One of the main causes of the increasing levels of anxiety in children today is the lack of free play. If they cannot have unstructured and unsupervised play, they might not know how to handle pain, shape a resilient mindset, or take courageous leaps. Dr. Tim Jordan describes the benefits of letting girls have free play, taking risks, and being responsible for their own safety.
Dr. Jordan’s previous related podcast: The most important factor in girls gaining confidence and resilience: Safe bases!
Dr. Jordan’s previous related podcast: In defense of helicopter parents
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The Best Cure For Children’s Anxiety? Free Play!
Thanks for joining the show. We’re going to talk about something that is missing in our children’s lives. It’s something that is uber important and is causing a lot of anxiety in our children. It’s not talked about nearly enough. We talk a lot about social media, including me. We talk about a lot of things, but the topic we’re going to talk about in this episode is different.
What is missing in children’s lives and what could be the most important tool or most important thing to help our kids become more centered and less anxious is play. Later on in this episode, I’m going to give you an opportunity to remember the kind of play that you did when you were growing up, how it’s so much different than now, and the cost to our children when they don’t have that kind of free play.
Stranger Danger
Free play means unstructured or unsupervised, like when we went down the street for hours at a time playing in our neighborhoods. That kind of free play that is unstructured, unsupervised, and not adult-directed play has been declining since the ‘80s for several reasons. One of them is that we started having this fear of our kids being kidnapped because it happens sometimes.
24 news cycles came on or cable news. We didn’t just have the nightly news. We had it going all day long. The stories would hit the news and it would be blared at us for weeks at a time. The message that we got from all those news services was, “This is a very unsafe world. Do not allow your kids to be outside without you being there. You need to not let them out of your sight.” That was the message that came through the screen of our TV sets when there were kidnappings.
There are fewer abductions and fewer kidnappings than there were back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. That’s a fact, but it seems like there’s more. Most parents would say, “It’s so much more dangerous today,” when in reality, for most kids, it’s not. Also, it wasn’t until the ‘80s that we started talking about this thing called Stranger Danger. That was not in our lexicon before the ‘80s, but we started talking about it and that added to it. We started overprotecting our kids to the point where we don’t trust any adult.
Back in my day, when I was running down the street with my buddies, there were parents who might be out and about and they were allowed to discipline us. We knew them. We knew our neighbors. There was much more of a community not just in my neighborhood but in general. There’s been a lot of research that would bear that out. More people are more disconnected from their neighbors than they were many years ago. When parents started to know the neighbors less and felt a little bit more isolated, that added to their fear.
We also were hearing in the ‘80s about these super predators, these awful, angry teenagers who were going to hurt everybody and destroy everything. We heard even in the election cycles in the ‘80s about these super predators. They were mostly referring to African American kids and kids who lived in poor neighborhoods. It was a racist thing in part. That also scared parents back then about allowing their kids to be out and about.
A Nation At Risk
Another thing happened too. In 1983, there came out a report called A Nation at Risk. What that report said was that our kids are behind other countries. They were lagging behind educationally. That brought up and created this intensification movement whereby several things happened. Number one, the school year got longer and there was more homework. Homework also was more so not just for the older kids but also for younger kids. That was part of the intensification movement.
Also, recess started getting shorter and even, in some cases, eliminated because we needed to be teaching for the test. That No Child Left Behind thing came about back in the Bush era, and then all of a sudden, it was all about testing and teaching for the test. There was more pressure on them about their academic performance and also on parents because their children were getting behind. We started to sign them up for these enrichment things, these after-school Kumon things, and these after-school tutoring. Kids didn’t even necessarily need it, but it was enrichment because they wanted their kids to not just keep up but get ahead and have an edge over the other kids that they were competing with in school.
It also led to more supervised activities. It also led to things like the youth sports movement which took over. It took over our schedules and our family lives. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there weren’t club sports like there are now. When I was a kid growing up, I played baseball in the summer. We played probably 15 or 20 games. All the great lessons that are there to learn in sports, we could learn in those twenty games. We didn’t need to be playing 80 games and traveling to out-of-town tournaments every weekend in order to gain lessons from sports. There was one more place where we stole kids from their downtime. They were spending so much time at practices and at tournaments all week long. That was another place where kids started losing their free play.
Safety-ism
Another thing that happened was we started being worried about what people called safetyism. Meaning, we started to have this negative attitude about kids taking risks. Start looking at how playgrounds have changed over the years. They’re cushioned. All the dangerous activities have been taken away because we started worrying about, “What if our kids get hurt?”
