949
AND you cant forget the illustrious John Dewey, father of education, who turned out to be a spy, but created our school systems structure.
“Operant conditioning shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay,” Skinner
“The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order.”
Willard Givens, Executive Secretary, National Education Association, 1934
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizen, to put down dissent.”
H L Menken (was in the same organization with boas, but changed sides)
If the family is to be ended, as communists, Marxists, feminists, etc say…
Then what do you do with children?
Do you let them play until they are 18?
Or would you just eradicate the sense of play for them so that they get right to work?
“Parent’s attitudes about what they want for their children represent one of the greatest barriers to successful implementation of school-to-work.”
U.S.Department Of Education’s Office Of Educational Research And Improvement
We can sit around and make stuff up, or we can learn the history, and we can see what we have been missing by making stuff up.
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well — by creating the international child of the future.” Professor Chester M. Pierce
Should read what William Z. Foster says in Toward Soviet America 1932…
I just remembered this very relevant essay I wrote a couple of years ago. If you haven’t seen it, take a look, you might it enjoy it. It generated a lot reminiscent commentary.
I have grandsons in kindergarten and 2nd grade. The part about school is right on. There is no recess and there is academic homework. There is lots of drill and pressure. Reading instruction begins the first term in kindergarten.
The fear driving all this is statewide testing. There is also justified concern that some children will not learn to read and will struggle forever. The schools are trying to compensate for absent or inept parents.
A serious problem is that young boys don’t handle all this conformity well. What used to be “ants in your pants” has become ADHD or deviant behavior.
Neo, after reading the article the first thing that crossed my mind was ‘the emptiness of selfishness’.
Earlier today I read an article saying that 41% of pregnancies in New York City ended in abortion. Those children who survive that most dangerous place (their mothers womb) then get shuffled off to a state sponsored indoctrination center. What should we expect from a state run school, those are not their children.
Yes, but if we let the kids play, some of them might be bullied or suffer low esteem. As good prog parents we can’t allow that to happen!
“most depressing”–yeah!
Get the kiddies outdoors–Hello Sarah Palin camping in the wilderness….
Throw away the cell phones and video games, and make the kiddies learn to build a campfire.
Hunting, fishing, camping, leaves, rocks, insect bites–it’s all better than socialism!
What nonsense. The movement to restore play is a hollow sham. Once again it’s about parental over-protection and control. I’ve never seen a kid incapable of play if adults leave them alone.
And actually, infantilize adults are more of a problem in our society than this.
I agree with geran. Send ’em out to play and leave ’em alone.
Those were just production notes for the new Brave New World movie.
I think a big part of the problem has been created by the 24 hour news cycle and the constant barrage of stories about missing kids. It has created a fear in parents that they must never leave their children unattended for even a minute otherwise someone will suddenly appear and kidnap their kid. I have not seen any evidence that the rate of stranger abductions has changed for the worse from the time I was a child in the early 60’s when my mother would tell us kids to go outside and play and just be home in time for dinner. Somehow we all managed to survive just fine.
“” It has created a fear in parents that they must never leave their children unattended for even a minute””
The Real Jeff
Amen. Half of all news is speculation on apocalyptic doom in every subject imaginable. I think all very much designed to demoralize and paralyze free people who need to be convinced of a powerful govt protector.
A big part of this is parents terrified that their kids will fall significantly below their own status…so they try to ensure success via credentials and “skills”. What they fail to understand is how much of success is really a function of meta-skills, or what used to be called “character”…things like determination, resilience, creativity, etc…which they themselves are undercutting via micromanagement.
It seems like it would encourage competence within defined limits, but what happens to real creativity? I don’t see much room for making up your own rules for neighborhood ballgames.
expat:
Competence within defined limits is what the Chinese(and in a looser sense pretty much all asian cultures) excel at. True genius lies not within their system, nor creativity.
Reading that article, part of me wanted to slap her for being a bad mother, and half to hug her for her efforts and never giving up on her child.
I think the “Chinese” method has some uses and could be used sparingly for some subjects children really need to learn, but I think as an overall philosophy it damages children and destroys their creativity and to some extent, their individuality.
Competence without creativity is viable. Creativity without competence, if it is possible, is pointless; it might do more harm than good.
