There is an experiment happening in homes across the country. Nobody designed it. Nobody approved it. Nobody is tracking the results with the rigor it deserves. But the experiment is underway and the subjects are children.
The experiment is this. What happens when you remove play from childhood and replace it with instruction, structure, supervision, and screens.
Previous generations did not need to ask this question because play was childhood. It was the air children breathed. It was what happened between breakfast and dinner on a Saturday. It was the default state of every child who was not in school, not eating, and not sleeping. Nobody scheduled it. Nobody supervised it. Nobody evaluated its outcomes or justified its existence. It simply was.
That era is over. Play, real play, the unstructured, unsupervised, child-directed, open-ended, messy, loud, imaginative, purposeless-looking activity that children have engaged in for the entirety of human history, has been systematically removed from childhood and replaced by things that look more productive, more measurable, and more impressive to adults.
The results of the experiment are coming in. They are not good.
David Elkind, one of the most respected developmental psychologists of the last half century, wrote “The Power of Play” to present the evidence. Not the evidence that play is nice. Not the evidence that play is fun. The evidence that play is necessary. Biologically necessary. Cognitively necessary. Emotionally necessary. Socially necessary. That its removal from childhood constitutes a developmental emergency that the culture has not yet recognized because the emergency does not look like an emergency. It looks like a full schedule.
Discover why play is not optional: Search for “The Power of Play David Elkind” on Amazon
What Happened to Play
The disappearance of play did not happen because someone decided play was bad. It happened because other things were deemed more important. And once the hierarchy was established, once academics were placed above exploration, once enrichment was placed above imagination, once measurable outcomes were placed above unmeasurable development, play was squeezed out. Not deliberately. By default.
The schedule filled. The afternoons were allocated. The weekends were committed. The free hours that once stretched across childhood like open fields were parceled, fenced, and developed into structured activity. Soccer practice from four to five thirty. Piano from six to six forty-five. Homework from seven to eight thirty. Bath. Bed. Repeat.
Somewhere in that schedule, the child was supposed to develop creativity. Emotional resilience. Social competence. Independent thinking. The capacity to entertain themselves. The ability to resolve conflicts without adult intervention. The cognitive flexibility that comes from inventing games, imagining worlds, and navigating the unpredictable social terrain of unstructured interaction with other children.
But there was no time slot for any of that. There was no line item on the calendar for becoming a complete human being. And so the development that should have happened through play was deferred. Indefinitely. With consequences that are only now becoming visible.
Elkind saw the consequences before most people saw the cause. He traced the rising anxiety, the declining creativity, the increasing social difficulties, the growing dependence on external direction, and the erosion of intrinsic motivation back to the same source. The same absence. The same stolen hours. The disappearance of play.
Why Play Is Not What People Think It Is
Part of the problem is definitional. The culture has collapsed the meaning of play until it includes virtually anything a child does that is not formal schoolwork. Screen time is called play. Organized sports are called play. Adult-directed craft activities are called play. Structured programs that use the word play in their marketing are accepted as substitutes for the real thing.
They are not. And Elkind is precise about why.
The Defining Characteristics of Real Play
Play is voluntary. The child chooses to engage. The moment the activity is required, it ceases to be play regardless of how playful it appears. The child on the soccer team who would rather be home drawing is not playing. They are complying. The internal experience is entirely different, and the developmental benefits depend on the internal experience, not the external appearance.
Play is intrinsically motivated. The child plays because the activity itself is satisfying. Not because there is a reward at the end. Not because an adult will be pleased. Not because a score is being kept. The satisfaction is in the doing. When external motivators are introduced, the activity transforms from play into performance. The child’s attention shifts from the process to the outcome, and the developmental benefits of play are specific to the process.
