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by Michael Thompson, Ph.D.
All camps are proud of their program offerings and the skills they
teach children. They are equally proud of the traditions
that may in time grow to be part of campers' lives. However, as
wonderful as the programmatic aspects of a camp
may be, what we teach campers may not be the most important part of
their summer experience. The most crucial and unexpected moments of
a summer may be when children are left alone to engage in free, undirected
play. For many campers, the experience of playing outside "alone" or
with a group of friends may be a truly new and joyful one. The loss
of time for free, undirected play in everyday life is one of the saddest
facts of modern childhood.
As a school consultant, I have watched the growing phenomenon of the
over-scheduled child, particularly in affluent
suburbs, and in independent and international schools. As a camp consultant,
I have observed how many campers' parents monitor them extremely
closely; one might say microscopically. Indeed, Ron Taffel, a psychologist
in New York, reports that much of modern parenting involves meticulous
time management of a child's packed schedule. This is a source
of sadness for me and for many people who work with children.
I was
talking with a teacher at an international school
once when her voice took on a tone of regret, even guilt. "This is a
wonderful school," she said, "And I love teaching here, but sometimes
I feel bad for the children who go here." It turned out that what made
her feel this way was the lack of play time in the lives
of her students and the weight of the academic
demands that the school — that
she — placed
on them. The teacher is not alone. Every thoughtful
educator and every parent has worried that there is something missing
in the lives of today's
children.
When we think about it, we conclude that
what is missing is play, or a work/play balance,
or, as I believe, the loss of a certain kind of play that should exist
in childhood: free, undirected play. We are doing great things for children
in many ways, but we are not leaving them alone enough. I know that
I hardly ever see children playing by themselves in my neighborhood,
a trafficfree cul-de-sac in a very safe suburb six miles outside Boston.
They are not there in winter — no
snowmen — and almost never in the summer. Many young families
have moved into the neighborhood in the past few
years. Their children, ranging in age from fifteen months to thirteen
years old, came to our door for candy on Halloween. I had never seen
them playing in their yards, but I certainly did notice that all of
them were accompanied by their parents, many of whom came right up on
the porch behind their children and, when we offered them two or three
candies, instructed them, "Just take one."
Researchers tell
us that over the past two decades, children in
the United States have lost nine to twelve hours of free play per week.
Over the past decade, forty percent of elementary schools in the U.S.
have eliminated recess, leaving children with less than a twenty-minute
break (for lunch) in a six-hour school day. At school, we have replaced
recess time with increased seat time as preparation for state tests;
at home, parents have replaced free play time with organized town sports,
art, dance, and, of course, tutoring.
When I ask an audience of one
hundred mothers and fathers to raise their hands
if they had parents who sent them out the door to play in the neighborhood
with instructions to "Stay out until dinner or until the street lights
come on," eighty-five of them will raise their hands to indicate that
they had played out-of-doors, away from home for
two to five hours (and even longer) at a stretch. When I ask those same
parents: "How many of you now send your children outside to play for
more than two hours without contact with you?" only
four or five people raise their hands.
Free, undirected
play used to be valued as a central, indeed, the
defining activity of childhood, for good reason.
Jaak Panskeep, play researcher at Washington State University, calls
play the "signature mammalian behavior." According to David Elkind it
is a child's " . . . inborn disposition for learning, curiosity, imagination,
and fantasy." Many people reading this paragraph remember their mothers
sending them outside to play with children in the neighborhood from
three in the afternoon until dinner time with the unequivocal instruction:
"Go play!" In 2007, The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report
declaring that, "It is through play that children at a very early age
engage and interact with the world they can master, conquering their
fears while practicing adult roles." Play makes children creative and
strong; play reassures children that they are okay in the world. Our
mothers knew that, but today's parents do not value play in the same
way.
What happened to play time? What happened to our respect for play?
A lot of free time has simply disappeared because
American children spend so much time — 101
minutes per day — in the car. In U.S. suburbs, neighbors no longer
know or trust each other; we are afraid of pedophiles and strangers;
we are comforted by organized town sports because our children are supervised
and away from computer screens. Many parents are afraid that their children
will be traumatized by bullying that they imagine might occur in free
play. But most parents are simply worried about their children's
futures in a competitive, globalized economy. They want their children
to be successful in school because they want them to have successful
lives and are ready to sacrifice play time for more and more study time.
What is the price our children are paying for the loss of free play?
