Hurricane Betsy writes, in response to this post on play:

I sent my son to a pre-school (or whatever they call it) many years ago, one day per week, for two years. The Final Event at the year’s end took place at nearby Provincial Park, a beautiful, natural spot. The two daycare workers (older women) in charge set up 10 play stations in a clearing surrounded by old forest. The 50 children were divided into groups of 10 and would line up in front of each of these artificial activity centers, taking their turn at “playing.” One such play center was throwing a ball into a hoop; another was horseshoes; a little slide; and so on. All involved interaction with Fisher Price plastic play things on demand. After each child would dutifully do his play, he’d be ushered on to the next play station, all in proper military rotation. On and on it went, round and round.

Several times, a few children got fed up with this never-ending, on-command, artificial “play” and tried to run away toward the edge of the nearby bush away from the “We are Now Officially Having Fun” area. I saw all this, and I watched, stupefied, as the daycare workers chased after them and ordered them back into their line to continue their “play.”

Today, my heart aches when I recall this travesty.

Jesse Powell writes on the same post:

One time, in the daytime, I was in a public park and I saw five and six years olds, mostly boys but some girls, playing a softball game. It was very weird. They all had uniforms on, there was an umpire, and there were several loud noisy and enthusiastic parents cheering their kids on and going “right on, right on” when their kids hit the ball well or made a good play. It was very regimented and some kids seemed to be taking the “game” seriously with serious looks on their faces putting forth real effort to do well. There was no negativity from the parents, and at the end of the game all the kids lined up to “shake hands” with their opponents, and I don’t really know who won and who lost, but again, it gave me the feeling of institutionalized daycare in the guise of a “game” instead of being true play for children. 

Thinking back to some of the play I enjoyed as a kid, in my neighborhood there were lots of kids about my age and we would all congregate around the house of a stay-at-home mother who enjoyed having kids around after school. She would make cookies that we kids could eat and sent the message we were welcome around her house. She provided some basic supervision for the play activities and then the many kids who congregated around her house would spontaneously organize some games to play with a few basic rules to follow. The games would spontaneously start, those kids who wanted to participate participated, those who didn’t would stay out and do their own thing or play a smaller game with a smaller group of friends, and when the game petered out the kids would simply disband. 

This form of lightly supervised play with simple rules to follow, a spontaneous beginning and end to the play time, flexible options as to which games to play and who to play with, this seems much more “fun” than all the boys who got shepherded together to play the organized softball game with their fathers cheering them on that I saw the five and six years olds playing at a public park in my neighborhood. 

There seems to be a drive to overschedule kids lives and to put them into organized supervised activities at too young an age for too great a proportion of their free time. It is like the institutionalized daycare model of child care is leaking out of the actual daycare facility and infecting the child’s life in a more pervasive way, that rules and regimentation and “structured activity” is being imposed upon the child even when they are in the great outdoors in the evening or at a play field on a Saturday afternoon. 

I wonder why this is, why there is this desire to impose “structure” upon even young children instead of letting them play?

Laura writes:

My husband played lots of pick-up baseball when he was a boy, and half the time was spent yelling and bickering over the rules. But, this kind of play is overall much more fun than the organized, scheduled activities that have taken its place. What is childhood without some freedom? How can you grow up without a little roaming? Once a certain tipping point is reached with the growth of organized sports, almost all children are forced to take part in them because casual, unscheduled play ceases to exist as a real alternative. In many neighborhoods, it’s either homebound isolation or organized activities such as sports teams and scheduled play dates. The increase in working mothers is a major reason for this change. School or school-like activities  fill that vacuum. 

Would baseball or football or hockey have ever developed as sports if children were always supervised to the degree they are today? Athletic teams have their place, especially in high school, but I do not think of organized sports activities as real play. It’s more like a form of work and dumbed-down sports. Many parents feel these games are essential for self-esteem, that a child cannot gain confidence unless he has been observed for hundreds of hours by attentive parents sitting in bleachers. But there’s a lack of intimacy, a very impersonal quality, to these activities for young children. Spontaneous play creates feuds and fights, but it also nurtures friendship. The crowd is the enemy of friendship.

On the face of it, these youth teams seem innocent and charming. And in moderation they would be fine. But, they’ve become an unconstrained force, part of the decline of leisure discussed in this previous post.

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