To Keep Kids “Injury-Free” School Substitutes Wii for Recess

Hi Folks! This story comes to us by way of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which loves when kids make up their own games rather than them simply playing something pre-programmed. At this particular school, the superintendent is quoted as saying a desire to keep kids “out of trouble” and “injury-free” prompted the decision to give kids Wii time as opposed to FREE time for recess, once or twice a week. As I watched the video, I despaired about three  things.

1 – The fact that Wii is seen as the same thing as making up a game, even though there is no imagination or organization required.

2 – The fact that it is now DE RIGUEUR that we not show any children’s faces in a video. As if somehow that is damaging to them or us or someone somehow somewhere.

3 – The fact that the hopscotch game at this school is a pre-fab mat, placed on the ground.

I’m sure I am a little too sensitive to all these issues, but come on: Let kids run around! Let them use chalk. Let them make up their own games. Let them get away from the screen. And PLEASE quit worrying that every non-scripted moment outside = an injury waiting to spring. – L.

A Hovering Mother Reconsiders

Hi Readers: I really enjoyed this Boston Magazine story, by Katherine Ozment. Here’s a snippet from this mom of 2:

In my nine years as a parent, I’ve followed the rules, protocols, and cultural cues that have promised to churn out well-rounded, happy, successful children. I’ve psychoanalyzed my kids’ behavior, supervised an avalanche of activities, and photo-documented their day-to-day existence as if I were a wildlife photographer on the Serengeti. I do my utmost to develop their minds and build up their confidence, while at the same time living with the constant low-level fear that bad things will happen to them. But lately, I’ve begun to wonder if, by becoming so attuned to their every need and so controlling of their every move, I’ve somehow played a small part in changing the very nature of their childhood.

The rest of the article is her talking to people who believe in the value of independence and play (a lot of the folks I like talking to, too), and realizing that unsupervised time is at least as valuable to kids as the super-saturated parent time she had been bathing them in. Not that the answer is to neglect our kids. (Well, maybe a little.) But anyway: giving them space is not neglect.

My favorite anecdote came from her chat with Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd who —

… tells a story about how, years ago, his 11-year-old daughter and several of her friends were planning an overnight campout with some younger neighborhood kids in his backyard. Before the big night, the parents of the younger kids began scouring his lawn for nails and shards of glass. “It just seemed like, Whoa, what is going on with this anxiety?” Weissbourd recalls. The problem wasn’t just the parental anxiety itself — it was how it was actually reshaping the experience for those kids: “I felt like these 10- and 11-year-old girls were so conscientious and these parents came and undermined them.”

Shards of glass they were looking for? What a perfect example of Worst-First thinking: Gee, it’s a suburban lawn. What terror could lurk there?

Great article, great stories, great revelation. In short: Great reading! — L.

Guest Post: “Five Freedoms I Had that My Daughter Won’t”

Hi Readers — Here’s a lovely piece by Kerala Taylor, senior manager of online content & outreach at KaBOOM, the organization dedicated to making sure every kid has a playground nearby. (And even plays in it!) KaBOOM has a “Back to School Pledge” folks can sign, to defend school day playtime. Naturally, I signed it! — L. 

Five Freedoms I Had at School that My Daughter Won’t, by Kerala Taylor

At six months pregnant, like most moms and moms-to-be, I’m finding plenty of things to worry about. When I’m not fretting over my daily calcium intake or environmentally friendly diaper options, I find myself plagued with anxiety about the longer-term realities of childrearing today.

I want to give my daughter the freedom I enjoyed as a child—freedom to move, imagine, and create. But in today’s paranoid, litigious, and test-happy culture, will I be able to? As kids across the country head back to school, and as I watch my belly swell, I’ve been thinking a lot about the freedoms I had in school that most kids these days don’t enjoy.

1. I had two recess periods every day. More and more kids are finding they have to rush through lunch to enjoy a precious few minutes of recess. Some kids aren’t getting any recess at all, despite the overwhelming body of evidence that shows kids need recess to focus in the classroom. This child sums it up perfectly: “I get this feeling in my legs when they want to run and that feeling moves up to my belly and when that feeling moves up to my head I can’t remember what the rules are.”

1. I got hurt sometimes—and no one freaked out. I suffered plenty of scrapes and bruises on the playground, and once limped around for a week after falling from the monkey bars. But no one ever told me to stop running, or even considered the possibility of taking away the monkey bars! These days, the fear of lawsuits from relatively minor injuries are prompting schools to not only remove see saws and swings from schoolyards, but to ban tag, touch football, and yes, even running.

1. I played inside and outside the classroom. I made a paper maché globe in geography, dug up “dinosaur” bones from the sandbox in science, and took regular field trips (on, gasp, public city buses!). Now, the pressures of standardized testing are forcing teachers to forego such creative, hands-on pursuits. After all, how will paper maché teach students which bubble to mark with their No. 2 pencil?

1. I took a school-sponsored week-long camping trip every year, starting in the first grade. Playing in nature comes intuitively to children; nature is rife with opportunities to splash, dig, climb, run, and explore. Unfortunately, nature is also rife with potential “dangers” that today’s bubble-wrapped children must be protected from at all costs. And as studies find that kids of helicopter parents have trouble functioning on their own in college, can we expect today’s first graders to be independent enough to spend a whole week away from home?

1. I played after school. I didn’t participate in any organized sports until sixth grade and my homework in elementary school was minimal. That meant more time for free play. Yet since the 1970s, as schools pile on more homework and kids get roped into more structured activities, children have lost about 12 hours per week in free time, including a 25 percent decrease in play.

Why are we taking these freedoms away from our children? We say we’re protecting them from harm, or we’re helping them succeed academically, or we’re preserving their fragile egos. But more often than not, the reality is that we’re slowly eroding the very essence of what it means to be a child. We’re not only making childhood less fun, we’re actually stunting our kids’ physical, social, cognitive, and creative development.

