http://www.care2.com/greenliving/not-playing-the-dangers-of-the-over-scheduled-child.html
Not Playing: The Dangers of the Over-Scheduled Child
There are children in my extended family that hold such an impressive array of cultivated skills and talents, that I could see my utter obsolescence and relative inferiority take shape on the immediate horizon like a hulking downpour threatening to drench me in my own mediocrity. They play not one, but three team sports, they are accomplished in violin, piano, and cello, they ski and snowboard, and are proficient in gymnastics and karate. (Not to mention their ability to effortlessly work the remote on a satellite television). This junior CV is all thanks to an ambitious and unyielding array of classes, lessons, and instructions in both curricular and extracurricular activities that occupy nearly every waking hour of their pre-adolescent lives. Impressive? Yes. Problematic…indeed.
Sidetracking the whole over scheduling phenomenon that has gotten a boatload of press and seems to gear children toward a type-A life as a cooperate executive, if nothing else, the dwindling of true, unstructured, free play is of paramount concern here. As is evidenced by a recent article in Scientific American by Melinda Wenner, there exists a serious need for imaginative, child-directed free play to insure normal social, emotional and cognitive development in children.
Many years ago, when play was simply an activity and not an activity dependent upon a toy, a game, or (egad) a video game, children engaged with their imagination or with one another in loose, improvised and sometimes wild play. Starting somewhere in the mid twentieth century, Children’s play became focused upon the toy, rather than the activity, with the functions and the limitations of the toy dictating the extent and direction of the play. Toys, along with children’s TV shows and movie narratives, became more advanced, more elaborate, more appealing and more dominant in all manner of play, creating more structure, rules and predictability in play (I.E. Barbie, Playstation, American Girl, etc).
Couple this with the parental desire to exert more control over their children’s activities in order to make them more safe, and secure from threats from the outside world, and you have a lot more children being placed in adult-moderated activities and classes that promise safety, enrichment and predictability. All this at a tremendous cost.
According to a paper published in 2005 in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, children’s free-play time dropped by a quarter between 1981 and 1997. This is a staggering drop as the engagement in free play remains critical for children becoming socially adept, coping with stress and building cognitive skills such as problem solving. The simple activity of free play (however you want to define it) affords more creative responses and helps children build fantasies that help them cope with difficult situations, like separation from parents, self-esteem issues, and social conflict. When engaging in free play, children often learn empathy as well as a sense of fairness and equality that comes from taking turns and role-playing. Additional research sited in the Scientific American article suggests that play promotes neural development in “higher” brain areas involved in emotional reactions and social learning.
So while we may be equipping our children with some excellent multi-tasking skills and servicing them with some fine exposure to the arts and structured activities, we may be inadvertently robbing them of the creative and inspired realities of childhood. The evidence is in.
What is your experience with over scheduled children? Has anyone witnessed a marked deficit in children who do not regularly get unstructured playtime? Are you in agreement with this article, or do you feel that much more is to be gained through more structured play and exposure?
Eric Steinman is a freelance writer based in Rhinebeck, N.Y. He regularly writes about food, music, art, architecture and culture and is a regular contributor to Bon Appétit among other publications.
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16 comments
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Thanks or the reminder. Its so easy to fall into the habit of giving kids something to do rather than letting them think of things themselves and play creatively. When you do let them be, the things they come up with are so much better than the "games" and activities that we think of.
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I think what's key is balance. As a child who grew up in the 70s with parents who didn't want to spend $ on activities & lessons I genuinely wanted to enrol in, I sincerely believe that my teen years, and early adult life, may have been significantly better and healthier in every regard had I not had so much 'unstructured' time on my hands. And yet I watch as friends' children literally teeter on burn-out from their schedules. I think both are equally important--children do need structure, and the value of cultivating interests & hobbies will carry throughout their lives--but it's incomprehensible to me that a parent would take that to a degree that does not teach children the importance of creating balance in our lives, regardless of what stage we're at/in.
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Free play is a wonderful thing for children, however organized play or time doesn't mean that the child is any less imaginative. Giving a child a routine is actually comforting to the child giving them a sense of security and structure. Children enjoy knowing that they will see "timmy" on tuesdays. As for creativity, many classes ie, art, dance, and yes even sports present ample opportunity for expressing creativity as well as giving the child a sense of structure and normalcy.
