Three Ways Parental Supervision Crushes Independent Play
Introduction
We have a slang term for the way children change when they realize a parent is watching: “mama drama.”
Every parent knows the feeling. Maybe it happens at school pickup — everything is fine until your kid spots you, and then the production begins. Or maybe they catch your eye on the playground and immediately need your help, or your attention. Watch me! Catch me! Look at me!
Over the past six months I have been researching childhood independence, which I define in simple terms: children between the ages of five- and twelve-years old playing and navigating the world outside of adult supervision. In addition to traditional research studies, I have interviewed parents and children and observed parent-child interactions in a variety of settings.
In every aspect of growth — physical, emotional, and intellectual — children learn through play and exploration. But not all play is equal, and much of what parents consider “play” does not meet the definition at all. In this essay, I offer three ways adult supervision ruins children’s playtime, and what you can do about it.
Part I: Optimizing // Monopolizing
I recently received a text from a friend: “I am at a park and every single parent is in the play structure with their kid. There are 8 parents and 7 kids including mine so my kid is playing by herself instead of with other children because the parents are monopolizing their time and I feel like the asshole parent on my phone.”
This text illustrates the first problem of perpetual adult supervision in play situations: the tendency for today’s parents to “optimize” (and monopolize) children’s playtime.
I shudder recalling my attempt to squeeze my 35-yr-old body through a green plastic play structure built for seven-year-olds because I had been told how important it was for me to play with my child.
I thought I was doing a good thing.
But children don’t need to learn how to play with adults.
Children need to learn how to play with other children. Ideally, without adults.
Research shows that without adult involvement, kids will often organize themselves into activities. It may take time; it may include squabbling.
Insert a parent (or three) into this freewheeling activity and the parent often tries to optimize the game: set the rules, divvy kids into groups, referee the activity. We think we are helping them “get to the good stuff,” as Lenore Skenazy puts it.
But the “good stuff” for healthy child development is the process of self-directed play, even when the actual games seem, to us, bizarre or nonsensical. Children’s imaginations run wild when concocting their own activities.
When I was a kid, we spent hours preparing for a game we called “war,” amassing “weapons” (pinecones), finding shelter, building hideouts, sneaking into “enemy” territory, devising rules.
I can’t remember if we ever got to the war part.
Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College, has been studying independent play for decades. “I’ve often seen games ruined by well-meaning adults who intervened — for the sake of safety, or because they believed that someone was being treated unfairly, or because they believed that they knew better than the children how to make the game fun for children.”
In a piece for Psychology Today, therapist Talia Filipelli explains that children and parents are “cognitively mismatched.”
Children’s brains operate differently than ours. Their prefrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control, planning, and critical thought, is still developing. That development occurs during play. When parents and adults optimize or intervene during play, they stifle that development. Children were born ready to play! They don’t need you to help them.
Part II: Peacemaking
Optimizing isn’t the only way adult supervision stifles children’s play.
Adults have years of experience fixing things. By 40, our prefrontal cortex is a powerhouse.
Thanks to our fully developed brain, we solve life’s little challenges with aplomb. We also solve our children’s challenges.
But remember, children’s brains are different. They are still figuring things out.
Parents today have been conditioned to intervene when children fight. We get embarrassed. We separate, we provide proper conciliatory jargon, we use therapeutic language and join forces with other parents to settle disagreements.
And as a result, our children do not do these things.
Optimizing children’s games diminishes the value of play; mediating children’s problems diminishes the value of play. Disagreements are normal. Children have been solving their own playtime problems without adult intervention for thousands of years, and coming to an agreement that enables play to continue is a deeply rewarding and profoundly affective experience.
Your prefrontal cortex is a boss because your mother didn’t solve all your problems.
Consider the driving force. Most children have one goal: to play as much as possible, ideally on their own terms. If they are clashing during playtime with another kid whose ultimate incentive is also to play as much as possible, their motivations match. That is powerful tonic for resolving disputes.
Adults almost always have competing motivations and responsibilities that don’t mesh with hours of supervising children’s playtime. Most families today have packed schedules and parents are ready to move on well before their children.
Maybe you even use disputes to serve your interests. I have. Kids fighting? They must be hungry/tired/bored/ready to go.
I used to tell myself that the lesson I was teaching them was that squabbling was “naughty,” and the consequence was ending playtime. I realize now I was teaching them that disagreeing with someone is a bad thing, and problems are best settled by an adult.
Similarly, if your child believes they could have solved the problem, and instead of being allowed to try, they are punished by leaving, then parents aren’t problem-solvers — they’re fun-killers.
The worst and truest of all things, though, is that I was intervening in a learning experience and robbing them of the joy of figuring things out and resuming play.
And we wonder why our younger generations are so easily frustrated, so quick to give up, so prone to depression.
Part III: Surveilling
We’ve learned how well-meaning intervention, whether optimizing or peacemaking, squashes the value of play. But how bad can it be to just watch? To be there in case “something happens”?
I have found the following exercise to be very effective. I ask parents to think as far back as they can into their own childhood. Maybe you played on your suburban street with cheap bikes and weird games like we did, or maybe you grew up going to city playgrounds or exploring abandoned lots. I spoke to one Gen X mom who told me fondly that she and her friends would bike the Penn State campus together — all 8,000 acres.
Now insert a cross-armed parent standing in the corner watching your every move.
Even when we try not to engage, our very presence alters kids’ behavior. Often what we see watching our children play is a performance. True play — the real stuff, the weird, inane, seemingly chaotic play — happens when kids are free from the watchful eye of a supervising caregiver.
People change when they’re being watched.
In harsh surveillance conditions, where the penalty for breaking the rules is great, anxiety thrives. Bruce Schneier, a world-renowned security expert who has studied both contemporary and historical surveillance, says that being watched humbles our instinct for experimentation. “The fact that you won’t do things, that you will self-censor, are the worst effects of pervasive surveillance.”
The fact is, says Schneier, “privacy is necessary for human progress.”
Sometimes being watched compels us to behave better than we normally would; sometimes it compels us to rebel. Surveillance is not inherently good or evil, but it isn’t neutral. Kids are aware of our cognitive mismatch.
“Attentive adults can ruin games even if they don’t intend to intervene,” said Gray. “Children perceive them as potential enforcers of safety, solvers of conflicts, and audiences for whining; and this perception invites the children to act unsafely, to squabble, and to whine. Play requires self-control, and the too-obvious presence of adults can lead children to relinquish their self-control.”
Self-directed play withers under surveillance — that joyful, crucial experience of independent play gets watered-down, muted.
What do we gain by giving our children independence?
We have all done these things, we have done them in combination, we have done them because we have been told that is what we should do.
But we must allow our children to reclaim their childhood before they have outgrown it.
Most parents will read this with a mixture of understanding, regret, and resentment. I am resentful of the culture that told me I could not trust my own judgement, that I cannot trust my own children. I resent a culture that told me that the way I played as a kid, or my parents played, or their parents played, is unattainable for my own children.
This is tough terrain to cross, and the boxes we have built around ourselves and our children are reinforced by the powerful timber of fear and shame.
But if you’re reading this, I suspect you know something is off. You are not alone. Research shows most parents understand the importance of childhood independence, they just don’t know where to start. The next essay I’ll share here is full of ideas and ways you can give your kids independence. I’ll also create a list of resources I’ve used to inform my research and my parenting.
Remember: trust is the foundation on which all meaningful relationships are built. Trusting your child to play on their own is loving them. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