There are six costs that we can see: 1) obesity;
2) high stress levels; 3) rapidly increasing diagnosis of ADHD, depression,
and emotional fragility; 4) social incompetence; 5) excessive dependence
on adults; and 6) the loss of a relationship with nature. In the industrialized
world, the most obvious cost of the loss of outdoor play is our epidemic
of child obesity. Even though 90 percent of American children are in
organized sports, obesity continues to rise. After the car ride to the
field, changing into a uniform, the talk by the coach, etc., two and
a half hours of organized sports may provide only thirty minutes of
actual exercise, far less than running around the neighborhood. The
same thing may be true of summer camps. While there is far more exercise
overall during a day at camp, in organized, skill-building activities
much of the time is spent listening to an instructor, learning the skills
one-by-one. My annual visits to a boys' summer camp suggest to me that
children often get more exercise in spontaneous after-dinner games of
tag, baseball, or basketball. That's when I see boys soaking wet with
sweat — happy
and smiling. When I see girls sitting at the table after lunch, by themselves,
inventing hand-and-rhythm games, singing together, and challenging each
other to ever more complex lyrics and rhymes I see a joy and creative
imagination at work that I don't see in adult-organized activities.
Pediatricians are seeing increased levels of stress and anxiety in
children, many of whom are overwhelmed by future expectations for college,
etc., they don't know if they can fulfill. The increase in diagnosis
of mental disorders in children, particularly ADHD,
depression, and bi-polar disorder has been stunning; many researchers
have suggested that the increase in ADHD is a direct result of reduced
play time; some researchers believe that children may be missing a crucial
modulator of nerve cell development (BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic
factor) which is generated by vigorous exercise and learning. Anecdotally,
teachers report that many children are more emotionally fragile than
their students in the past.
Teachers who supervise recess often find
that children are unable to organize games or resolve
conflicts on their own. They quickly turn to adults for help in resolving
minor disputes, even up to fifth and sixth grade. The teachers at one
elementary school engage in triage by saying, "Don't ask us to get involved
unless the situation is "D & D," dangerous and destructive." Finally,
as Richard Louv warns us in The Last Child in the Woods, today's
children are losing touch with nature; they have no independent relationship
with the out-of-doors.
The loss of free, undirected play is a significant
problem in contemporary childhood. Educators, camp
counselors, and child care workers of all kinds need to protect the
time they give children to play freely; they need to increase that time
if possible; and they need to educate parents about the importance of
play. However, the barriers to increased playtime in schools are significant;
it is not going to be easy to open up the school schedule. While it
is easier for camp counselors, I know that there are barriers in camp
life, too. Parents want to be sure that children are "supervised;" we
have many more concerns about safety and liability than we did in the
past and; most perniciously, we may feel that the best thing we do for
the children is the activities that we run for them.
What I am trying
to argue is that the best thing about summer camp
might be playing ping-pong in the lodge out of sight of the counselors.
That is a humbling thought for many of us, but it bears repeating: the
most important and unexpected thing we can do for our campers is to
give them time for free play, time to confront their own "boredom,"
learn how to entertain themselves with a friend, and organize a game
with their peers. Between school, organized town sports, music lessons,
art, dance, SAT tutoring and worthy service learning projects, that's
what today's campers aren't getting to do enough of at home.
One final story:
I am the supervising psychologist for an all-boys
school in suburban Boston, the Belmont Hill School, and we have a first-rate
hockey rink and competitive ice hockey teams, many of which start to
play competitively right after the twoweek Christmas break. Two years
ago, one of our boys called the athletic director, Mr. Tahan, and had
the following conversation with him.
"Mr. Tahan, is there going to be recreational ice time for Belmont
Hill boys over the vacation?"
"Yes, of course, we reserve
recreational ice time for our students."
"But,
I don't mean just skating in a circle, I mean with
sticks and pucks, so we can play."
"Yes, of course you can use sticks
and pucks in those hours."
"But, will there be
other boys to play with?"
"I don't know for sure,
but you can call some boys and organize a game."
After a long pause the boy said, "Well, could you organize the games?'
When he heard that, Mr. Tahan realized that this
fourteen-year-old boy, who had played on select
town hockey teams since the age of six, had never organized his own
game of hockey….never
in his life. That made him deeply sad, because he had grown up in upstate
New York organizing lake hockey games every weekend. The idea that a
boy couldn't pull a group together depressed him. It worries me,
too.
In the end, you can't teach children to play alone; you have
to let them play alone. Many parents are too frightened
to do so, and schools cannot find the time to do so. It may be that
camp is the place where grown-ups recognize the value of nonscheduled
time. I hope so. Our children's imagination, spontaneity, leadership
skills, and happiness depend in large part on free, undirected play.
References
American Academy of Pediatrics. (2007). "The Importance of Play
in Promoting Health Child Development and Maintaining
Strong Parent- Child Bonds."
Elkind, D. (2006). The Power of Play:
Learning What Comes Naturally, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Louv, R. (2008). The Last Child in the Woods: Saving
Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, Algonquin Books of Chapel
Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Marano, H.E. (2008). A Nation of
Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, Broadway Books, New York,
New York.
Originally published in the 2009 May/June
issue of Camping Magazine.
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