We didn’t want our kids to get hurt. We didn’t want them to get scratched. We didn’t want them taking risks. That was part of the helicopter parenting phenomenon that we’ve been engulfed with over the years. I did an episode called In Defense of Helicopter Parents. Go back and check that one out if you haven’t checked it out yet. There’s been a lot of things that cause us to feel like the world is not safe, so we need to cushion our kids everywhere, take away risks, and make sure they’re safe all of the time.
I also did an episode not long ago about safe bases. Safe bases, hopefully, oftentimes are mom and dad to begin with. Meaning, our kids know that we’re there for them if they need us. If they’re with us and they’re clinging onto our leg as we go out into a new place, a party, or something, we’re the base that says, “It’s okay. You’re fine. I’m here.” They tattle off out into the world and have some adventure. If they get a little anxious or something, they come back and we’re still there saying, “It’s okay. You’re fine,” and then they tattle off.
A safe base is the kind of base that when your kids look at you, they see, “I’m so glad you’re out there having adventures. Go take some risks. You got this. You can do this.” That’s a safe base. Unfortunately, a lot of kids, when they come back to that base, what they see is an anxious parent who’s got a face that says, “Are you okay? What happened? Did you get hurt? Were the kids nice to you?”
Even the questions we ask our kids imply that things probably aren’t right with them, so kids end up going out into the world, if they do, in what people call a defensive mode. They’re not in a discover mode but in a defend mode. The defend mode means they’re less securely attached because their parents are anxious. They’re less able to take care of themselves and handle risks because they haven’t been allowed to because their parents have been there every second to make sure that they’re okay.
Our kids have lost out on that play that has some physical risk with it. We let that go by the wayside. That was a great opportunity for kids to learn how to take care of themselves and their buddies. Kids will take on the responsibility for their safety when they’re allowed to be responsible for their safety. Unfortunately, most kids are not because too many adults are there to supervise and take care of them or are hovering around them to make sure that they’re okay and they’re safe. They’re not developing the ability to handle and process frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, and perceived injustices. Those are the things that happen out on the playground. Those are the things that happened down the street when the adults weren’t around. We learned to handle ourselves with those.
Think back to when you were a kid, when you were 8, 10, 12, or 15 years of age. Think about the adventures you were allowed to have. Think about the freedom you were allowed to have. I bet most of you reading this had a much longer leash than you’re allowing your children. You were allowed to go out on the street. You were allowed to ride your bikes blocks and/or miles away.
When I was a kid, there were two sets of woods around where we lived, so we were out in the woods all day shooting BB guns and shooting pellet guns, and blowing up M-80s and cherry bombs. Our dads in the summertime would dam up this creek that was not too far from our house. It was about a fifteen-minute walk. They would dam it up so that in the wintertime, there were some bigger flat stretches of creek. It was a pretty wide creek. We would play hockey on it. It used to be colder than it is now.
We would go out there and play all day. We were gone all day and our parents didn’t care. They didn’t expect us home until dinner. I bet a lot of you share experiences like that. How many of you were allowed to ride your bikes far away from your home and you didn’t have a cell phone to check in every 10 minutes and your parents didn’t have 360 to know where you were every 5 seconds? You were out and about.
Lessons From Outdoors
I’ve been giving talks to parent groups for 35 or 40 years. My wife and I have been traveling together giving talks to groups of parents. We used to teach a six-week parenting class. We stopped doing that years ago because we were gone too much, traveling too much, and all. We’ve been talking for years about what kids are missing out on because of lacking that unsupervised free play.
More people are disconnected from their neighbors today than they were 20 or 40 years ago. Share on XWe asked parents a lot about what they learned. We had 3-weekend retreats in the last couple of months for dads and daughters, and then 1 of them was for dads and sons. We asked them to share some experiences they had when they were kids growing up, the freedom. We said, “What lessons did you learn when you were out and about on the street in your free time?”
Let me tell you a few of the things that parents came up with. Number one is they learned social skills. They learned how to make friends. They also learned how to make decisions, choose things for themselves, and then take responsibility for their actions and live with the consequences, good or bad. They learned to lead. They learned to follow. They learned to take initiative.
We’d be out in the woods building forts and things and it wasn’t because our parents did it for us. It was because we decided to do it. We learned to take initiative and create our own fun. We learned, God forbid, to handle our boredom because our parents didn’t do it for us. We also learned how to solve problems and conflicts with each other out on the street because adults weren’t there to do it for us.
