Pediatricians Urge Free Play

How do your kids play? Are they getting enough free play time? Are you?

Highlights from a new American Academy of Pediatrics report on the importance of play at home and at school. Here is what they're saying...

• Children need free play at home and at school
• Play is essential for the cognitive, physical, and emotional well-being of children and youth
• Undirected free play:
  • Allows children to develop imagination and physical, mental, and emotional strength
  • Helps children conquer fears, practice adult roles, and develop confidence
  • Allows children to learn to work with others, share, and self-advocate
  • Builds active, healthy bodies

• Play is essential for learning
  • It helps children adjust to school settings
  • It enhances learning readiness, learning behaviors, and problem-solving skills

• Free play and recess are declining in American schools
  • In 1989, 96% of school systems had at least one recess period
  • In 1999, only 70% of kindergarten classrooms had recess
  • Today, school responses to the No Child Left Behind Act often results in reduced time for recess, creative arts, and physical education

This report clearly shows that free play is critical for the healthy development of children--and this includes "inner children"!

Our world is becoming increasingly focused on technological play to the detriment of free play. Kids, and adults, spend a lot of time--perhaps too much time--in front of a computer. While they may be playing fun, interactive games, it is vital that we build in enough free play with "real person face time."

What does this look like? Play time where there is no agenda. Games where there are open-ended rules or options. Person to person face time where we are physically and emotionally together. After all, we are social-emotional beings. Basically, it is making stuff up--either by ourselves or with others. After all, isn't that what the great artists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and engineers do which make our country great?

Hey, get out there and PLAY! Make stuff up!

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

When JK Rowling delivered one of the most powerful speeches at Harvard University's spring commencement on the importance of imagination, she made headlines. Of course, she might have made headlines with almost any speech she gave, but in this she took another vital stand for the role that imagination plays in our lives.

In her speech, she focused on the role that imagination plays in imagining a better future for those who are powerless. "We do not need magic to transform our world," she said. "We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better."

So when we talk about getting kids and adults to use their powers of imagination, we are really talking about not only loosening our minds and the routine thinking we often employ but we are talking about how we can think outside the box to help others.

"Imagination gives one the ability to empathize with others," she said. "Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the found of all inventions and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

With the fast paced onset of computer games, we desperately need to balance this with non-computerized games that stimulate the imagination. Buy games that encourage imaginative thinking. Support kids and co-workers when they have different ideas. Imagine what is possible when kids interact with others in person using their imaginations and cooperative group skills.

Read the whole address from JK Rowling

Child’s Play: What Has Happened to Playtime and Should We Be Worried About It?

Kids today don't play as much or as spontaneously as we did when we were kids. Child advocates blame hectic lifestyles, pressure to achieve and high-tech toys and media. Without imaginative, free play, they say, kids are losing valuable life skills.

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