I can see that this parenting thing is going to be a challenge.
An important part of the movement is teaching children themselves how to play. The average 3-year-old can pick up an iPhone and expertly scroll through the menu of apps, but how many 7-year-olds can organize a kickball game with the neighborhood kids?
Now, when I was seven I had already organized the wiffle-ball game with the neighborhood kids (who were all older than me), and we had set down all the ground rules. I’ve noticed that a lot of kids don’t play much outdoors these days, but I kind of figured that that was more true for non-athletically inclined people. We played basketball, and football (kill the carrier), and wiffle-ball, and frisbee, and we rode bikes everywhere, and we skateboarded, and we played little league, and did Cub Scouts, we played competitive tennis, and played flashlight tag, and we camped outside, and we took vacations in the wilderness and went hiking in the mountains and canoeing on the lakes. We skated on Lake Carnegie when it froze, which it used to do in the 1970’s. We took swimming lessons in the summer. Our whole lives were played out in yards and gyms and courts and parks. Or the Jersey Shore. Even when we were indoors we were playing ping-pong or air hockey or foosball or cards.
We did play some Atari. But it wasn’t much. We got cable television a couple years later than everyone else. I think we got it in our home in 1984. I used it to watch MTV and the Cubs. Ryne Sandberg and Andre Dawson were fun to watch. I think that was the beginning of the end. I love the internet, but screentime is not good for kids.
She was one of Palin’s top targets. The person she beat was so conservative that he criticized Palin for endorsing candidates who were “too moderate.”
Hope she pulls through; this rhetoric has consequences.
NPR is now saying that she has passed away.
NPR is reporting that she died. And you are right about Palin and her opponent in November. He spouted his own eliminationistic rhetoric as well.
Adding .. this is what her opponent did: http://bit.ly/hilsro (It goes to a comment at TGOS)
You might want to read Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods. He coined the term Nature Deficit Disorder to describe the situation with most kids whose only exposure to the outside is on their organized team and the consequences of that.
Thanks for the recommendation. Kids were already getting away from unsupervised outdoor play when CBtE was younger, and I think it’s only gotten worse. When we were kids, we had our own 50 acres to play on, plus the farm and barn across the street, a creek, forts we built in the woods, and 2 farmers’ worth of fields to explore. We would only go home for lunch and dinner in the summer.
And the elimination of imaginative play from school environments is just wrong, IMO. Kids need recess, and some time to actually play dodgeball and whatever other games they come up with every day. I remember all the made-up games we played in elementary school; what happens when these kids who can’t think up anything on their own grow up?
(Just wanted to add that the NYT seems to be doing a series of articles on this topic).
The b2 boy is talking about getting another DS game today. Sigh.
It’s hard, because you’re fighting such a battle with the way our society is…even parents can hardly tear themselves away from the screen to get out and do stuff. Or they take the mini-screen with them while they go.
It has been really useful on those 4 hour drives to Cape May. Other times I wish that it didn’t exist.
It gets replaced with texting and cell phones, you know…
We cut off the kids’ cell phones before our road trip to Michigan this summer…it took a bit, but it forced the kids to actually interact with us, and play road trip games along the way. My favorite part was when they finally picked up the road trip bingo cards and began playing a spirited game of “Cop car over there!”
There’s a move to have less picture books. The parents of this ilk want the kids at four years old to be able to read Stuart Little.
It’s all about pushing the kids because mommy and daddy want to be so superior.
I don’t like video games and I do know that hours are spent playing them. I have no solution to this one.
The often unnoticed cost of this is the extent to which it starts to seem unusual when children do play outside. This leads to perceptions of risk. For my part, i also believe that increased perceptions of risk contributed to this at the beginning. Screen time is a problem, but so are paranoid parents. Try to find a merry-go-round at a park. You can’t. They have all been litigated into insurance risk memory. It’s a mess.
I still have a slew of neighborhood kids playing in my side yard any day when it isn’t raining or snowing so hard that they can’t.
Football, wiffle ball, kick ball, snow ball fights, field hockey, and dodge ball seem to be the favorite activities.
Plus all the kids have skateboards, scooters and bicycles and can be seen shuttling around the neighborhood when they’re not engaged in some sports activities.
In the summer months the kids can be found swimming, fishing, water skiing, jet skiing, and simply splashing around in the lakes until the sun goes down.
Granted, I live in a small city in New Hampshire, and in a neighborhood that works mightily to accommodate kids. I make available my side yard (which is actually a vacant lot) for a sports field and I have no children, and many of the families in the neighborhood open their yards and lawns to play as well.
Hell, I even have kids climbing the giant maple outside my office window to try to get a peak at what I’m doing or attempt to startle me.
I think what works here is that parents do encourage their kids to play outdoors, and they hit the streets as soon as they’ve returned from school and changed clothes, and remain active until called home for dinner. The kids are less active outside in the winter, but only because it gets dark so early. That provides them ample time to hone their computer skills, which they all have developed to an astonishing degree.
An important part of the movement is teaching children themselves how to play. The average 3-year-old can pick up an iPhone and expertly scroll through the menu of apps, but how many 7-year-olds can organize a kickball game with the neighborhood kids?