If we were playing baseball and we decided, “Who’s going to bat first?” We didn’t need a teacher to come over and tell us how to do it. We took a baseball bat and threw it to somebody on the other team. They would catch it with one hand. You’d put your hands over the top of it until the one on the top was the one who started first. We create our own rules. We took care of ourselves. We refereed ourselves. We policed ourselves. Sometimes, there were arguments and fights, but we handled it. They were pretty short-lived because we knew we wanted to play.
When we go to schools in our Strong Girls Strong World program to work with classrooms of kids, one of the biggest problems they have is recess. They spend 3/4 of recess arguing about the rules and how to pick the teams because they haven’t learned how to do that. It always takes a teacher to come over, guide it, and say, “Do it this way,” or handle the problem. They haven’t learned.
Another thing that we learned out in the streets is we learned how to handle teasing. We learned how to handle people making fun. We learned how to throw it right back at people and not take it personally. Sometimes, it got out of hand. There were some kids who got bullied, but for the most part, we learned to police ourselves with things like that. We also learned to judge risks, like what’s too much and what’s okay. We learned that by taking risks. We learned how to keep ourselves safe by making mistakes, and sometimes, we got hurt.
We learned to police ourselves and judge risks on our own. We learn what is too much and what is okay by taking risks. Share on XI remember one time I came home from riding my bike. This is a true story. I walked into the house and my mom was like, “What happened to your leg?” I was like, “What?” I looked down and my whole shoe was full of blood. My bike had a piece of metal sticking out where I was pedaling. Unbeknownst to me, it had made a scratch on my leg or a cut. It required about eight stitches. I didn’t even know it. I had a high pain tolerance or something. We got scratched. We got bruised. We fell down. Things happened, but we learned to take care of it. We learned that it wasn’t the end of the world. We learned to shake it off and move on. We learned that we could handle those things.
A Story of Sisters
I heard a story about these two young girls. They were sisters. 1 of them was 8 and 1 of them was 5. 1 day, the 5-year-old fell down into this deep well. The older sister felt so bad, so she took a rope that she found and threw it down into the well. It was deep. She told her sister to hold on and started pulling her up. It took her a long time. Her hands started getting blistered and her hands were cut, but she didn’t give up. She pulled until finally, her sister came over the edge and she was safe.
They went back to their village. They told people the story and nobody believed them. They were like, “How could this little skinny seven-year-old kid pull up her sister? That’s impossible.” The girls insisted that it was true. They went to the local wise man and they were telling the story. The wise man heard the story and said, “I believe it’s true. I believe that she could do it because there was no adult there to tell her she could not do it.” That is a story to remember. There was no adult there to tell her she couldn’t do it. That’s how kids learn to do things. There’s no one there to tell them they can’t, so they have to. They have to put themselves and their minds to it.
Great Barrier Reef
There’s also a story about the Great Barrier Reef that stretches for 1,800 miles. People take boat rides out there to look at the Great Barrier Reef, which is disintegrating because of climate change. People notice oftentimes that on the lagoon side of the Great Barrier Reef, the corals seem pale and lifeless. It doesn’t look very healthy. On the ocean side, it’s pink and vibrant. It grows more and seems to be alive. It’s much different.
They say, “Why is it so different?” The guides always tell people that the reason that the coral on the lagoon side looks that way is because it’s not ever challenged. The water is always still over there. It’s not tested and it’s not challenged, so it doesn’t grow as much. It hasn’t had to face adversity like the corals on the ocean side. On that side, it’s facing storms, waves, wind, and all kinds of things so it has to adapt and grow stronger like your children. They need adversities. They need challenges. They need to sometimes skin their knees. They need to make mistakes. They need to fail in order to learn. That’s one of the things that they’re missing out on.
Children need adversities and challenges. They sometimes need to skin their knees and make mistakes. They need to fail in order to learn. Share on XDiscovery Mode
A healthy childhood should have lots of autonomy where kids choose what they want to do and there needs to be lots of time for unsupervised play out in the real world. When they have those opportunities, that will set their brains instead of being in defensive mode into more of what people call a discovery mode. That means they like to take risks, they like adventures, and they have the confidence that they can because they’ve done it. They’ve been allowed to do it. They learn how to handle risks and learn how to create their own safety. We need to have more opportunities for our kids to have that.
Instead of giving kids toys to have prescribed things to do, you might be better off going to the hardware store, buying a bunch of boards, some nails, some hammers, some screws, some screwdrivers, some rope, some inner tubes, and things of that sort, and throwing it out in the backyard and saying, “Have fun.” Kids love that. Think about your little kids during the holidays when they get their presents. This is an old cliche, but it’s pretty true. Oftentimes, little kids or toddlers will spend more time with the boxes and wrapping paper than they do with the toys. That’s free play.
