Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 39 of 91
The decline of open-ended play
This kind of open-ended play was fertilizing their brains with the behavioral equivalent of Miracle-Gro. That sentence might seem strange. Open-ended play? Not “open-ended purchase of electronic educational toys”? Not French lessons, followed by hours of militant drilling? Actually, I do believe in a form of disciplined repetition as children begin formal schooling. But many parents are so preoccupied with their young child’s future that they transform every step of the journey into a type of product development, recoiling at open-ended anything. From 1981 to 1997, the amount of free time parents gave their kids shrank by about a quarter. In the Atlantic, Esther Entin details more of that same study: Children “spent 18 percent more time at school, 145 percent more time doing school work, and 168 percent more time shopping with parents. The researchers found that, including computer play, children in 1997 spent only about eleven hours per week at play.” Children’s free time hasn’t improved since then. Researcher Peter Gray noted in 2011 that the number has been declining for more than half a century. The making-baby-smart product industry—fashioning toys that are the opposite of open-ended (what could be more claustrophobic than a DVD for infants?)—is a multibillion-dollar industry. We now know that open-ended activities are as important to a child’s neural growth as protein.