A great book about the difference between children raised in unstructured all play lifestyles and structured scheduled play lifestyles is "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, in it he discusses fundamental differences in child rearing that can either excel an average child or stagnate a brilliant one, and it all comes down to parenting.
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Interestingly, I have a number of books -- and a friend with hundreds of them -- which were all published c. 1900, which describe games and rules and make suggestions for 'making your own fun.' Craft ideas, varieties of tag, checkers, dress-up, 20 questions, cooking and building projects and other NON-IMAGINARY activities children were expected to engage in and, one would assume because of the popularity of these books, desired.
Having encountered a lot of the history of childhood, the idea of children having hours and hours of unstructured play time every day since the beginning of time until the advent of Nintendo is ridiculous. By 3, children were spending a huge majority of their time working alongside their mothers, and by 7, were segregated for work between boys and girls -- long before the industrial revolution created child-labour laws and, really, the whole idea of childhood as a time of innocence.
The author doesn't seem to be able to see backwards further than 1934.
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Sorry, cant type well today. Too many days preparing garden space...
I would also like to add that these scheduled activities also come at a higher price than just their cost up front. They consume a great deal of time, money and resources in other ways as well. They usually require someone to take them to them and bring them back, usually with a motor vehicle and usually as a standalone small trip, which is very wasteful.
The additional cost of paying for these activities also often leads to a spouse taking a second job and there are volumes of material about what a wasteful trap this is for 90% of the people who do so. Generally it costs far more to the family as a whole than the second income will ever produce.
I strongly recommend the website affluenza.org if you are finding yourself falling into the two income consumer pawn family trap.
And lastly there is the immense waste of resources and energy and all the environmental and economic damage that all this activity causes.
So on top of the social and real life damage you may be doing to your child, you are also helping to damage the environment as well as our economy which hinges on the availability of cheap energy. Energy that is wasted on far too many frivolous things already.
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Great article but there is much more that needs to be said as well.
The issue of socialization and learning social and situational coping skills as well as situational awareness is a another huge factor. In a structured environment kids don't learn these things and as such they are relatively weak in those areas and these areas have been cited as a huge factor in just how successful and health a childs future life will be and are considered as the underlying factors in while persons with mostly good grade point averages usually do better than those with 3.5 and up out of 4 max tend to better in real life.
There is also the issue of these children never really coming to grips with their own character, of getting to know themselves other than as a resume or shopping list of skills. They rarely have much opportunity to see how their skills and abilities translate into anything meaningful in the real world and thus are more prone to the typical insular and delusional perspectives common to the American upper and middle class.
This further contribute to their being easier prey for manipulators and scams of all sorts, from con men to advertising that preys on their lack of real fundamental self esteem which they can only obtain by coming to grips with their own abilities and weaknesses in a real world setting, not the pampered and controlled settings of these directed activities.
This places emphasis on the wrong issues, on skills of dubious value rather than real world
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We absolutely agree with your assessment, and homeschool for those reasons. Our boys get to do many hours of free play, as well as board-game type play. They're very calm children who can entertain themselves.
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I agree as well, though have no children of my own, i am however a nanny for two boys(7yrs and 4.5 yrs old) I've been with them for about 2 years now. And I am all for free play. The younger one has caught on and can get trapped for hours in imaginary play. His brother however can last about 5 min. (which is an improvement) but he doesn't know how to entertain himself. I will also add that the older boy struggles much more in social interactions. Their parents (mainly mom) have them in some activity other than a school program every day--some days more than one activity. Its not that i'm against the structured and group activities/programs but that should not be all they do.
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I agree - unstructured free time is so important for kids. Free of electronics, preferably outside. It's critical that kids be able to get along with eachother and entertain themselves without being in a class, or relying on video games. However, somethings are best learned young (for example, foreign languages), and are unfortunately not available in most schools. Parents may want to pick one or two outside-of-school activities with their kids for this reason. We too often use our kids' classes to give ourselves breaks from parenting, or to brag about to our friends.
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