The past generation has seen a lot of change in the way kids stay active. A generation ago, riding bikes, swimming holes and playing outside with friends was the standard for staying physically engaged for kids under 14. Organized youth sports accounted for some of the time kids spent playing, but generally not every day or every season. What changed? Is this the best thing for our kids?
Beginning in the 1980s, American childhood changed. For a variety of reasons—including shifts in parenting norms, new academic expectations, increased regulation, technological advances, and especially a heightened fear of abduction (missing kids on milk cartons made it feel as if this exceedingly rare crime was rampant) children largely lost the experience of having large swaths of unsupervised time to play and explore on their own.
If you’re over 40, chances are good that you had lots of free time as a child; after school, on weekends, over the summer. It was time that we cherished, if you were asked about it now, you’d go on and on about playing in the woods and riding your bike until the streetlights came on. Today many kids are raised like veal, only 13 percent of them even walk to school. After school, kids no longer come home with a latchkey and roam the neighborhood. Instead, they’re locked into organized, supervised activities. Youth sports are a $15 billion business that has grown by 55 percent since just 2010. Children as young as third grade are joining traveling teams, which are expensive and time consuming.
What about play? All animals do it, from dogs fetching sticks to gazelles playing a game that appears to be a version of tag. Why would they do that? They’re wasting valuable calories and exposing themselves to predators. Shouldn’t they just sit quietly next to their mama gazelles, exploring the world through the magic of PBS Kids? It must be because play is even more important to their long-term survival than simply being “safe.” A few years ago, Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray was invited to do a study on resilience in children, his main body of research is on the importance of free play, and he stresses that it has little in common with the “play” we give kids today. In organized activities like youth sports, adults run the show. It’s only when the grown-ups aren’t around that the kids get to take over. In free play, ideally with kids of mixed ages, the children decide what to do and how to do it. That’s teamwork, literally. The little kids desperately want to be like the bigger kids, so instead of bawling when they strike out during a sandlot baseball game, they work hard to hold themselves together. This is the foundation of maturity, and is a building block for success and independence.
These types of activities are not just about being active, they are about creating a social structure in our children as well as being emotionally rewarding and helping them to develop relationships. It can be difficult to conceptualize allowing children to be independently active in today’s culture but worth making the effort to experiment with finding less structured activities.
