Cutting play time could be counterproductive, experts warn

The National Association of Sports and Physical Education recommends that children engage in at least 60 minutes of physical activity daily and “should not be sedentary for more than 60 minutes at a time, except when sleeping.”

But the reality is that children ages 8 to 10 spend an average of six hours a day watching television, playing video games, and using computers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports “nearly 23 percent of children get no free-time physical activity at all.”

And recess, a time when children can engage in active, supervised, but unstructured, play, is losing its slot in many public school schedules. “Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s 16,000 school districts have either modified, deleted, or are considering deleting recess,” according to the American Association for the Child’s Right to Play.

The group blames the loss of recess on excessive and inconsistent playground safety standards and fear of litigation -- along with the desire to devote every minute to achieving high test scores.

According to Rhonda Clements, a professor of education at Manhattanville College in New York, the lack of play time has contributed to the childhood obesity crisis.

At a recent forum on play sponsored by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center and Common Good, Clements said, “When children are playing in a physical way, it makes the heart pump better, stimulates the brain, makes the bones stronger and denser, and makes the muscles more flexible and supportive.” She says active children are more resistant to chronic illnesses, and when they play outside, they absorb vitamin D.  

Clements’ advice on the staggering child obesity problem is simple: “Eat less; play more.”

The loss of recess also harms children by removing an outlet for creativity.

“Play, not unlike education, has become scripted, rote, and routine,” says Susan Solomon, author of American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space.

“Play’s been devalued to just another commodity, something to order up from a catalogue, and children are regarded as idiots who lack self-control, judgment, or the capacity to learn by making mistakes,” she says.

As a result, “the contemporary playground has become overly safe and highly predicable,” Solomon says. “There is no room for experimentation, no chance for error, no opportunity for kids to accomplish something they have to work hard at until they succeed.”

Children rarely intermingle with one another, “thereby limiting their chances for fantasy and social maturation. Kids encounter a directional, isolating, and controlled space,” Solomon says. The modern idea of play time “is the physical embodiment of teaching that is endorsed by the No Child Left Behind Act.”

Under extreme pressure to ensure high scores on standardized tests, many school administrators have cut recess or try to use physical education as a substitute for recess.

“It’s a different kettle of fish,” says Anthony Pellegrini, a professor of education psychology at the University of Minnesota. During recess, children are motivated to “muster all of their social and cognitive skills” to create games with their friends.

According to Pellegrini, recess is where children, especially English language learners, can find something they are good at. “It is something that encourages them to come to school and keeps them happy about going to school.”

The fear of costly court cases if children get hurt during recess also has led many school leaders to cancel recess or make it much more restrictive.

“Litigation has a profound, extensive, nationwide influence on children’s playgrounds, and the influence does not seem to be declining,” says Joe Frost, professor emeritus of education at the University of Texas.

“I get phone calls from child-care directors, school principals, school administrators, parks people, attorneys, all over the country on a regular basis, sometimes, two or three a day, asking what to in the face of possible litigation,” he says. Such litigation “is very real. It is far too extensive, and it is doing great harm to American kids.”

Another obstacle is school officials’ increased sensitivity to the threat of bullying. While that is a positive development, it’s almost “to the point where they want to protect children from the remote risk of hurt feelings,” says Christina Hoff Summers, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

People are becoming hyper-vigilant, agrees Pellegrini, and they are discouraging children, especially boys, from taking part in physically vigorous play.

“Rough-and-tumble play is something qualitatively different from aggression,” he says. “It is how kids learn social skills. It is how they learn to inhibit aggression, and to recognize aggressive facial cues. It does not come naturally. It does not happen by being taught morals or ethics or values; it happens by interacting with peers. And we have to give kids the opportunity to do this.”

“We trivialize kid’s play. It gets in the way of other things that we want to do on our way to achievement,” adds Hara Estroff Marano, editor-at-large of Psychology Today.

“One of the great hidden secrets of play is that it turns on genes in the brain. It fosters the maturation of the various centers of the brain that allow us to exert control over attention and to regulate our emotions and to control our behavior,” she says. “Social play helps program higher brain areas that will be required later in life.”  

Marano believes the lack of sufficient play time could be a factor in “the impulse control problems we label attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” She says the explosion of ADHD diagnoses has emerged at the same time that recess is vanishing.

Despite the pressures, some districts still make time for recess. Coquille (Ore.) School District 8 provides a 15-minute recess in the morning, 20 minutes at lunch, and 15 minutes in the afternoon for K-5 students, says Superintendent John Kinnee. Students in grades 6-8 get a 30-minute break after lunch.

“As a dad, I think play is pretty important,” he says. “As a teacher and superintendent, I am worried that the increased demands for accountability will make recess one of the things given up in the quest to attain higher academic achievement.”

“Every time you turn around there’s a new academic requirement,” Kinnee says. “How do you meet all of these divergent requirements without getting in trouble or being marked a district that’s not as successful as it’s supposed to be?”

He notes that the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to provide breaks after two and a-half hours of work, but “we’re taking recess away from kids . . . simply because we are trying to be more competitive in terms of academic success.”

Marano does not think eliminating recess will lead to higher student achievement. In fact, she believes, providing a break from class work is more effective, both in the long term and short term.

“Many think that taking play out of childhood and substituting workbooks or desk time or number work is the best way, and that earlier is better. That may have a certain naive logic, but it happens to be dead wrong,” she says. Children are under more pressure today because their lives are “micromanaged by adults.”

“By its very ambiguous nature, play gives brains a workout,” Marano says. “Play is cognitively challenging. It requires attention, and so it sharpens our senses. It both demands and inspires mental dexterity and flexibility.”\

“Play makes us nimble, capable of adapting to a rapidly evolving world,” she says. “It thrives on complexity, uncertainty, and possibility, which makes play just about the perfect preparation for life in the 21st century.”