This summer, two stories involving parents allowing children to play alone in their local parks made national headlines. Debra Harrell, of North Augusta, South Carolina, was arrested in June and charged with felony child neglect for allowing her 9-year-old daughter to play at a park while she was at work at a nearby McDonald’s. Harrell temporarily lost custody of her daughter and could face significant jail time if convicted. Then in July, a Florida mother, Nicole Gainey, was arrested and similarly charged for allowing her 7-year-old to walk to a park about a half mile from their house while she was home.
Neither state has a law outlining specifically at what age children may be left on their own at home or in public places, but according to a public opinion poll conducted by the Reason Foundation, a majority of Americans feel there ought to be one — at least when it comes to playing in parks. In August, with these cases still fresh in the public’s mind, the libertarian think tank found that 68 percent of Americans believe that there should be a law requiring 9-year-olds to be supervised when visiting public parks.
The news of these arrests and the public opinions surrounding them are troubling.
The Value of Play
In recent decades, researchers have studied and articulated the essential role of play in children’s social, emotional and cognitive development. Notably, the American Academy of Pediatrics has outlined the many benefits of play, including opportunities for kids to test and overcome their fears, build confidence and resiliency, and develop invaluable social skills like sharing, conflict resolution, negotiation and teamwork.
A critical feature of play in order to achieve these benefits is that it is mostly unstructured by adults. That is, child-led, exploratory play in which children are free to make up their own stories, games and rules. Unstructured, free play might involve climbing a tree, building a house or fort, making mud pies (or sand pancakes, as is this writer’s son’s specialty), exploring a creek or wooded area, or acting out a story with loose roles. Organized sports, video games and other structured, adult-led activities do not fall into this category.
Another valuable aspect of children’s free play is an element of risk. Joan Almon, co-founder of the Alliance for Childhood, writes about this in Adventure: The Importance of Risk in Children’s Play:
“Facing risk helps children assess the world around them and their place in it. Children love to see how high they can climb on a ladder, a tree or a jungle gym. Over time they see their abilities grow, and they become ever more confident about stretching their boundaries and taking appropriate chances. They also learn about their limits and the consequences of going too far beyond their limits. As they grow older, they apply these lessons in a variety of real-life situations.”
Almon goes on to ask, “How do children learn to risk-assess if adults are always present and doing it for them?”
It can be quite impactful — and fun! — when adults participate in child-led play; however, as Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg notes in a 2007 report published in the journal Pediatrics, “Some play must remain entirely child-driven, with parents either not present or as passive observers, because play builds some of the individual assets children need to develop and remain resilient.”
In other words: Unstructured and even unsupervised play is good for kids.
It’s a Dangerous World Out There
Readers may be thinking of their own childhoods, when they were sent outside to play in the morning and didn’t return home until dinnertime. As Hillary Clinton muses in The Games We Played: A Celebration of Childhood and Imagination,
“We had all kinds of games, playing hard every day after school, every weekend, and from dawn until our parents made us come in at dark in the summertime. One game was called chase and run, which was a kind of complex team-based hide-and-seek and tag combination… As with all our games, the rules were elaborate and they were hammered out in long consultations on street corners. It was how we spent countless hours.”
It was a time before cellphones, before jam-packed after-school schedules, and, perhaps most importantly, before the 24-hour news cycle.
With Amber Alerts popping up on mobile phones and outrageous crimes against children appearing on the news every day, one would be led to believe that the world is an increasingly dangerous place. It is no wonder that polls show Americans do not think kids should play alone.
However, there is no evidence to suggest that kids are growing up in more dangerous times today than in previous generations. According to U.S. Census data, the overall crime rate has dropped dramatically during the past 25 years. A 2012 U.S. Department of Justice report states that violent crime against children was down 77 percent between 1994 and 2010, and the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children agree that child abduction by strangers is both extraordinarily rare and also decreasing. In the words of Daniel Wood of the Christian Science Monitor, crime rates haven’t been this low since “gasoline cost 29 cents a gallon and the average income for a working American was $5,807.”
Public parks are arguably one of the safest places to let kids play unsupervised, particularly during the daytime hours when community parks are staffed and regularly patrolled. Public parks generally have few real hazards, regular maintenance and lots of foot traffic. Of course, parks are not entirely free of dangers, but a preteen is, statistically speaking, quite safe in a community park. And as the cases of Harrell and Gainey illustrate — as presumably well-intentioned strangers intervened in both instances — if something were to happen to an unsupervised child in a community park, chances are very high that an adult would step in to help.