It seems to me that a big issue here is control. Are parents really giving up the insane overscheduling and programmed learning if they think they have to “teach” their children to play? Play is the natural state and activity of childhood. When they are not at school, church or their limited other structured activities, simply supply them with some basic materials and companions of roughly their own age in a fairly safe space. Limit your intervention to issues of safety.
Once you have provided food, shelter and health care to your child, your job is to respond to their interests and follow the flow of their lives, with rare strategic interventions when they run too far off the rails. Parent-directed play is an oxymoron. That the New York Times is paying attention to the fad is all the more evidence that it’s a bad idea.
Brad, I had exactly the same reaction. She obviously wants what is best for her child and is delighted at the smile when the child succeeds, but why only piano and violin? I have no aptitude for nor interest in physical achievement. Had I been forced to take more than the 3 or 4 swimming classes I took, it would have been a waste of time, but I think I gained something from the time I “wasted” just watching people as a kid. I had set limits and certain things were expected of me, but not every second of my life was planned years in advance. I wouldn’t trade my life for a second.
I’m a preschool director in a preschool that sticks firmly to the principle that PLAY IS HOW YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN. Half our day is free play, with lots of engaging (and non-battery-operated) stuff set out by my teachers but children free to get other things out if they want to, and the other half of the day more “structured” around teachers’ themes – but still carried out through fun exploration, singly and together, not drills and worksheets.
We have no computers. We don’t explicitly teach ANYTHING about letters, for example, until the second half of pre-K, when (for instance) the teacher might have the children make pictures of muffins, during “M” week, by gluing red, blue, and brown dots (cranberries, blueberries, and chocolate chips) onto muffin-shaped outlines, and decorate the muffin-liners any way they like. Then they’ll make muffins for snack. One of our moms, a very high-achieving, highly intelligent woman whose older child started with us earlier than is typical (and who is now in kindergarten), just came to us a couple of weeks ago, saying, “I didn’t believe you, but you were right! All the children who went to academic preschools are really struggling, but my daughter is reading, doing math, AND is able to sit in circle and listen, play well with the other kids, cooperate, everything!”
I consider it a major part of my role to educate PARENTS about the value of play in their young children’s lives. And my own kids? I’ve never taught them a kids’ game; they make them up, or learn them from older kids, just as they should. Their kickball rules bear a passing resemblance to those I grew up with, and that’s the way it ought to be!
After reading the article I know how anthropologists must feel when studying some obscure African tribe. I can’t relate to people who don’t let their kids mess up the house or play outside alone.
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This is a problem that I noticed as my four children were growing up! (The youngest is now 23 years old.) Many of their friends quit imaginative play and play with toys at a very young age. Part of the problem was the over-scheduling that we see today. Since I had four children rather close together, I limited their after-school activities, so they had plenty of time for creative play, with positive effects on their abilities as adults! (I also had a pretty high tolerance for play-related clutter.)
I also teach at the college level, and I see many young adults with strikingly impoverished imaginative lives.
I also believe that the lack of play contributes to the tendency of children to grow up too soon; if all that a fourth or fifth-grader does is listen to pop music and dress to attract the opposite sex, why should we be surprised about premature sexual activity?
How about the author’s description of modern American parents:
“Behind the numbers is adult behavior as well as children’s: Parents furiously tapping on their BlackBerrys in the living room, too stressed by work demands to tolerate noisy games in the background. Weekends consumed by soccer, lacrosse and other sports leagues, all organized and directed by parents. The full slate of lessons (chess, tae kwon do, Chinese, you name it) and homework beginning in the earliest grades.”
Do more thanBehind the numbers is adult behavior as well as children’s: Parents furiously tapping on their BlackBerrys in the living room, too stressed by work demands to tolerate noisy games in the background. Weekends consumed by soccer, lacrosse and other sports leagues, all organized and directed by parents. The full slate of lessons (chess, tae kwon do, Chinese, you name it) and homework beginning in the earliest grades.”
Maybe 5% of American parents fit that description. The author must know that. But the others don’t count. They aren’t people. They aren’t “us”.
Creepy.