Play is process-oriented. There is no product. No grade. No evaluation. The child building a tower of blocks is not trying to produce a tower. They are absorbed in the building. The child pretending to be a pirate is not working toward a theatrical production. They are living inside the pretending. When adults ask what the child made, when they evaluate the drawing, when they redirect the pretend scenario toward something more educational, they pull the child out of the process and into a product orientation that changes the nature of the activity fundamentally.
Play is self-directed. The child determines what happens. The rules, the roles, the narrative, the pace, and the direction are all under the child’s control. This is the characteristic that most sharply distinguishes play from everything that has replaced it. In organized sports, the coach directs. In academic programs, the teacher directs. In screen-based activities, the algorithm directs. In play, the child directs. And it is precisely this self-direction that produces the developmental benefits the culture is desperate to engineer through every other means.
Elkind is emphatic about these distinctions because without them, the argument for play is meaningless. If everything is play, then advocating for more play produces nothing. The culture can point to the soccer practice and the coding camp and say the child is playing plenty. Only when play is defined with precision can its absence be measured and its necessity defended.
The Developmental Engine
Elkind presents the research on play not as a collection of interesting findings but as a unified case for play as the primary engine of childhood development. Not a supplement to development. Not a complement to instruction. The engine.
Cognitive Development Through Play
The child who plays is building a brain. Not metaphorically. Literally. Play activates neural systems across multiple brain regions simultaneously, producing a density and complexity of neural connections that no single-focus instructional activity can replicate.
When a child builds with blocks, they are activating motor systems, spatial reasoning systems, planning systems, and problem-solving systems in concert. When a child pretends, they are activating language systems, social cognition systems, emotional regulation systems, and executive function systems simultaneously. The integration across systems is what makes play so developmentally powerful. The brain does not develop in compartments. It develops through integration. And play is the most integrative activity available to the developing child.
Elkind presents research comparing children in play-based early childhood programs with children in academic-focused programs. The results are consistent and clear. By mid-elementary school, the play-based children have caught up academically and surpassed their peers in creativity, social competence, and motivation. The early academic advantage that the instruction-focused programs produced has evaporated. What remains is the motivational damage. The children who were drilled early have a weaker relationship with learning. They are less curious. Less willing to take intellectual risks. Less likely to persist when the work gets difficult. The play-based children retained their curiosity, their love of learning, and their willingness to engage with challenge because those capacities were built through play, not eroded by premature instruction.
The implications are staggering. The approach that looks less productive in the short term produces better outcomes in the long term. The approach that looks more productive in the short term produces worse outcomes in the long term. The culture has chosen the worse approach because it measures short-term performance and ignores long-term development. Elkind argues that this choice is not just mistaken. It is harmful.
Emotional Development Through Play
Play is where children learn to feel. Not where they learn about feelings from an adult-led social-emotional curriculum. Where they actually experience the full range of human emotions in a context safe enough to practice managing them.
The child who loses the game feels disappointment and practices recovering. The child who is frightened by the pretend monster feels fear and practices courage. The child whose block tower collapses feels frustration and practices persistence. The child who laughs uncontrollably during a silly game feels joy and practices the experience of letting go.
Each of these emotional experiences, repeated hundreds of times across the years of childhood, builds the regulatory capacity that will be essential in adulthood. The adult who can manage disappointment without collapsing, fear without fleeing, frustration without erupting, and joy without losing control is an adult who practiced those skills during play. The adult who cannot manage these emotions is often an adult who never got enough practice.
Elkind connects the rising rates of emotional dysregulation in children and young adults directly to the decline in play. The generation that plays least is the generation that regulates least. The correlation is not coincidental. It is causal. Play builds the neural circuitry for emotional regulation. Without play, the circuitry is underdeveloped. Without the circuitry, regulation fails.
Social Development Through Play
When children play together without adult direction, they must navigate the entire social landscape on their own. They must propose ideas and accept rejection. They must negotiate rules and enforce them. They must take turns and resist the impulse to dominate. They must read facial expressions, interpret tone of voice, and adjust their behavior based on social feedback in real time.