As a Free-Range stepmom and mom-to-be, I’m used to feeling isolated, enraged, and just plain exasperated. But I know I’m not alone! I say, let’s join forces to save play in our nation’s schools—we can start by signing this Back-to-School Pledge.

We are not powerless to curb the rising tides of paranoia, testing-frenzy, and blatant disregard for the health and well-being of our children. It’s when like-minded parents connect—whether on this blog, in the neighborhood, or in PTA meetings—that we can channel our frustrations into action and restore some good old-fashioned common sense. – K.T.

Recess Coaches: Good Idea?

Hi Readers! Well today a topic we’d discussed a little earlier (and earlier still)  has made the front page of The New York Times. “Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has a New Boss,” is about a recess assistant hired at an elementary school in Newark, NJ, where many of the kids had ostensibly been spending recess deliberately running into each other, or arguing, or banishing other kids to the sidelines.

The Times mentions that the coach broke up a “renegade game of hopscotch,” making it sound as if she is outlawing all that is joyous about childhood. (So does the headline.) And if there is an element of official kill-joying,  I hope the coach learns to back off. But her job is also to teach the students a vast array of what sound like fast, fun “just add kid” games — games with rules so simple that the children “can focus on playing rather than on following directions.” She lets them yell as much as they want, and jump around, and run.  Another school’s recess helper has taught kids how to settle their disputes with the age-old rock-paper-scissors, rather than  squabbling. (Or using a real rock. Or scissors.)

When we discussed this issue here a few months back there was concern that these “helpers” could actually be “squashers” — squashing kids’ inherent creativity, or problem-solving abilities, or even their right to daydream. After emailing with a couple of readers this morning, however, here’s an idea that makes sense:

One reader suggested that this would be a good program for kids who had gotten into recess-time trouble: make them participate in the organized games. Another suggested it would a be fine program, providing kids could opt out. But synthesizing these ideas makes even more sense: Make this program mandatory for everyone for a little while, and then allow kids to opt out. With all the kids participating, it wouldn’t get the reputation of punishment. Meanwhile, ALL the kids would learn a bunch of games — games they could eventually organize themselves, even outside of school. Or even during recess, without adult help!

In times past, and in some places to this day, kids grew up KNOWING how to play “Mother, May I?” and freeze tag and Duck, Duck Goose. When those games get forgotten, they’re like a lost language. They don’t spontaneously re-appear. Someone needs to teach them to the kids again. So  let’s teach them. (Let’s just make sure it’s not as painful as real language lessons.)

Meantime, by allowing kids to opt out a little later on, we’ve got the best of both worlds: Kids who want to go  off and play that game of hopscotch on their own still can, so we haven’t lost the “free” in “free time.” All that has been added is a new repertoire of games and maybe some skills at solving disputes.

I’m all for free play, as you know. But if what’s really happening is free-misery, it makes sense to reassess recess. — Lenore

"Should we fight or learn a game?" PHOTO: National Archives

Maybe Semi-Organized Recess Isn’t So Bad

Hi Readers — It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind (and a man’s, too), and this article from The Boston Globe has me re-thinking my knee-jerk reaction against any attempt to organize and regulate recess.

The article points out that in many schools, kids have almost forgotten HOW to play. Sending in a coach to get kids jumping rope or playing kickball is a sorry thing to need — you wish kids just did this spontaneously. But when they don’t,  sending in someone to teach the basics of fun is sounding good to me. 

Naturally, I don’t love the idea of an adult constantly prodding and organizing and restricting the kids. I want the kids to learn the basics then run the show. It’s their free time. I also want the non-athletic kids (like I was) to still have a chance to sit around and talk, if that’s their inclination. But to sit around because you have no idea how to organize a run-around game and neither do your friends? That is just sad. So here’s to teaching the other three Rs, when necessary: Running, Romping and Recess. — Lenore (who thanks MITBeta for sending along the link)

Lessons From a Pine Cone (and, okay, a blog)

My kids have never gone to overnight/sleepaway camp, but I really like this blog  from a camp out west. The camp director (or someone!) sent it to me thinking the “Top 10 Things I’ve Learned as a Summer Camp Professional that Make Me a Better Parent” entry would be right up my alley. It is. I particularly like part of lesson 8, about how to resolve conflicts:

A great technique for getting a kid to talk is to MOVE. Children, especially boys, can have a hard time expressing their feelings if they feel like an adult is standing there, waiting for an answer, and “pressuring” them to say something. If you can remove the child from the situation and go for a walk (ideally outdoors), the questions you ask may elicit more than the standard, “I dunno” answers.

Great advice. But anyway, then I scrolled down to the post beneath that one, which turned out to be all about how a bunch of 5^th graders came up with – sit down! – their own game. The game has something to do with hitting pine cones into a hole and each pine cone is worth so many points and you get so many tries to hit them, and on and on. But the blogger’s point (and now mine) is that it is so lovely when kids invent their own games. And so rare that it needs to be celebrated.

Kids need free time or they can’t invent their own games, rules, worlds. That kind of inventing is as valuable a childhood activity as any I can think of.

My boys certainly have some after school activities, of course. I’m an American! But once I started researching “free play” for my book, I let them drop out of some, too. Goodbye piano! Goodbye electric guitar!

I still feel a little guilty (sometimes more than a little) about that. But aside from the personal joy of no longer having to nag them about practicing, it just became obvious that there is something just as enriching as extra class time and that is… extra free time. Learning to be resourceful without a teacher, parent or coach telling you what to do next.

So here’s to the weekend ahead of us all. May it be filled with nice things – in part by being not filled with too, too much.   — Lenore