When I was in 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th grade all those years ago in the ’50’s, play consisted of the following from my mother: “Go outside and play.” And we did. We imagined things, we made roads in the dirt, later we had baseball and football games, we sat around bored. In other words, we were allowed to live in a kids’ world separate from adults. We were allowed to simply enjoy life and have fun. We ran around all day, we rode bikes, we looked for weird plants and ugly bugs. All of that is gone now. And it is a damn shame. Now that I am a geezer, I look back on those times as almost heaven on earth. We were free to be kids. And innocent kids at that. I spent one whole summer being Sandy Koufax. Even took one of Dad’s old T-shirts and used a crayon to put “Dodgers” and number 32 on the front. Today’s children are missing sooooo much.
No recess in elementary school? That’s just sad.
Seems like the logical outcome of control freak statist having children. You can’t just let kids have liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They’ll take stupid risk, run into bullies, play doctor with the girl next door and all that other stuff that makes rugged individuals that deplore a nanny state.
I still remember the interpersonal skills required to organize a sand-lot baseball game and to settle disagreements about whether a pitch was a strike or whether a player was safe–skills that could never have been learned in that game if an adult organized the game and called the strikes and ‘safes’.
And my children, now in their fifties, still remember my response when they complained about being bored: ‘Good. There is no greater stimulus to creativity than boredom.’
One of the founders of quantum mechanics once said: “Understanding of theoretical physics is a children’s play compared with understanding of children’s play”.
My childhood was similar to Don and Jim’s–wonderful with lots of free time and puppies. Another aspect was sharing seasonal chores with my parents. I helped husk corn for freezing, hunted mushrooms, picked berries, helped sew curtains and clothes. These things weren’t boring like making your bed because you only got to do them a few times a year. Yet each was a step in learning skills without the pressure to get an A. When I joined the Brownies at 7, they offered a sewing course, and my mom enrolled me so I would learn how to sew the “right” way. I came home after the first class and told mom that the teacher was an idiot. We had spent the whole class trimming margins from our patterns, and I already knew that the margins would fall off by themselve when you cut through the fabric they were pinned to. I don’t remember mom ever saying, Today, I am going to teach you how to sew. It was organic. Perhaps that was my first lesson in being skeptical of experts.
What’s that old refrain about what is important about real estate: location, location, location.
How about the new refrain about what is important in our kid’s lives: politicize, politicize, politicize!
The new SS: Scumbag Socialists.
“Teaching” kids to play. Sad. Truly sad.
This is utopia after 110 years of effort and about 40 years of intense cooperation and conjugation with ideas that are sugar coated toxic.
“They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.” Freud to Jung on his first visit to the US…
The antithesis of humans with rights is what?
Is the answer what they are working for?
Play is a privilege to those that think humans have no rights. Its always been with the left that if they could see some goodness in something, that they would suppress it, for good is another power in and of itself.
when you want to put people to use as a means of production, play is time wasted from what they can do for you. its all a matter of perspective, from where you choose to stand and what one must take up to stand there.
The passion for destruction is also a creative passion. Mikhail Bakunin
Play is the work of children. It’s very serious stuff. Bob Keeshan
[for those that dont know who that is, that’s captain kangaroo, and in a previous job, Clarabelle the clown]
“Play is just a natural thing that animals do and humans do, but somehow we’ve driven it out of kids.” Kathy Hirsh-Pasek (from the article)
“Kinsey’s quantitative research, and his numbers, were a perfect fit for Rockefeller to utilize the mass media to ‘shape public attitudes and conduct.’ Attitudes were changed through mass communications, which caused a rejection of chastity, self control and moral public governance, as well as increased illicit sexual conduct. ‘Social management’ of this sort was nothing less for Rockefeller than changing America’s way of life, by among other things altering what Kinsey would call ‘breeding patterns’ along an evolutionary or animalistic view of human sexual conduct.” Judith A. Reisman, PhD
“I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over the “savages”. The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down upon them.” Franz Boas
Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928…
I will shorten this to point out that children who are sexuality early on, are no longer children. Boas, Meade, Kinsey are all part of the start of the milieu that children are sexual beings and we as adults are hiding from them important stuff.
