Getting Unstuck #172: Why Do Our Children Need Time for Self-initiated Free Play?

Oh, maybe because it’s critical for their emotional health.

Our guests

Genevieve Eason is the Executive Director of Wilton Youth Council, a non-profit in Wilton, Connecticut focused on the social and emotional well-being of students. The council’s programs have been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition and the PBS NewsHour. Genevieve and her oldest daughter are also subjects in the new documentary, Chasing Childhood, which explores the benefits of free play and independence as solutions to the rise in rates of anxiety, depression and behavioral issues in children and young adults.

Hannah Beach is an award-winning educator, author, and keynote speaker. She is delivers professional development services across the country, provides emotional health consulting to schools, and speaks at national and international conferences about the power of bringing more feeling and human connection into the classroom. She is the co-author of Reclaiming Our Students: Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down Than Ever―And What We Can Do About It – a book about restoring the emotional well-being of children.

Dr. Michael Hynes is a public school superintendent for the Port Washington School District in NY and an Associate Professor in Educational Leadership at Long Island University. Michael is a Fulbright Specialist, TEDx speaker and author of the best-selling book Staying Grounded: 12 Principles to Transform School Leader Effectiveness.

Why this conversation matters

“As a culture, we’ve replaced play with entertainment. Kids used to have this “outbreath,” whether it was playing the guitar or playing hockey on the street or building forts or whatever it was. Kids no longer have this place to digest their inner world. Instead, they are saturated, full - and not in a good way. There are no empty spaces in their lives for play to even take root. They are attached to screens or in programming 24 /7. None of those things are bad in themselves, but when you add them all up together, they remove all the “void” moments in which kids would fall into play. And this loss has dire consequences both on their individual emotional health as well as that of learning communities.”

— Hannah Beach

Listen for

√ Why it is essential for so many reasons for children to engage in unstructured free play.

√ How parents (and schools) engage in the concept of “resume building.”

√ Why the lack of unstructured free play is not just an individual’s problem to solve, or a parent’s problem to solve, but a community’s issue to solve.

√ The relationship between boredom and play.

√ The relationship between measurement and play