Excerpt
Here on the balmy central coast of California and all across the country, kids are heading back to school. The classes are larger, the No Child Left Behind mandates remain in place and, despite advice from the nation’s secretary of health and human services and others, recess and physical education (not to mention art and music instruction) have in many schools been cut back or eliminated. While most of our backpack-laden kids are eager to catch up with friends they haven’t seen over the summer, the general feeling is that “playtime is over.”
Even if summer does not bring children a complete release from their over-organized, cell-phone-computer-TV-and-video-game-saturated lives, it does offer most a bit of free “goof-off” time – the sort that leads to physical activity and elective, self-organized play, often in short supply during the school year. Still, it’s not enough. Goof-off time shouldn’t be limited to summer vacation: it’s important all year.
For most American children in the not-so-distant past, “going out to play” was the norm.
This is something I totally agree with.
This old-fogy can remember my childhood when it WAS normal for neighborhood kids to get together for a baseball or basketball game, WITH NO ADULT SUPERVISION.
Yes there was Little League, but in the daily life kids just getting together on their own was prevalent. This is VERY important because it's how we learned how to work things out for ourselves. How to get along together, even deal with bullies.
In today's overly-supervised childhood this is sorely missing. Then you add the over-zealous parents, shouting and even fighting, over a Little League game; OR pushing their kids into this or that activity (often over scheduled) WITHOUT really considering if their child wants to do that, you have to wonder. Just what are we doing to our kids?
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