Have We Over-structured Kids’ Playtime?

Has your child ever caught a frog, or is his/her play too structured for that?

My local paper printed an article by conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, that caught my attention. He bemoans the loss of unsupervised play. Gone are the days when a parent sent their kids out in the neighborhood to have fun.

Yes, my mom knew my approximate whereabouts. I could ride my bike up to the busy road and no further. She knew all the neighbors on my block and could depend on them to keep an eye out. But that was when mothers stayed at home. Now kids have play dates and organized sports. There’s nothing wrong with that.   But there is something wrong with the cultural shift in attitude that has accompanied these things. Douthat cites three changes in our corporate perspective.

“First is the upper-class, competition-driven vision of childhood as a rigorously supervised period in which unattended play is abnormal, risky, and weird.” He tells of an African-American single mom who let her nine-year-old play at a nearby park while she worked a shift at McDonalds. She ended up in jail. Is that the answer? Really? He quotes Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic essay on “The Overprotected Kid.” “It has encouraged bystanders and public servants to regard a deviation from constant supervision as neglect.”

Second, he talks about “the disproportionate anxiety over child safety; fed by media coverage of every abduction, every murdered child, every tragic ‘hot car’ death. Such horrors are real but the danger is widely overstated.” I agree. We can’t be motivated by fear.

Third, he tells of the “erosion of social trust, which has made neighborliness seem unnatural or archaic.” He quotes Gracy Olman’s article in The American Conservative which calls this the “bad Samaritan” phenomenon. Douthat says “Why speak to a parent when you can just snap a smart-phone picture for the cops?”

I have five children, nine grandchildren, and write fiction for kids. So I have a heart for children’s welfare. My question is–can we let go of some of our fears and suspicions and still provide safe play and learning  for them?   I think we can. Perhaps it takes building trusting relationships with neighbors and parents. This takes time–something we don’t seem to have much of in our fast-paced society. At the very least we need to quit blaming single parents who are doing the best they can. They need our encouragement and wisdom, not jail time.

And maybe it’s okay to let our kids go wade in the creek and catch a frog.

Want to hear more? Here is a link to Douthan’s blog about his NY Times article:

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/helping-parents-cope-leaving-kids-alone/

So what is your opinion? Do you have suggestions for safe unstructured play? Let me know.