I am indebted to the ever-fascinating Dense Discovery newsletter for drawing my attention to an essay by evolutionary anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster. The premise of the piece is that among our hunter-gatherer cousins and ancestors, children spend and spent a lot of time goofing around in largely unsupervised peer gangs. Now, we’ve taken away all the safe-ish places our kids could do that–no more woods at the edge of town, no more hanging out at the swimming hole, no more sandlot sports–and thus children have nowhere left to seek unsupervised peer society other than the dangerous, dirty, depressing internet.
This little thought piece has stuck with me, maybe because my upbringing did include woods that started right at our backyard, a sandlot baseball diamond/rugby pitch/soccer field, solo tromps to school from age five, horseback rides over hill and dale at all hours with not an adult supervisor to be seen. No internet nothing. No TV allowed for much of it.
But I was also raised by parents who played. Mom went off to whack tennis balls with her lady friends, Dad would sit down at the piano and fool around with some boogie-woogie licks a friend had shown him in high school. When Dad got together with his old friend Ben, they’d play cribbage by the hour and you never heard such silliness as those two grown men indulged in. Mom and Dad occasionally got into flirtatious and playful moods, though I have no idea why my dad was dancing to Get Up and Boogie with underpants on his head that one morning when I was in eighth grade (he was also decently attired).
I saw play modeled by the grown ups around me. I saw it validated as a worthy use of time, as a source of legitimate joy. I was not only allowed to play, I was expected to play. I was also expected to excel in school and do chores, but unstructured goofing around, with and without peers, was firmly on the agenda adults assumed I would follow.
One of the guys I dated, by contrast, had been raised in a conservative farming family. One day a year they’d pack up the station wagon and take a picnic to the shores of Lake Michigan. For that entire day, the dad would grumble about time wasted, the mom would sit white-knuckled in the front seat praying the family made it home. One grouchy, anxious day a year was all the leisure and recreation that boyfriend saw modeled.
Play is good for us, and great for children. It strengthens our executive functioning, problem-solving skills, creativity, empathy, social resilience, autonomy, and even the very structures of our brains.
I do think that wrecking our green spaces, putting cars at the top of our community design priorities, and buying into stranger-danger paranoia is bad for us all around, and especially bad for our children. I also wonder, though, if we’re making enough space in our parenting and collective child-rearing, for the seriously beneficial activity we call play.
How did you play when you were a kid? If a child looked at your life now, would they see you being regularly playful?
Your thoughts remind me how much things have changed in the decades since I was a child. I played a lot, both indoors and out. I have 4 younger siblings and since my Dad was in the Air Force and we moved every 2-3 years, they were my normal playmates (I remember though that my best friend when I was about 6 or 7 was a neighbor’s Great Dane). We did not live near woods but we played in the neighborhood yards and rode bicycles and when we lived in Turkey, we played on what I now know was essentially a small construction site. Even when we visited my grandparents and cousins here in central Florida, we played outside even in the summer. My parents played cards regularly and bowled wherever we lived.
Nowadays, I mostly play inside my head as I read, and thus live, in various genres and time periods.
Hi! This is Eli, the author of that Substack essay. Just wanted to thank you for reading it and for writing such a thoughtful response — your point about the modeling of play as a worthwhile activity is quite interesting. You might be interested in work by Peter Gray, if you haven’t stumbled upon it already 🙂
Holy pistol. I am honored that you’d comment. Please keep up the thought-provoking, good work! Also, another book that stuck with me hard was Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv. Scary good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Child_in_the_Woods
I sometimes wonder if it is just my “old people thoughts” but I do believe kids today are missing out on a lot because they don’t interact with each other in play as much as we did.
When the weather was good my siblings and I would be outside playing with all the other neighborhood kids. Some were organized games (tag, hide and seek, etc.) but a lot was pretend play (cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, etc.) Indoors it was board games or games we made up and maybe hide and seek.
When we were outside most of the time we had to stay close enough to hear our mother if she called us. But we were allowed to wander further sometimes. I do remember playing in the woods. I also remember walking along the railroad tracks which we were not supposed to do.
Good post Grace. Took me on a nice trip down memory lane.
