154. How to Protect Your Child's Playtime in a Busy World

A mom wrote to me, torn between the pressure to start academics early and her daughter who just wants to play, and I have a feeling her question lives in a lot of us. In this episode, I answer it directly: yes, play is enough, and it's actually more sophisticated than most of the programs we're tempted to buy. I walk through what's really happening in your child's brain when she stacks blocks or plays pretend, why schedules and screens are crowding out play, and how to recognize the real learning that's happening right in front of you. Then I give you three simple things you can do this week to protect play in your child's life, and one of them is about protecting it in yours too.

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Transcript

Why Play Matters For Everyone

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Play isn't just fun for kids. It's literally how they build confidence, practice social skills, and develop their brains. In this episode, we'll uncover why play is under threat today and how you can reclaim it as the foundation for your child's growth. And you may also be surprised how important play is for your brain as well. Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it's what we want for our kids, but it's also what we need for ourselves. My name is Lee German. I'm a therapist and I'm a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way. Hey everyone, I am so glad that you've decided to spend some time here with me today because we are diving into a question that landed in my inbox this week, and I have a feeling it's going to resonate with many of you.

The Guilt Behind Early Academics

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Here's what one mama wrote. Hi, Lee, I'm a mom of a four-year-old and I feel torn. Everywhere I look, I see pressure to start academics early, flashcards, reading programs, school programs, enrichment classes. But honestly, my daughter just wants to play. Sometimes I feel guilty that I'm not doing enough to prepare her for school. Is play really enough? And if it is, how do I know she's actually learning from it? Well, can we just say that this sweet mom is not alone in this feeling? And here's what I want you to know right up front. That tug that you are feeling, that instinct that says your daughter's desire to play might actually be exactly what she needs. My quick answer is you have to trust that instinct. Because here's the truth we're going to try to unpack today. When your four-year-old is deep in play, she is not avoiding learning. She is doing the most sophisticated learning her brain is capable of. And by the time we're done here, hopefully you'll understand exactly why that's true and how to recognize the incredible learning that is happening right in front of you as your child is playing. Now, if you don't have a four-year-old right now, maybe your kids are all different ages, or maybe you're in a different season entirely, I'm going to encourage you to stay with me for this episode because the principles we're exploring today are going to help you understand child development at every stage. But also there is something here that will help you understand your own brain and why you also need play in your life. So let's first answer this mom's

Brain Science Behind Real Play

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first question directly. Yes, absolutely, play is enough. Not only is it enough, it's superior to most of the academic programming you're going to buy or enroll your child in. And I'm going to add that if your child is playing and you are nearby, it is a double win. So let's start with what the research tells us. The American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't just recommend play, they call it essential for healthy development. So let me paint you a picture of what's actually happening when a child chooses blocks, let's say, over flashcards. When they're stacking those blocks and watching them tumble down, what they're doing is actually a very mini physics experiment. They're learning about balance and gravity and cause and effect and spatial relationships. And when the tower falls and they immediately start building again, they're also developing persistence and resilience. And when they create increasingly complex structures, they're engaging in the same kind of problem-solving thinking that engineers literally use to design bridges. And then you watch your child, maybe your daughter, move from blocks to pretend play. Now maybe she's the mama taking care of her babies, or she's a doctor fixing her stuffed animals, or a teacher leading a classroom of dolls. So listen then closely to the language flowing from her during these games. She's practicing narrative structure, expanding her vocabulary, learning the rhythms of conversation. She's also developing what psychologists call theory of mind, the understanding that other people have thoughts and feelings and perspectives that are different from her own. This is the power of role play. When you watch children becoming someone else and assuming another role, it's the foundation of empathy, of leadership, and of literally every meaningful relationship she will have in her life. The cognitive demands of pretend play. Your child has to hold multiple ideas in her mind simultaneously. She has to remember she's pretending to be someone else, keep track of the rules of the game she's creating, monitor how her playmate is responding, and adjust the storyline accordingly. If you know to look for this, it's going to become obvious to you all the little steps that is going on in her little brain. Neuroscientists have discovered that this kind of play lights up the entire brain in ways that structured learning activities simply cannot replicate. We find in the research that children who engage in more pretend play score higher on tests of creativity, of reading, comprehension, and mathematical thinking later on. So play doesn't compete with academic learning. It actually creates the foundation that makes academic learning possible.