One of the best things you can buy or get for your kids that’s probably free is to get some of those big boxes, like appliance boxes from refrigerators or whatever. Put that in the toy room or put that outside. Put that in the garage and they’ll play for hours building forts and things because it’s what kids like to do. They like to be self-directed in their play. They like it. Kids will handle their boredom if they’re allowed to handle their boredom. Give them some toys that are like that, unstructured.
When we used to have boys at camp years ago, we had one night where the girls and the boys were separate. The boys’ part was called a Warrior Night. We had all these traditions. It was really fun. We might have maybe 25 teen boys out there and maybe 6 or 8 of our staff. Oftentimes, what we did was we would give them boards, ropes, inner tubes, and things and say, “You have X amount of time, maybe 20 minutes or 30 minutes, to build a raft that will hold all of you and the male camp counselors. You have to be able to take that in the water and we have to be able to float around this area, the dock.”
These teens loved it. They would build these structures that were somewhat safe. In the end, we would pile on it. Half the time, it was half-sinking, but they would get around that dock. They could not have been happier because look what they built on their own. We’d walk away and hang out away from them so we wouldn’t get our little hands in there and tell them how to do it right. We let them do it their way. That’s what your kids need. They need time like that.
Reviewing Your Neighborhood
You need to know the context of where you live. Some neighborhoods may not be safe. A lot of them are safer than we give them credit for because of all those fears I talked about at the beginning. If you don’t have a neighborhood and if there aren’t kids out there, then my challenge for you is where will they find that time? Where could you create environments for them to have free play, have unsupervised time, and hang out and do their thing like we used to do? Where could that be? I wouldn’t give up.
A lot of kids today are not very street-smart when they leave home at the age of 18. They need a play-based childhood where there is a lot of unsupervised time. Share on XKids complain a lot to me. They say, “I want to go outside and play with my friends, but when I go outside on a Saturday afternoon, nobody’s there. Do you know why? They’re out of town at a tournament.” That happens so much. We need to do it differently. We need to have those times when there are lots of kids out on the street in the neighborhood. We need to start giving them more freedom to ride their bikes, go to the neighborhood next to them like we used to do, and play in the street. We played hockey games in the street in our neighborhood against another neighborhood.
I saw a girl in my counseling practice not too long ago. She’s in 7th or 8th grade. She lives in an area that’s not too far from where I used to live. I asked her what she did and she said, “My mom won’t let me go to my friend’s house because she’s scared.” Her friend doesn’t live that far away. I said, “I know where you live because I used to live not too far from there. There’s a creek. We used to spend hours and days at the creek. Have you ever thought about walking down there and stuff like that?” She said, “My mom would never let me go there.” It’s a 10-minute or 15-minute walk.
I said, “When I was nine years old, and this was back in the day when there was an evening paper, I had a paper route for three years. My route was the guy in the big truck would come by and dump off this big stack of newspapers. I would put it into my red wagon and walk it up the street, probably about a quarter mile to a half mile. It was a busy four-lane street.
I would stop at this intersection, stand in the street, and sell newspapers every day for a couple of hours. I did it every day Monday through Friday for three years and nobody thought a thing of it. I did it.” I stopped doing it because the paper used to be $0.7. A lot of people gave me a dime. There was my profit. After a little over two and a half years, they raised the price of the paper to $0.10. My profits got wiped out, so I quit.”
My point is that not only was I allowed to walk where this girl’s parents wouldn’t let her walk, but I did it when I was nine, and I did it every day. From Monday through Friday for three years, I was staying in the middle of the street selling newspapers. That was a huge growing experience for me as a little kid to be able to meet the public, make some money, and be out in the real world doing my thing.
Episode Wrap-up
Look for opportunities where your kids can have more unsupervised free play so they can be in their discover mode where they can learn to take care of themselves, their friends, or their siblings. They can learn to create their own rules, initiate their fun, handle their boredom, and learn how to take healthy risks and how to keep themselves and their friends safe. Those are important things for kids to learn. Those are the street smarts that a lot of kids are not getting. They’re not very street-smart when they leave home at the age of eighteen. They need a play-based childhood where there’s a lot of free play unsupervised time. Make sure somehow in some way that you create that for your children so they can learn the lessons that you and I learned when we grew up.
Thank you so much. Brainstorm with your kids for some ideas about what they want to do. There’s a good book I read a called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. He talks about some of these things in his book. It was a really good validation of what my wife and I have been teaching for years. I tried to get him as a guest on the show, but he’s way too busy doing all these national interviews. It’s a good book to read. Thanks so much for being here and tuning in to the show. I’ll see you back here in the next episode.