How Do We Get Kids to Play and Socialize Outside?

In elementary school, the highlight of my day—almost every single day—was recess. Depending on the season, I’d help organize and play a game of football, kickball, or soccer with a group of 10-20 other boys. We picked our own teams, made our own rules, resolved our own conflicts, and had a great time. Teachers occasionally watched, or even joined the game, but rarely interfered. Adults seemed disappointed that my favorite subject was “recess” since I was so “inquisitive” or “intellectual” at a young age: how could I possibly prefer playing outside with my friends to learning? Through speaking to my peers and reading relevant research, I’ve come to understand the nature of the pressure put on young children not to go outside, the crucial importance of free, unstructured socializing, and consider the ways parents and teachers can be motivated to get their kids to play more.

Peter Gray, a psychologist at Brown, wrote a groundbreaking article in 2011 suggesting that the decreasing time children are spending outside might account for a large part of the decline in mental health of children and adolescents over the past 70 years (Gray). Evidence strongly indicates that since roughly the 1950s, children have spent successively less time outside, less time with friends, less time playing games, and more time in school and doing schoolwork. Gray claims “play deprivation” leads to children who “grow up feeling that they are not in control of their own lives and fate*”* (Gray 433)—spending less time playing games with others leads to the perception of an external locus of control, which is the single experience most psychologists believe relates most to feelings of helplessness, anxiety, and depression (Rotter).

If lack of play accounts for even a small chunk of the decline in the well-being of kids and adolescents, getting children to play more could have an immense positive impact on society—not only making kids happier, but making their parents happier, as well as the adults these kids grow up to be. Let’s look at how kids are spending their time now to investigate the root cause of the decline of play, and see if there’s a way to fit it in.

School days have gotten significantly longer, and students spend increasingly more time completing school work (Hofferth & Sandberg)—which is consistently the least favorite part of kids’ days, whereas hanging out freely with friends is the highest-ranked activity (Csikszentmihalyi & Hunter). In addition, I strongly contend that urban sprawl beginning in the postwar era has caused parents to purchase properties further from existing communities and insulate themselves as nuclear families. As a result, children may go to school farther away from home, so commutes are much longer—and children live much further from their friends. That’s why, when I was in 4th grade, recess was such a highlight—it was my main opportunity to play freely with a group of friends who all lived miles away from my house.

If children are spending so much time in school, and school is going to be where students have the most social exposure, we should be pushing strongly for schools to enforce longer periods of recess and physical activity. While recess time substantially decreased after the No Child Left Behind Act, there’s a trend (albeit a slow one) for US state bureaus of education to increase mandated recess time (EAB). This works. But just like any K-12 issue, since the kids aren’t the voters, and the real voters are so detached from students’ experience, it’s an incredibly sluggish, bureaucratic process.

It is imperative to contextualize discussion about education with technological advancements—especially since technology advances far faster than public policy. Modern learning is beginning to undergo a massive transition to digital, personalized formats (Resnick). Practically all schools use online platforms to evaluate and/or deliver content to students, and in recent years many entirely-online middle and high schools have achieved accreditation. This sounds like a social nightmare, though. How are kids supposed to have real-world peers and friends to play with?

Education needs to start becoming more local and community based, so that kids will live in close proximity to their classmates. One approach is microschools, another recent development essentially bridging the gap between homeschooling and private schools. Small groups of elementary or middle school-level students gather to socialize, play, and learn collaboratively, complemented by individualized learning plans (Bedrick & Ladner). A new startup, KaiPod, is bringing the individualized online study advantage to the microschool concept, creating in-person learning “pods” where online school students can collaborate and socialize.

But what about opportunities for children to socialize completely outside of school? This is one of the hardest issues in parenting and urban planning. Kids live increasingly far away from their school friends, and need parents to transport them to often hyper-supervised “playdates.” Parents are wary of letting their kids roam free. Kids aren’t going to parks (Rigolon). Notably, children are enveloped in engagement-driven digital media, which started with TV, moved to video games, and landed most recently on endless short instant-gratification videos—all of which are highly sedentary and rarely social. The main issue here might not be that the screens are “rotting kids’ brains,” as my mother loves to proclaim, but that screen time frankly takes away from time that children could otherwise be spending playing outside, with others. The first obvious response here is getting kids to spend less time on screens. Various studies have determined how to do this effectively and why it is critical (Walsh). It’s hard, though, since software has only become harder to resist and enforce—with smaller devices and fast-paced engagement opportunities becoming more and more prevalent. Digital socializing becomes an all-or-nothing activity (“but you can’t take away my phone, that’s how I talk to my friends!”). The need for kids to socialize outside also draws broader questions about modern urban planning. Well-maintained public parks have pretty much proven to never be bad, so thankfully in recent years there has been some academic and policy support to make more of them. The policy process is slow though, and the economics of urban real estate only complicate this (Rigolon).

There’s another interesting private venture looking to sidestep the urban planning issue (and the zoning nightmares that come along with it) by literally building a new city from scratch, focused on car-free transportation, high-density living, and expansive public spaces (Culdesac). Modern metropolitans aren’t going to stop existing anytime soon, and their futures will warrant a host of problems to solve, but the prospective success of building an entirely new city is a refreshing step in the positive direction.

Getting kids in the urban developed world to be more social may be extremely impactful, but is also an extremely difficult issue to solve. Because of the slow policy process, kids’ social predicament might not get much better in the near future—so we will likely have to continue to embrace the fact that children are growing up with constant mental health struggles. However, there is definitive hope: education policy pressing schools to let kids spend more time playing has been helping. And, in the faster-paced private sector, schools are transitioning to emphasize collaboration and group engagement and consolidating content delivery to primarily online, individualized formats, which has been making substantial headway in getting kids to play together more. Finally, public and private initiatives to restructure urban areas to be more communal and less disjoint are currently in their infancy but have the potential to go a long way. I look forward to a future in which my children and their peers grow up to be resilient, free to socialize and play outside as much as they want.