How To See Learning Happening

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So the second part of this mom's question is how do I know she's actually learning from it? Because I think what she's really asking is, how can I feel confident that I'm not sure changing her and her future? And here's how you recognize the learning that's happening in play. It's not always obvious because it doesn't look like traditional classroom learning. You're going to watch for problem solving in action. Does your child figure out how to make their block tower taller without falling? Do they negotiate with friends about who gets to be which character in their game? Do they adapt when her or his original plan doesn't work? These are executive functioning skills. When they narrate or create dialogue between characters or ask about how things work, they are actually doing some critical thinking. And of course, my favorite as a therapist and emotional resilience teacher, when you see a child comforting a crying doll or a hurt animal, they're developing their nurturing skills. Now, I know they can comfort them in one moment and then throw them down the stairs in the next. So we don't take this literally, but it's that role playing, it's that practice. They are developing the ability to do this in real time in the future. And the thing about children's play and their leading it is that it's self-correcting and really calibrated to your child's developmental level because your kiddo can't get it wrong because there's no predetermined right answer, right? A child can experiment and fail safely, try again and build confidence in their abilities. Hopefully, I ran through just a whole list of things that will support the idea that play is truly valuable and enough for our kids. We have the research, we understand the brain science, play is not just great, it's necessary.

The Modern Squeeze On Playtime

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But here's where I think we need to address the next concept that I really want you to pay attention to, the very pressure that I think this mom is feeling. Because play isn't just naturally happening in most children's lives anymore. It's being crowded out. There's competition for it. It's squeezed sometimes even into the margins and sometimes eliminated entirely, certainly by well-meaning parents and educators, but I don't think we realize what we're taking away from our kids. And I see it a lot of places, families where kindergartners have schedules that would exhaust, you know, a grown-up. This is something that I think we are overcorrecting in. And I watch all the moms, the best moms I know, all of us are trying to figure out how to negotiate and manage all of these, navigate all the choices that we have. Because we've got piano lessons and soccer and baseball and football practice, and tutoring is also something that is kind of new on the scene that we should start our kids early and kind of jumpstart these um academic skills before they get into the school year where they're going to learn them. And I don't think that there are is anything inherently harmful about these activities. The harm comes when they consume every free moment because that means we crowd out the opportunity that children have to do their most essential work, which is play. We feel the pressure because the academic pressure is truly creeping down. It's creeping down from high school to middle school to elementary school, and it's landed even on the shoulders of preschoolers. Kindergarten used to be very centered around play primarily. And it was half day. That's another big thing. Because the half day matched the developmental age and stage of a five-year-old who is still kind of in between a full day away from mom and dad, a full day of not needing a rest, a full day of being on, organized, disciplined, listening. That's a lot for a five-year-old. Now, a lot of our kindergarten classes look a little bit like our second and third grade rooms, right? We've got worksheets and sight words, and we're asking five-year-olds to kind of step it up and be better prepared for first grade where even more pressure is coming in. Now, I am not against kids going to school. All my kids went to school, all my grandkids go to school. I want everybody to go to school. And I trust our kindergarten teachers. Kindergarten teachers, our first grade teachers have hearts that are built for children this age. They're part teacher, part mom. And I trust that they are looking out for the highest needs and the highest good of our kids. But there is a trend where we are upping our game in our academics with our children. And I'm all fine with that as long as we don't crowd out the play. Kids need recess, pretend play, they need collaborative play. They need to be able to use those circuits in their brain so that they're prepared for all of the other heavier academic things that are going to come their way. And they won't lose their creativity. That's the other piece that we've really got to protect.

Screens And Over-Supervision Risks

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Okay, you know, another challenge to play are screens. Screens are a default solution for every moment of boredom, not just for our kids, but for us. As we're talking about play and the importance of play in the brain of a child, I want you to remember that your child's brain is not that different from yours. Certainly it's not as developed as yours, but the needs that a human being has for creativity and for imagination and for problem solving and for laughter, that never goes away. All of us are fighting screens as a default solution for our boredom and for entertainment. Instead of staring out the window and letting your mind wander, instead of creating elaborate games with maybe rocks and branches and whatever you can find outside, our kids are handed just streams of pre-made entertainment. Someone else is doing the imagining for them. And their creative muscle, the one that builds innovation and problem solves, it's not getting used the way we want it to get used. I think we've made our world for our kids very much restricted and very supervised, which has its merit, of course. But if you've read The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Hait's book, he really makes a big point that we may be over-restricted and over-supervised in our physical world, where we're very cautious to not let our kids, you know, kind of do too much on their own at a young age, and that that's creating some feelings of having to hold back and maybe even some fear, some anxiety. But the other interesting thing is that simultaneously we're giving kids access to unlimited and often dangerous digital freedom on iPads and phones and TVs. And kids who aren't allowed maybe to climb trees or walk to a neighbor's house alone are scrolling through social media platforms that are just designed to capture and monetize their attention. So I think that, you know, we're eliminating some of the healthy risks that build resilience for our kids while we are not so aware of the psychological risks that they are facing through the screen experiences that they're having. And the biggest concern we have, or the barrier, the thing we should be concerned about in our children's play is our own anxiety about it and our own worry about keeping our kids engaged in activities and being scheduled for things. And like this mom's question, we kind of worry if all they're doing is staying at home, playing in the playroom or playing in the family room. It might kind of make us feel guilty that they're just playing because somewhere along the way, I think we are receiving the message that learning really does need to look more like work and that growth has to be kind of pushing kids to the next level, and that uh sometimes preparing for the future means we have to sacrifice the childhood of the present.

