Experts: Lack of playtime is hurting children

Several years ago, when I was between IT jobs, I worked at a pre-school, teaching two-year olds. I was fired after two weeks because I couldn't keep them on schedule. They were all supposed to color at the same time, on the same subject, play with blocks at the same time, etc.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27789613/

Associated Press updated 3:13 p.m. ET, Tues., Nov. 18, 2008

...
Among the speakers at last week’s Wonderplay conference Y was Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a Temple University psychologist who contends that lack of play in early childhood education “could be the next global warming.”

Without ample opportunity for forms of play that foster innovation and creative thinking, she argues, America’s children will be at a disadvantage in the global economy.

“Play equals learning,” she said. “For too long we have divorced the two.”

Some of the factors behind diminished play time have been evolving for decades, others are more recent. Added together, they have resulted in eight to 12 fewer hours of free play time per week for the average American child since the 1980s, experts say.

Among the key factors, according to Thompson:

* Parents’ reluctance to let their kids play outside on their own, for fear of abduction or injury, and the companion trend of scheduling lessons, supervised sports and other structured activities that consume a large chunk of a child’s non-school hours.
* More hours per week spent by kids watching TV, playing video games, using the Internet, communicating on cell phones.
* Shortening or eliminating recess at many schools — a trend so pronounced that the National PTA has launched a “Rescuing Recess” campaign.
* More emphasis on formal learning in preschool, more homework for elementary school students and more pressure from parents on young children to quickly acquire academic skills.

“Parents are more self-conscious and competitive than in the past,” Thompson said. “They’re pushing their kids to excel. ... Free play loses out.”

The consequences are potentially dire, according to Thompson. He contends that diminished time to play freely with other children is producing a generation of socially inept young people and is a factor behind high rates of youth obesity, anxiety, attention-deficit disorder and depression.

‘It gets them thinking’
Many families turn to organized sports as a principal non-school activity, but Thompson noted that this option doesn’t necessary breed creativity and can lead to burnout for good young athletes and frustration for the less skilled.

Vivian Paley, a former kindergarten teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and now an author and consultant, argues that the most vital form of play for young children involves fantasy and role-playing with their peers.

“They’re inventing abstract thinking, before the world tells them what to think,” Paley said in her speech to the conference. “It gets them thinking, ‘I am intended to have my own ideas.”’

She worried that preschools, in the drive to prepare students for the academic challenges ahead, are reducing the opportunity for group fantasy play — and thus reducing children’s chances to learn on their own about fairness, kindness and other social interactions.

“The theater of the young receives the least attention from those planning the curriculum of our nation’s schools,” Paley said. “This very activity is being dismantled in our schools to make room for early phonics. ... Preschoolers are being asked to practice being first graders.”