My mom had a cowbell, and when she rang that thing, you could hear it half-way across the valley. That was the signal to get thee home, because dinner was about to be served. No street lights where I grew up, which made for much better games of flashlight tag!
Baby boomer here. We played! I was off in my bike everyday when I wasn’t doing something at home. Elementary school had recess (do they still have that?) where it was team sports (kickball) or do your own thing (jump rope). No hovering mom here. I gave my son the same freedom to goof around on his own. If he wanted a particular activity, soccer/baseball/gymnastics, I found a way to make it happen. But his off time was not scheduled unless he wanted it to be. Free time was good for imagination in our play; Nancy Drew following clues, pirates, cowboys, you name it, we did it.
Oddly enough, the game I recall playing most often was Lost Kids. We’d turn a good climbing tree into our long ship, and battle all manner of storms and monsters.
My mom had a cowbell, too, that she rang for dinner to get us home! I wonder how common that was back then (for me that would mostly be the late 1950s since I don’t remember her using it after that).
My mom started with the cowbell in the early 50’s. It ended up with me and I gave it to the brother who has coordinated all of our family reunions. At the last reunion, I got to ring us all home with it.
Paradoxically and even with the responsibilities of adult life I’m having much more fun and playing more now than as a little girl. Above all the creativity that is so strong in the little – and no so little – ones not only I’ve not lost it but it has kept growing and expanding.
I didn’t start writing novels until I was in my forties, and got my first publishing contract at age 50. My experience was, if creativity or creative self-expression had been stifled earlier in life, or in the parenting/working crunch years, it just lurked until it saw an opening, and then… look out, because singing your song, writing your poem, telling your tale, or making your personal pair of yak wool booties is just too much fun, and too re-vitalizing to be denied.
We took off on our bikes with the direction to come home when the street lights come on. While I lived “in town” we had a couple of parks near by. One froze the baseball diamond in the winter so we could ice skate. My dad was a deadpan kinda guy who would turned the hose hose on us once while we were all working in the garden. We continued doing unexpected laugh inducing things (unannounced) while we grew up. Kinda of impromptu improv. As we became adults we sibs continued to crack each other up when we got together. I did succeed in creating laugh moments with my daughters but not as often as I would have liked.
Like my dad the exceptionally introverted academic dancing around the back hallway with underpants on his head. I wish I could reverse the reel and get the context for that memory.
I lost my mother to leukemia when I was four years old. My father remarried 90 days later to the Wicked Witch of the West. She didn’t understand me – a girl who once I learned to read could not put the book down. I would be sitting in the house reading on a beautiful day and she was say to me “put the book down Davida and go outside and play.” So I would hide the book in my clothes, go outside and walk around the corner to the next block. There, I would sit on the sidewalk and continue to read my book. As I got a little older and could walk a few more blocks away from my house I would go to the Free Library Branch of Philadelphia that was built near by when I was ten. There, I had a friend that was the librarian who would greet me as I walked in and she would sometimes have a Georgette Heyer book in her hand and she would say, “Davida I think you would like this book.” And that started my lifetime of loving Regency books. Books were my play and books saved my life.
It appears we grew up in the same times so I would repeat almost everything you stated.
I am happy to say I still play at 85. I do somethhing everyday that bring laughter to my life and others. It is never to late to play.
My young nieces and nephews laugh at the things I did as a kid, but they seceretly love hearing the stories!
As an educator and counselor I made it a point to have the group laugh at something. My prayer is for all kids to learn to play. With others and by them self.
I was a kid in the greater Los Angeles area in the 1950s. Our neighborhood was laid out in blocks, but not all the plots had houses — there were many vacant lots filled with mustard flowers. I didn’t have siblings at home, but there were a few kids in the neighborhood my age. We played all through the neighborhood, mostly cowboys and indians. We also got out all our bikes, wagons, etc. and had parades. The only warning I ever got from my Mom was to be careful in the vacant lots and make sure we didn’t fall down an abandoned well or something.
