To today's school-age parent: What's hard about play?

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How good is play for our children? How about vital, essential, necessary, life-giving, brain-making, future-shaping? So why aren’t we heirs of the Protestant Play Ethic?

I am playing with you a bit, but I’m really not overstating the case. In a healthy child’s life, play is not a reward for work wedged in at the corners. Play is an essential ‘nutrient’ in a balanced diet of child life, just like work and sleep and eating well.

There’s actually a fair bit to think about in today’s culture when it comes to play, directions where it can go wrong. The parent’s part. How play can be cheated. How play can be stolen. And, encouragingly, how play can be naturally and healthily included for a flourishing life.   

I don’t think research gives us one perfect formula for getting this right in our children’s lives, but research is clear that our kids need play. So, what is a parent’s part in that?

You don’t have to be your child’s chief playmate. If you are, they probably will miss some of the good play is supposed to do for them. But if you miss almost all their play, they will miss something important there as well and you will miss a treasure that can’t be replaced. Also, if their mom or dad or both don’t ever obviously let loose and play – with them and around them – then our children get a hard to forget and very hard to overcome lesson that adults don’t waste time with such things. Grownups work and that’s all. If so, that’s a whole lot less of life than the Lord intends for us and for our children.

Play is fundamentally and essentially creative, as well as physical and multifaceted and personal and relational and collaborative. Do some of those sound to you like a good list of ‘ready for work’ skills developed for our 21st Century graduates? You got it! Play is natural preparation for adult work and community but is true play while preparing. That’s an efficient economy of activity. That’s good living,

If a parent is too involved in a child’s play, it loses much of this open-ended and varied character. We see –and hear – kids always making up rules and changing them and arguing about them in their play. While they can stand a little guidance in this, they also need room to learn from it through trial and error. Given a few safe boundaries, our children need room to make it up and mess it up for themselves.

This leads uncomfortably into the direction where play can be cheated too easily and too often in today’s culture. Because we don’t – for reasonable objectives of safety – shoo our children out the door in the morning to return at sunset or later after playing all day with their neighbors, we find ourselves replacing it with structured and organized and supervised play – often in the form of athletics.

If highly delineated sports activity is all the play my child does, look for yourself at what is eliminated from those earlier characteristics of play. Even that though is healthier than play which is hijacked by parentally vicarious, progressively competitive sports involvement. If my child is always preparing for ‘the next level,’ he isn’t simply experiencing and enjoying the one he’s on. I won’t belabor this. Just consider what comes into play and what goes out of it when that kind of activity is what my child experiences as her play.

Play also can be stolen from the life of today’s child. Organized sports is one way but performing arts or ‘recreational’ pursuits made ‘professional’ are others. Hyper-academic preparation is yet another. Are these what my child gets for play? Call it work and you’re closer to the truth. Call it torture and you’ve hit the nail on the head. One sidebar point is worth noting: work itself, given too early and too intensely to my child can also be the thief of personal development and maturing through the healthy mix of work and play.

Though I do honestly believe it’s dangerous territory, I don’t mean by all this to presume that no child can be psychologically healthy while preparing young for the Olympics or competitive chess or the ballet dance company and the best of the best of youth symphonies. Getting those 10,000 hours of practice for expert status can happen alongside the play, personal time, and creative disengagement needed for the mind and heart to mature in the playfield of freedom. But time and space for the unique self to develop can also be easily lost in those pressured confines of preparation dictated by the coach or parent or demands of virtuosity.

Finally, if there’s not a prescriptive formula for how to do this parenting and play thing just right, then what is available as a healthy guide? While I mentioned in an earlier post how parents can handicap their children by seeking to fight every battle for them, I do think there’s a battle ready and waiting for mom and dad to fight for the benefit of their children.

You don’t have to structure and plan everything about play in the lives of your children. Instead, you need to let it happen!

Fight against the sneaky forces on all fronts seeking to own all of your child’s time, energy and attention. Even sneakier is the fact that those forces usually win that battle by getting you to fight on their side. You end up being the one who steals your child’s time, energy and attention. As mentioned earlier, you steal it because you think that other all-consuming activity is what is best for your child.

Instead of a healthy, somewhat free and quite varied mix of life coming as play, work, family, friends, church, head, heart and hands you sign on for the master course in sports or arts or academics. You structure and plan and direct and own your child’s time, energy and attention directed toward what you goodheartedly deem to be best for him or her.

Of course, you decide what is best for your child. You are his parent. But what if you don’t know all or most of what is best? Then perhaps some openness to what the Lord brings next would be called for.

Think of family finances as a parallel example. If you assume today that the biggest, most beautiful house (and probably neighborhood and maybe athletic club and, who knows, car or whatever) that takes all you can earn and more is what is best for your family, you might mortgage yourself way above your head. Today’s decision takes away the money margin and openness to new choices and growing understanding for the next ten or so years. You can’t decide differently in five years because you already signed up for the crushing obligation and may well not be able to get out from under it.

Time and energy can be mortgaged in much the same way. You can leave no room for next year’s growing understanding as a parent. You may leave no room for the unplanned. You may give no space to the developing or unfurling of experience which good, free play looks like.

Fight that battle for your kids. Keep away the ‘all-in’ commitments which take away most future choice and freedom. For your child and your family, there may be room for a large commitment which still gives freedom of time and energy for something more than that one great buy-in. If so, then that is room for “play” in your child’s life. If for you and your child, though, that commitment would take it all, then my advice would be to think longer and harder before signing up.

You don’t know today what you will learn tomorrow. You will want to have choices available in the future which haven’t been all mopped up by today’s decision.