Articles by the Author
The New Play Date
By Marlene F. Byrne
Founder and Author of Project Play
Do you remember when you couldn’t walk by a neighborhood park without seeing kids running the bases or taking turns at bat? Or when kids played in their backyards for hours at a time with oodles of neighborhood kids? It was only after the street lamps turned on that children would grudgingly leave their games behind and return home for the evening. Today, saying the same thing would no longer be true. Unless there’s a school-affiliated or organized sports game in progress, parks and neighborhoods are often quiet. Where have all the children gone? When was the last time you saw children playing classic backyard games?
Unstructured playtime is becoming endangered. The carefree days of our youth have been replaced by a childhood that ends in the blink of an eye. Instead of gathering with the neighborhood children for a game of "kick the can" or "follow the leader," children are pressured to keep busy with organized sports, activities, and school programs. And while it’s okay to value achievement and competition, do we really believe that the more extra-curricular activities our children have, the better off they are? Ask any parent how their child is doing and they won’t say, "He’s great—he plays at home five times a week."
But by over-scheduling our children, we’re not only eliminating unstructured playtime, we’re setting them up for stress, anxiety, and even depression. If you asked any adult to schedule in soccer, football, golf, an art class, Girl Scouts, and a science program after their work day, they would call you crazy. But because we are so driven to give our kids the best and ensure that they keep up with their peers, we don’t hesitate to start filling up our child’s time after school—we want them to have an edge in their science skills and swim the length of the pool by age 7. But keep in mind, Michael Jordan didn’t play on the high school basketball team until his junior year, so why rush?
It is important for us as parents to place a priority on play and unscheduled time for our kids. It can be an unstructured play date where the kids take all the blankets to the basement to make forts. Or an evening in the backyard where their friends come with flashlights to play. Or maybe a group that gets together for an afternoon treasure hunt. The ideas are endless but what it all comes down to is that kids just need time to be kids. They deserve the same joy and freedom of playing that we enjoyed growing up.
This doesn’t mean we should eliminate organized sports and activities from our children’s lives. But we do need to caution ourselves against over scheduling. We need to be confident in allowing our children to use their imaginations, play their own games, and negotiate their own rules.
A pediatrician once told me, "It’s not the kids with skinned knees that I worry about, it’s the ones without a scratch." Unstructured playtime is valuable. Our kids need time to round up their peers, play "kick the can," even scrape their knees. Our job as parents is to make backyard playtime a priority—and be there to supply the band aid afterwards.
Marlene F. Byrne is the founder and author of Project Play and the founder and President of Celtic Marketing, Inc.—a full-service creative agency located in north suburban Chicago.
