In today’s Wall Street Journal, Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, laments the lost art of play for American kids. The fear of injury and the desire to make every moment academically enriching discourage parents and daycare centers from letting kids just run around and play. Skenazy points to research documenting the decline in active play and discusses how this phenomenon could be making kids less safe and healthy as they get less exercise and develop fewer physical skills.
I’ve written before about the startling differences between playgrounds in the United States and in Europe, as well as how the specter of litigation harms American culture generally.
American parents, however, can feel justifiably frustrated about the mixed messages that they get about how to help their kids thrive. Skenazy notes how parents mistakenly assume that trading playing time for reading time is a way to help prepare preschoolers for school, when play itself is actually an important way for kids to development necessary skills.
Yet American parents can hardly be blamed though for feeling pressure to do everything possible to get their kids “ready to read” as quickly as possible. It’s a focal point of just about all media geared to concerned parents.
Europe seems to have a very different philosophy when it comes to what preschool is about and how best to prepare kids to learn. We lived in Austria for two years and are now in Brussels, with a one-year stint in Virginia in between. In Austria, my daughters were in preschool, and there was absolutely nothing an American would consider academic about their school time. No letter recognition or push toward naming shapes or counting for counting sake. At the German school in Brussels (where my kids are currently enrolled), kids start learning to associate sounds with letters and ultimately to sound out words and read in first grade.
My three-year-old was receiving similar instruction at her preschool in Virginia. My five-year-old took part in a rigorous reading program during her kindergarten in a Virginia public school, and I would have felt like a complete failure as a parent if she hadn’t been able to make it through basic books by the end of that year.
Intellectually, I appreciate the European model that seems to be more relaxed about skill acquisition at this young age. Yet I struggle as a parent not to panic about the need to keep up on the faster academic track that I know their U.S. peers are following.
Bombarded with messages about the need to protect kids from potential dangers and to use every tool possible to give them a leg up academically, it’s hard for parents (and other caregivers) to know when to draw the line. Using common sense and letting kids be kids is easy advice to give, but a challenge to embrace.
— Carrie Lukas is the managing director of the Independent Women’s Forum.
We used to live in a subdivision with over 300 homes, most of them owned by families with kids. An elementary school and its playground was also in the sub. There were also a couple of elementary school sized soccer fields, a couple basketball courts and a baseball field. Ninety percent of the time that we went to the playground with our boys, we were the only ones there. The only exception was when there happened to be a little league baseball game going on, when the brothers and sisters of the kids playing baseball might come over and join us. But, usually, no kids on the playground, the basketball court or the soccer fields. So, it's not just during school and pre-school time that kids aren't just getting out and playing.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have noticed this phenomena, but it is hardly recent. As a kid I always noticed that school and church playgrounds would be empty almost every time we drove by them. I lived on a farm, and thought this a terrible waste -- if you lived where you could walk to a playground, why wouldn't you?
When my children were young, I would take them to school playgrounds, and we would almost always have the whole place to ourselves. TRAVEL TIP: they make an excellant break spot for the kids when travelling.
Nowadays, the gradnsons, who live out in the country, ask to go to the playground when they come to our house. The busy time is weekend afternoosn, with custodial parents out with their kids.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou should follow your gut instinct on your kids' learning timetable. If they're ready to read, teach them yourself. who cares what some gov't body thinks about child development, whether in the US or Europe? You're the mom, you know best; don't rely on school systems.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI just don't understand why parents feel so much pressure. Everything they learn/are expected to know in their first 6 years of school could be learned in a year by an adult. You don't learn a darn thing in math other than endless goofing around with arithmetic until you are in freaking 7th GRADE.
Let 'em play..they'll still want to hang out with you, and when they are, you can play reading games with em.
As far as kids spending less time playing, I really doubt that's the reason. I suspect that it's because parents would rather have them do things that require less supervision, and they are really playing video games.
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