Remember the days when we rode our bikes through the neighborhood, explored the woods with our friends and set up lemonade stands unsupervised? Sadly, as Rosa Brooks explains in her in her LA Times column, unstructured childhood play “has gone the way of the dodo, the typewriter and the eight-track tape.”
Reader, if you’re much over 30, you probably remember what it used to be like for the typical American kid. Remember how there used to be this thing called “going out to play”?
For younger readers, I’ll explain this archaic concept. It worked like this: The child or children in the house — as long as they were over age 4 or so — went to the door, opened it, and … went outside. They braved the neighborhood pedophile just waiting to pounce, the rusty nails just waiting to be stepped on, the trees just waiting to be fallen out of, and they “played.”
“Play,” incidentally, is a mysterious activity children engage in when not compelled to spend every hour under adult supervision, taking soccer or piano lessons or practicing vocabulary words with computerized flashcards.
Brooks goes on to lament that between 1981 to 1997, children 8 and under lost from 228 to 501 minutes of unstructured playtime (this from University of Michigan time-use studies). She writes:
Increasingly, American children are in a lose-lose situation. They’re forced, prematurely, to do all the un-fun kinds of things adults do (Be over-scheduled! Have no downtime! Study! Work!). But they don’t get any of the privileges of adult life: autonomy, the ability to make their own choices, use their own judgment, maybe even get interestingly lost now and then.
I remember seeing a commercial for a stationary bike for kids that you could hook up to a TV for a simulated outdoor riding experience. Despite the coolness of the technology, the fact that we need something like that made me sad. I find it frustrating that my kids won’t get to roam freely outdoors like I did. Parents must find alternative ways to let their children play. It may require that Moms and Dads accompany their children outdoors. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
HT: Tim Challies
I personally like what one person commented,
“I lived out in the country growing up, and loved every minute of it. If you have the option, raise your kids in the country, not a city or a suburb. We never worried about strange people taking off with us; our biggest concerns were snakes and the occasional wild dog.”
Amen.