I think I’ve kept playing all my life. When I worked for the county welfare dept. (not a career, but a way to support myself) I wrote skits that laughed at all the regulations, etc. we had to follow and the people we encountered — those were fun at an office gathering. I sang in a choir for a long time, and then discovered a dance community that has given me so much joy. My children were involved in some of this, too. I’m 80 now, and downsizing. My daughter wants my morris hat and step clogs — that’s how she wants to remember me and I am really honored.
Like the others, I had a very active childhood with my three younger brothers (mainly) plus friends and neighbours. Always exploring on our bikes and hiding in corn fields only two blocks away. Yes, we had jobs (mowing, babysitting, selling pop on the golf course behind the house) but also lots of time to play.
My play these days is mainly reading, some quilting, plus lots of online research for new books and fabrics.
Grace, very impressed with your reference to the essay, and then when the writer wrote back – priceless!
Summertime was spent roaming outdoors with the neighborhood kids and winter meant board games with my brother, card games and television with the family, and books, glorious books on my own. This was the 1950s and early 1960s.
I spent most of my childhood in a small city in the Midwest– Cedar Falls, Iowa, in fact. And I did enjoy freedoms similar to those you mentioned. Behind our house, the land swooped down to a great wide,field, with playground equipment in the middle. This field was bordered on three sides by a drainage ditch, which we called “the crick”. It was full of slabs of broken concrete and had water in it about half the year… it also passed in some places through concrete culverts, which were fascinating additions to our play– echo-ey, a bit scary, and not at all sanitary. I occasionally found agates in the Crick, as well as the occasional dead rat, and all kinds of oddments. I once found an amazing pornographic magazine there; also a brass scabbard for a curved Middle-Eastern dagger– the knife was missing, so I tried to make one for it out of Sculpey. Didn’t work too well!
My family was quite dysfunctional, and my father, seriously abusive… but they were also very busy, and so we were allowed to play.Whenever we didn’t have homework or other work to do. It was often best and safest to stay out of the way! I spent a lot of time up in trees, building forts in the woods on “the island”, which was some wooded land beyond the drainage ditch on the far side of the field. There was also a place we called “the dirt hills”, which were literally huge piles of concrete, asphalt and other stony debris… i guess it was a place where the city put hard-surface refuse. My brother and I and his friends often played there, and sometimes had neighborhood wars and other imaginary games.
My brother was 2 years younger than me. Sometimes we played together, particularly when he was younger. I had some dolls (which were not “Barbies”, but an odd assortment of
inxpensive small figures I’d ended up with over the years). Sometimes my brother and I would have wonderful imaginative games under the hedge; our dolls would go on expeditions or build
treehouses, on a big plastic philodendron plant that our parents had. I also remember
that there were styrofoam containers that fast food sandwiches came in, that we sometimes used for really great spaceships!
We had a lot of unsupervised time, When we weren’t in school, which was great. In the summer evenings, we could play outside until well after dark, so long as we came quick, when they called.
I loved to read, but my mom was always after me to go outside and play… i suspect because her mother did the same thing to her, or maybe because she was worried that I was an introvert.I had good reason! But I managed to read a whole lot anyway, and had a rich, imaginary life. It helped me survive, and gave me other lives and worlds to get lost in.
( I typed this on my phone, so it’s probably full of weirdness…Sorry about that!)
PS: I raised my son by myself; he was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I had to be and do so much more, for him. Anyway I did my best to make sure that he
Had lots of opportunities to explore his dreams and creativity. I didn’t get to play with him myself as much as I would have liked but I did more than my parents did with me. And I read to him every night and also whenever we went on long driving trips together. I made recordings to listen to in the car; I recorded all of Tolkien and a bunch of other long books too! Those were good years.
When he was about seven, we moved to Florida, where we lived on the Gulf coast for fifteen years; we did a lot there! We collected animals and fish at the beach, and had a wonderful saltwater aquarium, and I taught him all the things I knew about those animals. I also got us involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, which was a great experience for us both… And I wrote an educational pirate program, which he and I performed in, with our Alexandrine ringneck parakeet. Swordfights and all! I also once let him dig a hobbit hole in the backyard… which got me in big trouble with the homeowner’s association in the complex where we lived. They threatened to take my house if I didn’t return the lawn to the way it had been! But at least he got to have the experience. Lots of experiences, in fact. He is my Magnum Opus!