Neighborhoods that Nurture: Why The Play-Based Childhood Requires More Than Just Putting Down the Phone
afterbabel.com
Neighborhoods that Nurture: Why The Play-Based Childhood Requires More Than Just Putting Down the Phone
Conscious parents can bring back playtime for kids of all ages by deliberately making time for it in their weekly schedules and seeking out other parents who understand the importance of unstructured play and schedule regular get-togethers to let the kids hang out, just as you would make time for a jog in the park or a jam session in the garage.
Nir Eyal • Indistractable
A play-based childhood is one in which kids spend the majority of their free time playing with friends in the real world as I defined it in the introduction: embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, and in groups or communities where there is some cost to join or leave so people invest in relationships.
Jonathan Haidt • The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Many people on Twitter/X shared images from local parks with “no ball throwing” and other no-loitering-esque signs actively deterring children and teens from enjoying the space. People have every right to be angry about these cases, that there are few places to simply be. But even these situations can be traced in part to our phone-centric culture.... See more
Matter
The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence,
... See moreJonathan Haidt • The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood
A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz w... See more