“They laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at infidelity…believe explicitly that one love will quickly cure another…adultery does not necessarily mean a broken marriage…divorce is a simple, informal matter…Samoans welcome casual homosexual practices…In such a setting, there is no room for guilt.” Meade
Samoan students that came to america and attended classes where the teachers told them things about themselves that didnt jibe gave opposition,
but she and others were there to legitimate progressive goals, and to find ways to instill the values they needed to achieve those goals (which are unchanged)
Kinsey is the most quoted justification in legal texts.
if you read: Childhood in the promised land: working-class movements and the colonies de By Laura Lee Downs
Basically… [to save space]
They posited that given a choice, between real, creative action, and a mere game, a healthy child would want real (work). (the book referring to the Faucons Rouges)
Freinet created the teachers’ trade union C.E.L. (Coopérative de l’Enseignement Laé¯c) in 1924, from which arose the French teacher movement Modern School Movement (Mouvement de l’é‰cole Moderne). The goal of the C.E.L was to change public education from the inside with the co-operation of teachers.
Read about Otto Felix Kanitz
Kanitz was a proponent of the Kinderrepublik anti-authoritarian education movement.
[Lets say despite becoming a catholic he ended up at buchenwald]
Maria Assunta Isabella (better known as Bella Dodd)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd
Dodd was a graduate of New York University School of Law. She also served as head of the New York State Teachers Union. A schoolteacher and lawyer by profession, Dodd was an organizer for the CPUSA from 1932—1948, and from 1944 to ’48 sat on the CPUSA’s National Council. She was expelled from the CPUSA in 1949
AND you cant forget the illustrious John Dewey, father of education, who turned out to be a spy, but created our school systems structure.
“Operant conditioning shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay,” Skinner
“The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order.”
Willard Givens, Executive Secretary, National Education Association, 1934
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizen, to put down dissent.”
H L Menken (was in the same organization with boas, but changed sides)
If the family is to be ended, as communists, Marxists, feminists, etc say…
Then what do you do with children?
Do you let them play until they are 18?
Or would you just eradicate the sense of play for them so that they get right to work?
“Parent’s attitudes about what they want for their children represent one of the greatest barriers to successful implementation of school-to-work.”
U.S.Department Of Education’s Office Of Educational Research And Improvement
We can sit around and make stuff up, or we can learn the history, and we can see what we have been missing by making stuff up.
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well — by creating the international child of the future.” Professor Chester M. Pierce
Should read what William Z. Foster says in Toward Soviet America 1932…
I just remembered this very relevant essay I wrote a couple of years ago. If you haven’t seen it, take a look, you might it enjoy it. It generated a lot reminiscent commentary.
I have grandsons in kindergarten and 2nd grade. The part about school is right on. There is no recess and there is academic homework. There is lots of drill and pressure. Reading instruction begins the first term in kindergarten.
The fear driving all this is statewide testing. There is also justified concern that some children will not learn to read and will struggle forever. The schools are trying to compensate for absent or inept parents.
A serious problem is that young boys don’t handle all this conformity well. What used to be “ants in your pants” has become ADHD or deviant behavior.
Neo, after reading the article the first thing that crossed my mind was ‘the emptiness of selfishness’.
Earlier today I read an article saying that 41% of pregnancies in New York City ended in abortion. Those children who survive that most dangerous place (their mothers womb) then get shuffled off to a state sponsored indoctrination center. What should we expect from a state run school, those are not their children.
Yes, but if we let the kids play, some of them might be bullied or suffer low esteem. As good prog parents we can’t allow that to happen!
“most depressing”–yeah!
Get the kiddies outdoors–Hello Sarah Palin camping in the wilderness….
Throw away the cell phones and video games, and make the kiddies learn to build a campfire.
Hunting, fishing, camping, leaves, rocks, insect bites–it’s all better than socialism!
What nonsense. The movement to restore play is a hollow sham. Once again it’s about parental over-protection and control. I’ve never seen a kid incapable of play if adults leave them alone.
And actually, infantilize adults are more of a problem in our society than this.
I agree with geran. Send ’em out to play and leave ’em alone.
Pingback:Kids don’t play anymore? | Liberty Wolf
Those were just production notes for the new Brave New World movie.
