Our children need boredom and free play for healthy brain development!

Those of us who grew up in late 70s and early 80s in India can still remember evenings when we played freely in the neighborhood, with other kids, unsupervised...and had loads of fun. Some afternoons when we got bored we went and asked a friend if he or she could play...we made up games, fought and argued and then made up with our friends all without any adult intervention. That changed in 1990s with the advent of 24 hour television channels and video games and of course computers. Children’s play became more and more structured with planned play dates with full supervision by parents or nannys. Nowadays, as soon as they get free time, after all their structured day is over, a child’s idea of a ‘break’ is playing a video game on his/her ipad or whatever device they own. How has this transformation of ‘play time’ or what to do in free time impacted our kids brains? What happened to getting bored and figuring out what to do with your free time?

In the January 2015 issue of National Geographic, I read an article that talks about brain development in infants and children and how what they experience as children is essential to that. According to this article by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee,

“ between the ages of one and five, and then again in early adolescence, the brain goes through cycles of growth and streamlining, with experience playing a key role in engraving the circuits that will endure”.

That got me thinking..after all what ‘experience’ do one to five year olds have than in ‘playing’. Is the lack of free-play impacting our infants' and toddlers’ brains in a way that will totally change the way children experience childhood in the future?

In this same issue there is a feature on Waldorf School on Whidbey Island northwest of Seattle, where children play on bales of straw while teachers supervise. It states that school’s philosophy is that free play is essential for physical, cognitive, linguistic, and social developm

ent in young children (National Geographic magazine, Jan 2015).

Does that mean freeplay is back?? Recently a friend mentioned that in San Francisco, free play is the new ‘in thing’. I laughed as I remembered that trends change every 25 years...and that’s when the old trends come back! I hope parents become aware of how ‘free play’ positively impacts their child’s overall development and consciously provide opportunities for kids to experience boredom so they come up with their own free play activities. Let them walk to the neighborhood park and enjoy playing with other kids. You can watch from far but let them fight their own battles and win their own wars. The question is how can we encourage our teens and tweens who are already engulfed in the technology based leisure to make this transformation? Young kids hooked on minecraft and dragon vale talk to each other in a language that we 40 year olds do not understand.

Have you come up with any creative ideas to rally kids away from the screen atleast for a few hours in a day? Maybe a ‘screen free’ night once a week? or ‘no gadgets when you go on a vacation’ might be a starting point. We tried that with our kids when we went on week long vacation to Mexico. We ‘forgot’ to take the ipad! As soon as this was discovered our younger one was upset for an hour or two..but soon we were doing other fun activities on the beach and slowly the memory of a missing device faded. It is possible, but parents have to keep a lot of patience!! It is easy to give a computer to a kid and have him entertain himself so that grown ups can have their own ‘me time’. But in the long run is it worth it? Do you think it is time to go back to free play, and letting our kids experience boredom? I think it's high time. Do submit your comments.

Thanks!

#childrenandboredom #screentime #childrenandfreeplay