Have you played today?

I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to child psychology.  I find it fascinating.  My love for it all started when I read a book about the impact of no-fault divorce legislation on children.  The book covered the results of a study of a controlled group of kids of divorced parents over the course of 25 years.  It also compared those results with that of children who grew up with unhappy parents that stay together.  

A great new documentary, called "The Lost Adventures of Childhood", covers the role and impact of play - both free and structured - on child development.  It's pretty amazing.  

Free play (without parents, engaged supervisors, rules or structure) allows children to be themselves, take risks, experience uncertainty, get hurt, learn cooperation, be creative and try new things.  Structured play, when the only type of play in a child's life, has been so organized that it is maturing children too early. This includes organized sport and clubs that are so intensive that it emulates the responsibilities of an adult. This creates followers rather than leaders, forces children to be the same or risk losing out, and stunts their ability to succeed later in life.  

I remember playing freely as a kid all the time.  In fact, many of us who did likely have dozens of stories that are retold by their parents today about how we played.  Stories that are funny now because they are uncannily similar to who we are today.  My family's unfinished basement, in fact, became three businesses over the span of two weeks when I was home from school recovering from an appendectomy.  A grocery store, a bank and a law firm.  I made my sister into the stock girl, customer or client and played for hours.  Bossy, enterprising, creative and oddly organized.  Sound familiar?

Check out the documentary if you can. I can't find when it is showing again, but hopefully it will reappear.  And, more importantly, don't get sucked into everything that modern child rearing is today.  Some of its structure is good, of course.  But a lot of it isn't.  When you have kids, let them be....kids.  I feel lucky that my parents did.