The Crossover movement
Letting Kids Be Kids
Posted by Brian McCormick
I am not a parent. However, I saw an article on MSN titled “How to Let Kids Be Kids” about parenting and insane schedules.
it seems that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of modern American parenting. The thinking goes like this: The sooner our children start racking up knowledge and experiences — whether it’s learning Mandarin or perfecting their sidestroke — the greater their lifelong chances for happiness and success.
However, are the early lessons the best way for kids to learn and develop?
“Well, what kind of mastery are we talking about?” asks Susan Linn, a psychologist at the Judge Baker Children’s Center and Harvard Medical School and the author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World. “Children learn through playing, through active exploration that feeds their imagination, not by always having others organize the world for them.”
Play is vastly underrated. While we understand the importance of executing fundamentals correctly, we do not understand the best way to develop these fundamentals. More to the point, we cringe when kids make mistake after mistake and we want to show them the right way. However, learning is a series of mistakes and people learn best when they figure out things for themselves.
Hard to believe? Well, maybe that’s because many adults have a kind of amnesia about what was important to us growing up. We (and by “we,” I mean I) tend to think, Well, it’s a tougher world than the one we grew up in, and our kids must learn to compete on the reality show called, um, Reality. So we see unstructured play as a waste of time.
When kids play, there are no measurable outcomes. Adults like to measure and define things so they can determine the best course of action. Play lacks defined goals. So, we underestimate its value as a learning tool.
Relentlessly provide your child with homework and structured activities, experts say, and you will be teaching him what to think. Leave plenty of room for self-directed play and unstructured time, and you will be teaching him how to think. “It’s in playing that we first learn to think for ourselves, and perhaps only in playing that we can truly be ourselves,” says Linn.
The same occurs in sports. Playing in structured practices and running set plays teaches players what to do, but not how to think. Then, we criticize players because they do not know how to think or adjust on the court.
According to research from the University of Michigan on how children ages 3 to 12 spend their time, over the past 20 years there has been a drop of 12 hours a week of free time overall, with unstructured activities like walking or camping falling by 50 percent — and structured sports going up by 50 percent. “I’m amazed by the parents around here that have their kids scheduled all the time,” says Julie Bell-Voorhees, a mother of four in Sneads Ferry, NC. “Pick them up at 10, drop them off at 10:30, pick them up again at 2, drop them at another event. It’s like we feel we have to have our children’s lives mapped out by the time they’re 10. Like, ‘My kid will play piano, play golf, and speak French.’ Where’s the fun in that?”
And, in that time, kids’ stress has increased and there is an argument that, while basketball players today are certainly more athletic than in years past, they are not necessarily better basketball players. LeBron James is amazing, but is he a better basketball player than Larry Bird or Magic Johnson or Oscar Robertson?
“Children are self-directed learners — they are naturally curious — and how they learn is through play.”
Therefore, we need to give young athletes more time to play to enhance their learning and their enjoyment of the activities.
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