I think a big part of the problem has been created by the 24 hour news cycle and the constant barrage of stories about missing kids. It has created a fear in parents that they must never leave their children unattended for even a minute otherwise someone will suddenly appear and kidnap their kid. I have not seen any evidence that the rate of stranger abductions has changed for the worse from the time I was a child in the early 60’s when my mother would tell us kids to go outside and play and just be home in time for dinner. Somehow we all managed to survive just fine.
“” It has created a fear in parents that they must never leave their children unattended for even a minute””
The Real Jeff
Amen. Half of all news is speculation on apocalyptic doom in every subject imaginable. I think all very much designed to demoralize and paralyze free people who need to be convinced of a powerful govt protector.
A big part of this is parents terrified that their kids will fall significantly below their own status…so they try to ensure success via credentials and “skills”. What they fail to understand is how much of success is really a function of meta-skills, or what used to be called “character”…things like determination, resilience, creativity, etc…which they themselves are undercutting via micromanagement.
I just read this on Chinese mothers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html
It seems like it would encourage competence within defined limits, but what happens to real creativity? I don’t see much room for making up your own rules for neighborhood ballgames.
expat:
Competence within defined limits is what the Chinese(and in a looser sense pretty much all asian cultures) excel at. True genius lies not within their system, nor creativity.
Reading that article, part of me wanted to slap her for being a bad mother, and half to hug her for her efforts and never giving up on her child.
I think the “Chinese” method has some uses and could be used sparingly for some subjects children really need to learn, but I think as an overall philosophy it damages children and destroys their creativity and to some extent, their individuality.
Competence without creativity is viable. Creativity without competence, if it is possible, is pointless; it might do more harm than good.
It seems to me that a big issue here is control. Are parents really giving up the insane overscheduling and programmed learning if they think they have to “teach” their children to play? Play is the natural state and activity of childhood. When they are not at school, church or their limited other structured activities, simply supply them with some basic materials and companions of roughly their own age in a fairly safe space. Limit your intervention to issues of safety.
Once you have provided food, shelter and health care to your child, your job is to respond to their interests and follow the flow of their lives, with rare strategic interventions when they run too far off the rails. Parent-directed play is an oxymoron. That the New York Times is paying attention to the fad is all the more evidence that it’s a bad idea.
Brad, I had exactly the same reaction. She obviously wants what is best for her child and is delighted at the smile when the child succeeds, but why only piano and violin? I have no aptitude for nor interest in physical achievement. Had I been forced to take more than the 3 or 4 swimming classes I took, it would have been a waste of time, but I think I gained something from the time I “wasted” just watching people as a kid. I had set limits and certain things were expected of me, but not every second of my life was planned years in advance. I wouldn’t trade my life for a second.
I’m a preschool director in a preschool that sticks firmly to the principle that PLAY IS HOW YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN. Half our day is free play, with lots of engaging (and non-battery-operated) stuff set out by my teachers but children free to get other things out if they want to, and the other half of the day more “structured” around teachers’ themes – but still carried out through fun exploration, singly and together, not drills and worksheets.
We have no computers. We don’t explicitly teach ANYTHING about letters, for example, until the second half of pre-K, when (for instance) the teacher might have the children make pictures of muffins, during “M” week, by gluing red, blue, and brown dots (cranberries, blueberries, and chocolate chips) onto muffin-shaped outlines, and decorate the muffin-liners any way they like. Then they’ll make muffins for snack. One of our moms, a very high-achieving, highly intelligent woman whose older child started with us earlier than is typical (and who is now in kindergarten), just came to us a couple of weeks ago, saying, “I didn’t believe you, but you were right! All the children who went to academic preschools are really struggling, but my daughter is reading, doing math, AND is able to sit in circle and listen, play well with the other kids, cooperate, everything!”
I consider it a major part of my role to educate PARENTS about the value of play in their young children’s lives. And my own kids? I’ve never taught them a kids’ game; they make them up, or learn them from older kids, just as they should. Their kickball rules bear a passing resemblance to those I grew up with, and that’s the way it ought to be!
After reading the article I know how anthropologists must feel when studying some obscure African tribe. I can’t relate to people who don’t let their kids mess up the house or play outside alone.