** Playground Rules: Playgrounds Rule **
When I was 9, I went on the carnival with my dad for 2 weeks during high season. He worked full time, leaving me mostly unsupervised for the duration in a different city each week. This was a turning point in my life, and while I continued through a public school education and appreciate the ability of a classroom to learn coding and Chinese, am receptive to the idea that maybe there’s something better than the classroom.
In a way far more convincing than The Gardener and the Carpenter Free to Play lays out the benefits of play and intentional unsupervision.
Play is the way that all other mammals learn, all the way up to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Play serves to practice both mental integration and interpersonal collaboration, building mental models, risk-reward judgement, and interpersonal skills in a way that adult led learning simply can’t match. Indeed, the very presence of an adult during play or the introduction of rewards turns play into activities focused on pleasing caregivers.
Since independent play is the path towards executive functioning, put simply: * If you want responsible kids, allow them the freedom to be responsible. * Furthermore, the type of play is important. One area repeatedly brought up as beneficial is the value of age mixed play, as it ensures * play is highly cooperative and non-competitive. * The author is more sanguine than most when it comes to video games, and notes that violent video games may be an example of opposite causality, where violence in the world causes violent play.
The end of the book degenerates into cheerleading for the Sudbury Valley School model, which is understandable, but dilutes the informative value of the book with regards to parents not actively looking to change schools for their kids. * to my eyes the school contains precisely the elements of a hunter-gatherer band that are essential for self teaching … and Hunter-gatherer societies were the original democracies. * Exhortations towards trustful parenting are more welcome, but I wish that the other put more effort into reviewing the available literature on what it means to participate in play.
While not well covered by the book, the biggest drawbacks of the book seem to be depression and emotional regulation in the short term, with reduced interpersonal skills and emotional regulation as well as a more external locus of control over the long term.
From the few Google searches I did, Sudbury schools represent the maximum amount of play kids in America could get, with little research able to create an unbiased comparison between Sudbury and public schools. College attendance was higher,, but this is what I would expect from families that take an active role in choosing their school. More notably, when compared with non-Sudbury private schools, the number of self-employed alumni 10+ years after graduation was double (6% vs. 13%) a notable gap. On the other side, home schooled unschoolers are show to have performed much worse on language tests than public school participants.
In the end this is a reminder of the need to create age-mixed and stimulating environments for play for our kids, something the carnival and winter grounds provided for me in spades. Yet it’s not enough to convince me to give up that private school tuition in favor of more time in the playground.