The Healing World of Free Play

During set-up week, while our teachers attend meetings and get their classrooms ready to welcome students for the new school year, our campus becomes a place of magic and adventure for our staff’s children, ranging in age from preschool to fifth grade.

While always under the watchful idea of adults, they love deciding on their own activities in classrooms and gardens, inspired by their shared imaginations and cooperative plans. Although they intermittently touch base with their parents, independence and free play are their priorities hour after hour. It’s fun to witness children creating a band in a preschool classroom, playing a game in the garden while they stop to feed guinea pigs, and fifth graders organize a campus-wide game of hide-and-seek.

For me, this week is an inspiring glimpse into the healing, but often forgotten, world of free play, so essential to children’s well-being, yet so rare in the modern world of structured extracurricular activities.  Perhaps you once experienced this kind of independent creative play as a child in your neighborhood or on vacations. Maybe you remember the heady sense of moving through the world unbounded by time pressures and adult-made rules or loved hiding in a tree house or fort where your imaginary world could take full flight.

If you ask an AI app why free play is important, you will receive a long list of answers: increased cognition, self-regulation, and language development. It’s true, cooperative play definitely extends these abilities. But the real advantages of free play aren’t skill development or getting better at something. This type of activity leaves children and adults with a feeling of internal expansiveness and refreshment.

Summer is the season when we can program unstructured times for play into schedules. How wonderful when we can bring those gifts of summer restoration into our perspectives on fall. Instead of giving in to popular pressures to schedule children for lots of skill-building activities, remember the value of free play.  

You can create play times to refresh you and your family too. Stop at the park, plan family play times, set up cozy spots for children to enjoy outdoors. Take advantage of the evening light while you can. You’re always welcome to come to our campus on weekends (the sports field above our campus is identified as a park on Google Maps).