Every one of these interactions is a social skill exercise that no adult-directed program can replicate. Because the adult-directed program has an adult managing the dynamics. The adult resolves the conflicts. The adult enforces the rules. The adult mediates the disputes. The children are social passengers. In free play, the children are social drivers. They must do the work themselves. And the work they do, clumsy and imperfect and occasionally brutal in its honesty, is the work that builds social competence.
Elkind notes that children who engage in more unstructured play with peers show better conflict resolution skills, stronger friendships, greater empathy, and more sophisticated social reasoning than children whose social interactions are primarily adult-managed. The free play children have practiced social navigation under real conditions. The managed children have been protected from the conditions that would have trained them.
The playground is not a break from education. It is the most sophisticated social education available. And recess, which has been systematically reduced or eliminated in schools across the country, is one of the most developmentally valuable periods in the school day.
The Three Stages of Play
Elkind traces the evolution of play across childhood, showing how each stage builds on the previous one and contributes unique developmental benefits.
Mastery Play in Infancy and Toddlerhood
The earliest play is the play of exploration. The baby who shakes, bangs, drops, mouths, and manipulates every object they can reach is conducting experiments. They are learning about cause and effect, object permanence, spatial relationships, gravity, texture, weight, and a hundred other physical principles through direct sensory-motor experience.
This play looks repetitive and pointless to adults. The baby drops the spoon. The adult picks it up. The baby drops it again. The adult picks it up again. The baby is not being defiant. The baby is testing a hypothesis about object behavior. And the repetition is not meaningless. It is the scientific method in its most primitive and most essential form. The child repeats until the principle is internalized, then moves on to the next experiment.
Elkind argues that interrupting this process with structured instruction, with flash cards, with educational apps, with any adult-directed activity that replaces the child’s self-directed exploration, is not accelerating development. It is interrupting the foundational process upon which all subsequent development depends.
Imaginative Play in Early Childhood
As the child develops symbolic thinking, play transforms. Objects become other objects. The stick becomes a sword. The box becomes a spaceship. The child becomes a doctor, a firefighter, a parent, a dog. The real world dissolves and a world of the child’s creation takes its place.
This is not idle fantasy. This is the most cognitively demanding activity a young child can engage in. Holding two representations simultaneously, the stick is a stick and a sword, requires a cognitive sophistication that lays the groundwork for all subsequent abstract thinking. The child who can pretend that a block is a phone is practicing the same representational skill they will later need to understand that the letter A represents a sound, that the number 3 represents a quantity, that a map represents a territory.
Imaginative play also builds executive function with extraordinary efficiency. The child who is pretending to be a teacher must inhibit behaviors inconsistent with the role. They must remember the rules of the pretend scenario. They must maintain the narrative over time. They must negotiate with other players about the direction of the story. Each of these demands exercises the prefrontal cortex, building the neural pathways that will later support academic focus, impulse control, and strategic thinking.
Games with Rules in Middle Childhood
As cognitive development advances, children become capable of understanding and following formal rules. Board games, card games, team sports, and organized games with defined procedures and competitive elements become central to social and cognitive development.
Games with rules teach the child to subordinate personal desire to collective agreement. The child who wants to win must play within the rules. The child who loses must manage their response. The child who disagrees with a ruling must accept a framework of authority and fairness.
These are not abstract lessons. They are practiced experiences. Every game is a miniature society. Every rule is a social contract. Every dispute is a negotiation. Every loss is an emotional regulation challenge. The child who plays games with rules extensively arrives at adulthood with a practiced understanding of how cooperative systems work, how fairness operates, and how to compete within boundaries.
Understand the developmental stages of play: Search for “The Power of Play David Elkind” on Amazon
Get the Full Audiobook Free
If you are a parent who has been wondering whether the schedule is too full and the play is too scarce, this book provides the scientific basis for the changes you are considering. And you can absorb the entire argument without adding another commitment to your already overcommitted life.
Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial at amzn.to/48xEGLV and use your free credit to download the complete “The Power of Play” audiobook. Listen while your child does what the book argues they should be doing more of. Listen during the drive home from the activity you are about to reconsider. Listen during the evening hours that could be reclaimed for exactly the kind of unstructured family time the book describes.
The audiobook is yours to keep permanently. Even if you cancel the Audible trial before it renews, the book stays in your library forever. No cost. No risk. No obligation. Just the most comprehensive scientific case for play ever written, available in your ears whenever you need the reminder that the most important thing your child can do looks nothing like what the culture says it should.
Sign up for your free Audible trial and get this audiobook free
The Forces Destroying Play
Elkind names the forces responsible for play’s disappearance with the directness of someone who has watched a preventable disaster unfold in slow motion.
The Achievement Machine
The educational system has been restructured around measurable outcomes. Test scores. Grade-level benchmarks. Standardized assessments. Each measurement creates pressure. Each pressure point compresses the time available for activities that do not contribute to the measurement. Play does not appear on any test. Therefore play is expendable.
Recess has been reduced or eliminated. Kindergarten play has been replaced by instruction. Preschool play has been replaced by pre-academic preparation. The entire system has shifted toward measurable output, and play, which produces immeasurable development, has been sacrificed.
Elkind argues that this sacrifice is not just educationally unsound. It is counterproductive by the system’s own metrics. The children who play more perform better academically in the long run than the children who are instructed more during the years when they should be playing. The system is destroying the very thing that would improve its own outcomes. And it is doing so because it measures the wrong things at the wrong time.
The Safety Culture
The cultural obsession with child safety has eliminated many of the environments and circumstances that naturally supported play. Children no longer roam neighborhoods unsupervised. Playgrounds have been sanitized of risk. Parents who allow their children to play independently are subject to social judgment and, in some cases, legal scrutiny.
The result is a childhood conducted under constant adult surveillance. The child is never truly unsupervised. Never truly independent. Never truly free to navigate the physical and social world on their own terms. The protection that was intended to keep children safe has kept them underdeveloped. The skills that independent play builds, risk assessment, problem-solving, confidence, resilience, are the exact skills the safety culture prevents children from acquiring.
Elkind advocates for a recalibration. Not for reckless endangerment. For the recognition that age-appropriate risk is not the enemy of safety. It is the foundation of competence. The child who is allowed to climb high enough to be nervous is learning to assess and manage risk. The child who is never allowed to climb learns nothing about their own capacity and develops no confidence in their own judgment.
The Screen Invasion
Screens have filled the void that play’s departure created. The child who has no unstructured time and no access to independent outdoor play turns to the screen. The screen provides stimulation without effort. Entertainment without initiative. Engagement without self-direction.
Elkind is clear that screen time is not play. It may involve game-like elements. It may even require some decision-making. But it lacks the essential characteristics that make play developmentally powerful. It is not self-directed in any meaningful sense because the parameters are set by the designer. It does not engage the body. It does not involve spontaneous social negotiation. And it is engineered to capture attention rather than develop it.
The child who spends their free time on screens is not choosing between play and screens. They are defaulting to the option that requires the least internal resource. And in doing so, they are forgoing the developmental benefits that only self-directed, embodied, socially negotiated, imaginative play can provide.
What Parents Can Do Starting Today
Elkind translates the research into practical guidance that any family can implement.
Protect time. The most important thing you can do for your child’s development is give them time that is not allocated to anything. Not enrichment time. Not educational time. Not quality time with a planned agenda. Empty time. Unstructured time. Time that the child must fill on their own with whatever their own mind and body produce.
Provide space. The child needs access to environments that invite play. Outdoor spaces with natural materials. Indoor spaces with open-ended toys. Blocks, art supplies, building materials, costumes, fabric, cardboard, sand, water. Materials that can become anything rather than things that do one thing.
