The End of Neighborhood Play?

I recently read an article by Joanna Mazewski about the disappearance of the neighborhood as a space for unstructured play. In her article, she describes her childhood spent hopscotching and jump roping outside. Her afternoons were open for exploration, be it inside a book or outside with sidewalk chalk.

Now a mother, she recently experienced a stark change to the carefree and friendly vibe she had associated with neighborhoods. Now, she implies, being social doesn’t mean simply walking outside to join the rest of the block’s kids for a spontaneous adventure. Instead, this freedom of the past has been replaced with over-scheduled, over-organized, and over-controlled “extracurricular” time.

It’s a vicious cycle that reinforces the push for more extracurricular activities. When all of your child’s contemporaries are off in tennis lessons or at soccer practice, where else will your child make friends? When walking over to a friend’s house isn’t an option, signing your child up for art class looks even more appealing — now your six-year-old can spend time with other kids while she trains to become a great painter!

Joanna’s observation is nothing new. I spent my elementary school years in the early 2000s, and I can only recall one time when I actually participated in free, unstructured play with kids from my neighborhood.

I was about eight years old, and my little sister and I had decided to set up a lemonade stand on the corner by our house. A little while after we opened up shop, two kids from around the corner walked by and quickly noted our lack of customers. Instead of continuing on their way, they decided to join in our enterprise and take over our marketing campaign. Together, we found sidewalk chalk and paper, scribbled signs to tape to lampposts, and drank the grand majority of our lemonade supply.

Even though we didn’t make more than a couple of sales, I remember this afternoon well, particularly the excitement we felt at creating something completely our own, and the novelty I felt at the spontaneous collaboration. And while I had plenty of friends throughout this time period, I can’t remember any other time where we did something so unstructured. Instead, my mom would call Rachel’s mom to set up a playdate, otherwise we’d just see each other at school or at basketball practice.

To be fair, some of my best friends have come out of organized, extracurricular activities, and I never really interacted with my lemonade stand partners again after that day. This could be because there just weren’t that many kids living within the radius of my eight-year-old self — if there had been more kids living nearby, there likely would have been more spontaneous play.

However, I’d argue that the push for extracurricular activities clearly surpasses the call for the “free range” child. Instead of encouraging creativity and discovery by allowing kids to become “bored”, we take boredom to be a sign of laziness, therefore upping the pressure to schedule and focus every aspect of our lives.

As this over-scheduling trend has grown, parents like Joanna and giants like the New York Times have been pushing back. But even though most people are aware that over-scheduling isn’t necessarily the way to go, I don’t see the trend stopping anytime soon — we want what’s best for our children, but it’s hard to know what’s best when your dealing with a six-year-old, especially when the other six-year-olds are doing ballet.

This piece was originally posted at VersaMe.com. VersaMe created the Starling the world’s first wearable engagement tracker that helps encourage and reinforce positive parenting behaviors.