No Rules on the Playground? Good.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of research on play and its vital part in child development. As I work with our design team to plan our school’s natural playground, and as I watch our students
No Rules on the Playground? Good.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of research on play and its vital part in child development. As I work with our design team to plan our school’s natural playground, and as I watch our students play outside during recess, I’ve developed some pretty strong opinions about how rules (or the lack thereof) can influence the quality of play we allow kids to experience.
Rules stop kids from making their own rules.
When kids free play, they often choose to develop their own games—which means they make their own rules. This could include the boundaries and “safe zones” for a game of tag, or the number of times an invisible blaster gun may be fired at a robot monster before reloading is required, or how close you can get to someone during an acorn-throwing battle. These are often the only rules that kids need in order to self-govern during play, and we do them a disservice if we assume they can’t play well unless adults intervene with rules of our own.
If well-meaning adults aren’t careful, we can create a world where adults supply rules and then kids practice as much anarchy as possible within those rules. This encourages students to look at rules as arbitrary boundaries. Instead, we should encourage the type of play environment in which kids will naturally create their own rules. Usually all this takes is quelling our understandable impulse to control, prevent, and fix—there are times where kids need that from us, but play really isn’t one of them.
They will disagree with each other. There will be a kid who refuses to comply to the group’s rules. There will be a small sub-group of kids who develop alternative rules they insist on implementing. These are all sticky situations that in most cases can be resolved amongst kids with zero adult intervention. It might mean Jimmy and Bobby aren’t friends for a recess or two, and it might turn into a weeks-long ideological war between two groups of kids; neither of these are bad things. This is how kids learn low-stakes conflict resolution and negotiation. This is the proving ground where they develop empathy and the ability to compromise. This is also where cruel, contrary, or spiteful impulses are pointed out (and hopefully stamped out) by peers rather than by teachers.
Organized sports are another example of adults imposing rules on children—and I would argue that the moment adults are calling the shots, what the kids are doing can no longer be considered real play. This is why signing kids up for youth soccer is not a viable replacement for free, unstructured play, though organized sports certainly have their benefits.
Rules prevent risk management.
Can I hit the snooze button again and still make it to work on time? Should I drive through the intersection even though the signal has been yellow for a few seconds? When people consider taking a particular action by identifying and weighing potential outcomes, we call that risk management. This is a skill that adults use constantly, but it’s one that we start developing long before we grow up.
Well, we develop it before we grow up if we’re given the opportunity. Adults are increasingly depriving students of this key part of development by taking the possibility of risk out of play. When the stakes are low, taking risks has benefits that far outweigh potential consequences. That’s why allowing risk management on the playground is such an important opportunity to give students the time and space they need to explore their abilities and limits.
Some kids are fearless, and need to push their personal boundaries in order to learn through failure what they can and can’t handle. Some kids are fearful, and need to push their personal boundaries in order to build confidence and discover that they are stronger, faster, or more able than they thought. Taking risks and pushing boundaries is the healthy way for both types of children to learn, even though they have opposite attitudes toward play.
Developing new skills (like balancing on a beam, jumping from tree stump to tree stump, or climbing a tree) can take time, and sometimes requires failure. This might mean scrapes, bruises, and even sprained ligaments or broken bones–but kids’ bodies are very resilient, and this is how they learn what their bodies are capable of and how far they can reasonably push themselves. This skill continues to pay dividends as their bodies mature, and their risk management begins to translate to mental and emotional assessments in addition to physical ones.
How can they have these experiences if we limit opportunities for r