Want Your Kids to Play More? Some Tips from Peter Gray!

Let Grow Co-Founder Peter Gray taught us these two truths:

1 – Kids NEED free play. It is up there with food, water, love, and sleep, when it comes to a healthy childhood.

2 – Kids are NOT GETTING free play. The unstructured kind. Not much of it. They might be in a soccer league, or dance class, which are fun. But being watched and coached is nothing at all like organizing your own games, solving your own arguments, deciding what you want to do and with whom.

Peter’s classic TEDx talk explains why evolution installed the play drive in all mammals. It is literally how they learn. And the more kids play, the more they learn. (That’s one reason humans have such a long childhood.) So how can we help our kids get more play in their lives?

On his Play Makes Us Human substack, Peter lists 13 suggestions, like try to go on family vacations with other families so the kids have someone to play with.

And don’t drive your kids everywhere.

And ask your kid’s sports team or organization to include free play as part of the practice.

Below are a few more of Peter’s ideas. And here is the link to his whole post!

Decades ago, a common refrain of parents to kids was, “Get out of the house.”  Kids were shoed out partly because parents recognized it was good for the kids but mostly because they recognized it was good for them (the parents), usually especially the moms. It worked then, because there were lots of other kids out with whom to play and neighbors expected kids to be out and weren’t distraught by it…

[To make that happen again:] Get together with your neighbors who have kids. Maybe have an informal neighborhood party for parents and their kids. Let the kids play while you talk with the parents about the value of kids’ social free play. Then say something like this: “What if we all, for certain hours every week—maybe every Saturday afternoon or one day a week after school—act like old-fashioned parents and shoo our kids out of the house. And keep the cell phones inside! If enough of us do that, they will find one another and find ways of playing. I bet they’ll thank us for it after a few such experiences and beg for more.” If there is concern about safety, your group can have an adult out there, just to watch for emergencies, not to intervene in the play.

One of the best things you can do with your kids is to ask them what they would really like to do, maybe something a little scary, but for one reason or another haven’t done. It could be something as simple as taking the bus themselves to visit a friend. Then give them permission to do it, or something as close to it as you can tolerate. I’ll elaborate on this more in a future letter, as it is a technique some schools are using to encourage independent out-of-school activity (here) and that has proven remarkably successful, in a recent clinical study, in reducing anxiety in highly anxious kids (here). It is a way of enabling kids to develop courage.

Let Grow Play Club is a school-centered program developed by yours truly in collaboration with Lenore Skenazy [and Jonathan Haidt and Dan Shuchman] through the Let Grow nonprofit. It’s typically an hour of free play before or after school, most often in elementary schools, involving kids of all grades together. The only rule is don’t hurt anyone, and there are lots of things and people to play with. Read about it here and talk with personnel at your kid’s school about the possibility of adopting the program there. It’s a whole lot cheaper than a course in social-emotional learning and way more effective.

More ideas here! And please add any tips that have worked for you, over our Raising Independent Kids FB group!

Peter Gray and his playmate Ruby.