Provide peers. Play with other children produces developmental benefits that solitary play cannot. Arrange for unstructured time with other children. Not playdates with a planned itinerary. Time together with nothing to do. The children will figure it out. That figuring out is the point.
Step back. When the child is playing, the adult’s job is to be available but uninvolved. Not directing. Not suggesting. Not improving. Not evaluating. The moment the adult enters the play and takes charge, the play becomes something else. Something that may be enjoyable but is not producing the self-directed developmental benefits that genuine play provides.
Reduce the schedule. Something has to go. If every afternoon is committed, play cannot happen. The activity you drop may be the one that looks most impressive to other adults. That is a cost. The benefit is a child with time to develop into a complete human being rather than an accomplished one.
Turn off the screens. Not forever. Not as punishment. As policy. Screens fill the space that play should occupy. When the screens are off and the schedule is clear, the child will initially complain. Then they will wander. Then they will discover what their own mind is capable of producing when nothing else is providing the stimulation. That discovery is worth every minute of the discomfort that precedes it.
The Honest Limitations
The book is strongest on the case for play and less detailed on the practical challenges of restoring it. Parents who are convinced of the argument may still struggle with implementation in communities where overscheduling is the norm and opting out carries social consequences for both parent and child.
The book does not fully address the modern screen environment. Published before smartphones reached full saturation, the analysis of technology’s impact on play, while directionally accurate, does not account for the specific addictive design features of current platforms that make them particularly difficult to compete with.
The framework is designed for typically developing children. Children with sensory processing differences, autism spectrum conditions, or other neurological variations may have different play needs and patterns that the book does not thoroughly explore.
The argument could more fully address the socioeconomic dimensions of play’s disappearance. Children in under-resourced communities have lost play for different reasons than children in affluent ones. Unsafe neighborhoods, lack of outdoor space, inadequate school facilities, and the necessity of screen-based childcare when parents work multiple jobs are barriers to play that require systemic solutions, not just individual parental choices.
Who Should Read This Book
If you are a parent who feels that something essential is missing from your child’s day but cannot identify what, this book names it.
If your child cannot entertain themselves, cannot play independently, cannot settle into an activity without direction, this book explains why and shows you how to rebuild what has been lost.
If you are a teacher watching recess shrink and test prep expand and wondering what the long-term cost will be, this book provides the answer with decades of evidence.
If you are anyone who makes decisions about how children spend their time, from school administrators to policymakers to grandparents managing an afternoon, this book should inform every one of those decisions.
The Most Serious Thing a Child Can Do
“The Power of Play” is a book that asks the culture to reconsider its most fundamental assumption about childhood. The assumption that productive activity is always better than unproductive activity. That structured is always better than unstructured. That adult-directed is always better than child-directed. That measurable is always better than immeasurable.
David Elkind presents overwhelming evidence that these assumptions are wrong. That the unmeasurable, unstructured, child-directed, apparently unproductive activity called play produces deeper, more durable, more comprehensive development than any structured program ever created.
Play is not the opposite of learning. It is how learning happens. It is how it has always happened. It is how the human brain was designed to develop. And every hour of play that is replaced by instruction, enrichment, or screen time is an hour of development that the child does not get back.
Your child does not need another program. Your child needs to play. Freely, messily, loudly, imaginatively, without a goal, without a grade, without an adult telling them what to do or how to do it. Just play. The most serious, most important, most developmentally powerful thing a child can do.
Let them do it.
And if you want to understand the full scientific case for why, grab the complete audiobook free by signing up for a free 30-day Audible trial. Download it, listen at your own pace, and keep it in your library forever, even if you cancel before the trial ends. No cost, no obligation, and a book that could fundamentally reshape how you see every hour of your child’s day.
Get your free audiobook with a 30-day Audible trial
Search for “The Power of Play David Elkind” on Amazon
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. If you sign up for an Audible trial through my link, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
Leave a Reply