Three Practical Ways To Protect Play

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So let me leave you with three things you can do starting this week to make sure play stays strong in your child's life and maybe in yours too. The first one is to protect a window of nothing. I mean it literally, somewhere in your week, block out time that has no plan attached to it, no lessons, no drives, no screens, no craft you found and printed out, just open, unscheduled, unstructured time where kids are free to decide what happens next. And here's the part that's gonna maybe be uncomfortable. So I want you to prepare for it. Your child may be and probably will be bored. They may follow you around the kitchen telling you there's nothing to do. They may complain, they may lie on the floor dramatically, like their whole life is over. That's not a sign that the plan has failed. That's a sign the plan is beginning to work because boredom is a doorway. It's the uncomfortable moment right before imagination gets turned on. So if we rescue our kids out of every boredom every single time with a screen or an activity or a suggestion, then it's going to be harder for them to go back to that play. Their brain won't be able to have the opportunity to generate things because we keep generating it for them. So when the complaining starts, say very calmly, I know it's okay to be bored. Something will come to you. And then go back to what you were doing. That's it. The whole intervention. What happens next, if you can hold your nerve for about 10 minutes, is that probably a game will appear out of nowhere for them, a fort or a store or a whole world made of couch cushions. That's what we're going for. And I might add that we also have to be comfortable with possibly the mess that comes with it. But the second thing that I want you to be thinking about is to be nearby without taking over. Do you ever find yourself watching your child play and not being able to stop yourself from managing it? It comes from love. It comes from that little anxious voice that says, I'm not teaching. This doesn't count as teaching. But here's what I want you to know the learning for your child is already happening. The tower when it falls is the lesson. And sometimes our questions, as well-intended as they are, they actually interrupt the exact process we're hoping to support. But when you're nearby, you're in the room, or you're on the floor, or you're on the couch, and you're available. So when they look up, they see you. When they hand you a plastic piece of food, a waffle, you pretend to eat it with enthusiasm. When they assign you a role in their game, you take the role and you let them direct. You follow, they lead. That's what makes it a double win. Kids get the developmental work of play and they also get the felt sense that mom is close and interested in their world. It's connection. It costs nothing but our presence. And if you only have five minutes, five minutes is worth more than an hour of us being the leader in that process. The third thing, this is the one I guess maybe I want you most to hear, is to take your own play back. Because I've been talking about your child's brain this whole time. And I told you at the beginning that her brain or his brain is not that different than ours. But the need for imagination, for creativity, for wandering thoughts, for laughter, that doesn't expire when you turn 18 and you're formally an adult. Somewhere in there, I think most of us quietly step away from play and we get focused on producing things. Our walks need to count as our exercise. The book has to teach us something. The hobby can become a side business sometimes. We feel that pressure. Even our rest must be optimized, or it doesn't feel like it's earned in our day. Well, this is life with all the play squeezed out of it. And when we live this way, we run on a very thin margin, which is exactly the margin that disappears when it's bedtime and somebody won't go to bed. And we start to lose our temper or our energy is just gone. So we want you to be re-energized. I want you to try to find one thing that has no outcome attached to it, something that's useless in the best possible way. So turn music on, dance around a little bit, get in the water at the pool instead of watching from the chair. Play the card game. Sing loudly with your kids. Go outside without your phone and go on a walk and just notice what's around you. Also notice what's happening in your body. Hopefully, you'll feel those shoulders drop, that your breath gets a little slower, that you can laugh from somewhere lower in your chest than you have in a while. That's your nervous system coming out of vigilance. Laughter and movement and open, unfocused attention are the fastest ways we have to move out of stress and back into steadiness. Your child gets the benefit of that mom, the one who's a little lighter and a little happier to be in her life. So to the mom who wrote in, to every one of you that's felt that same little guilty tug, trust your instinct. Let your kids play. You're not behind. They're not behind. There's nothing you need to buy or enroll in or print out to make them ready for what's coming next. Protect that empty time and let yourself play too. I hope this week you can have a little lightness in your heart and feel the joy that comes with watching your children play and playing a little yourself.

Final Reassurance And Disclaimer

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I will talk to you all next week. Take care. The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It's also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.