 Study: Kids' lack of play time may affect development
Source: USA Today By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY Date: 04/14/09
Good morning. U.S. tykes soon may need to bring little briefcases to their first day of school, suggest new studies of 268 public kindergartens that looked
for "play time" and found it nearly squeezed off the agenda.
In
today's paper, my colleague Janice Lloyd reports "Experts say play time
can relieve stress in bad times" -- and that's about adults. One
wonders what psychiatrist Stuart Brown would say about this.
On
a typical day, kindergarten students in Los Angeles and New York City
spend 4 to 6 times as long being instructed and tested in math and
literacy as in free play. They're allowed about 30 minutes or less a
day for creative activities such as blocks and dramatic play, say
researchers from UCLA, Long Island University and Sarah Lawrence
College. In some classrooms there is no play time at all, according to
a new report from the Alliance for Childhood, the group that
commissioned the studies.
Standardized
testing and preparation for tests are daily activities in most
kindergartens, the report says. Teachers say they consider play
important, but it's no longer included in the curriculum and
administrators don't value it.
Child-driven
play has fallen out of favor in early U.S. education, replaced by more
teacher-directed activities that emphasize mastering academic material
from the first moment in school, but many studies show that kids who
engage in complex social and dramatic play develop higher levels of
thinking, better language and social skills, and they're also less
aggressive, according to the report.
The
trend "to make kindergarten a one-six-smaller first grade" is
misguided, says psychologist David Elkind, author of The Hurried Child
and The Power of Play. He calls the new findings "heartbreaking" in a
forward to the report.
A
recent upsurge in behavior problems and school failure among
kindergarten students may be due to unrealistic standards that are
beyond many young children, the report says. China and Japan -- often
envied for academic success -- have an experience and play-based
curriculum until second grade, say report authors Joan Almon and Ed
Miller of the Alliance for Childhood.
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