Children Should Play

When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it. 

The passage above, by Peter Gray, from an article aptly titled “The Play Deficit,” reminds me of days with my cousins while our dads helped each other harvest crops.  I’ve never called it hunter-gather time, but that’s a good name for all the roaming we did around my uncle’s farm.  Many people my age describe the hours and hours of unsupervised play they had as children.  Now, I’m not sure we feel the world is safe for this kind of activity.  That’s one issue, but the more difficult issue may be the addictive quality of the various electronic screens that vie for our kid’s attention.  Of course the world changes, but we have some choices about those changes.