The Role of Parks
Parks around the country are working to provide safe places for kids to play, and many have embraced the idea of facilitating unstructured play through summer and after-school programs. One of these is Ushers Ferry Historic Village, a facility of Iowa’s Cedar Rapids Parks and Recreation Department. Ann Cejka, program coordinator at Ushers Ferry, has developed a series of camps designed to foster unstructured and “risky” play, supporting kids’ development into confident and resilient adults. Cejka and her team work to provide a framework for play and learning, and then they step back. She sees a number of positive outcomes from this approach:
Self-regulation. At the “Dangerous Day Camp for Boys,” what Cejka describes as “an experimental ‘build-it’ camp,” participants make foam swords. “There was one boy there who was pretty aggressive with his sword,” she recalls. “I didn’t say anything, but it didn’t take long before no one would fight with him because he was too aggressive. By the end of the week, he was starting to modify his behavior, otherwise he would have no one to play with.” No doubt this was a valuable life lesson for the boy, and one that he likely would not have learned if an adult had intervened.
Self-confidence. Campers at Ushers Ferry face many challenges that test and develop their confidence, and the “agility log” is a great example. “It’s maybe only three or four feet off the ground, and if the river has flooded, there might be a shallow pool that’s perhaps ankle- or knee-deep underneath it,” Cejka reports. “Some kids will scamper over it with no problem. Others will proceed over it at a snail’s pace, terrified at falling in the water. Some will think it through, set down all their stuff, go over the log, then take a safer route back to pick up their stuff, while others will go over the log, pack and all. Every child seems to approach it a little bit differently. There is no right or wrong way to do it, and by the end of the week, they all want to go over it as it is one of their favorite paths.” Left to problem-solve on their own, kids find a way to overcome what seems at first like a great obstacle, developing confidence in their own abilities.
Teamwork. Cejka has seen teamwork and social skills develop through child-driven fort-building projects. “For whatever reason, building something together, particularly a fort, is usually the foundation of building a team,” she says. “The result is always the same: something they worked together on in which everyone takes pride.”
Critical thinking. “It’s all about learning to weigh consequences of our choices,” Cejka says, about the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills kids acquire when left to make their own decisions in their play. “This summer I took a group of kids caving at Maquoketa Caves [State Park]. At one point, about six of them went tearing off the trail down into a deep ravine to explore a small stream. When it was time to get back up on the trail, they discovered the bank and footbridge were about six feet above their heads. I looked at them in exasperation. ‘Well just come back up the way you went down.’ I said. ‘This IS the way we went down!’ they said. Twenty minutes later, they navigated their way over logs, water and shoulder-high weeds to get back. They were somewhat more cautious after that.” Chances are, if an adult navigated the way back, they would make a similar reckless choice again.
Cejka has some advice for her peers in the park and recreation field who are interested in helping foster this type of adventurous, unstructured play in a safe way.
First, provide a venue for kids to explore. “Let’s face it, neatly manicured parks are boring. Trees are trimmed too high to climb. We have railings and fences to keep kids away from the water and the animals. There is no adventure,” she says. Of course, true hazards must be addressed, but providing opportunity for exploration and discovery is critical.
For park programmers, offer a theme or broad concept, and let the kids do the rest. “Many kids need some sort of theme or concept to plant a seed in their imagination,” Cejka says. Her themes range from Zombie Survival Camp to Huckleberry Finn Camp, and all employ plenty of unstructured time to engage kids in free play and exploration.
Develop safety guidelines and inform parents. At Ushers Ferry, parents acknowledge that their children are likely to be exposed to rough wilderness terrain, poison ivy and ticks, for example, and that they may handle pocket knives, fish hooks or sharp tools. For most, parents and kids agree that these are reasonable risks. “Kids are also made well aware of the fact that they need to take an active role in ensuring their own safety,” Cejka says. “We remind them that we will grant them a lot of latitude to play and explore, but the risk is that if anyone were to get seriously hurt, it would likely end this awesome program forever. This is a particularly effective warning.”
Step back when the childrens’ imaginations and interests begin to take off. “Fort building occasionally takes a left turn into raft building and they decide to see if they can make something that will float on one of the ponds. We have met snakes, turtles and toads, found ancient Indian beads and Devonian fossils, and a hundred other treasures that turned out to be far better than what was in the plan.”
And finally, play with the kids! Yes, kids need unsupervised time to explore, learn and work things out for themselves, but they also need adventurous adults who are willing to play alongside them and parents who scaffold their development to the point where they can visit the park on their own. All things in balance.
Jessica Culverhouse is NRPA’s Senior Manager of Fundraising.