Buy This Playborhood Book!

I've been a fan of Mike Lanza's ever since I stumbled upon his Playborhood Blog. As his website says, "he's worked hard to create a very rich neighborhood play life for his three boys - ages 7, 4, and 2 - in Menlo Park, California. He's also discovered and written about dozens of neighborhoods throughout North America that are doing innovative things to make a vibrant life for kids. Prior to his writing career, Mike was a five-time software and Internet entrepreneur in Silicon Valley."

So, in addition to playing with his boys, he has written a book:In Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Place for Play, you’ll find inspiring stories of innovative communities throughout the US and Canada that have successfully created vibrant neighborhood play lives for their children. You’ll also get a comprehensive set of step-by-step solutions to turn around your family and neighborhood cultures, so that your kids can spend less time in front of screens and in adult-supervised activities, and more time engaging in joyful neighborhood play.

I like what Joan Almon, Director, Alliance for Childhood, had to say about this book:

“When I was young my friends and I played all over our neighborhood. It was our world, and it gave us the security to go out later and explore the wider world around us. Life is different now. You can drive through the safest neighborhoods and they look like ghost towns. Not a single child is outside playing. I am so grateful to Mike Lanza for reminding us that play begins at home and in our neighborhoods. It takes so little to make it happen there – just awareness, passion, and commitment. This book helps to feed all of those.”
— Joan Almon, Director, Alliance for Childhood

I moved to California 14 years ago from the midwest. The first thing I noticed about the neighborhoods here in the East Bay were the fences. They were everywhere. Each yard has a high, privacy fence. We didn't have fences in the midwest. In the Chicago suburbs, all the backyards melted into one another and became one huge field for play or naughtiness or whatever.

The next thing I noticed was the deserted streets after school. After school, my boys and I lived outside on our street (luckily it's flat, with sidewalks and a cul de sac that dead ends into a park, that our community built, BTW). Our street became (and still is) the baseball diamond, the pitching mound, the soccer field, the roller hockey rink, the inline skate strip, the bicycle race track, the basketball court, the jogging trail, the skateboard park, the dog walking path, the football field...

My boys are now 18 and 16 and they still spend a good amount of time outside on the street. These days it's mostly used by them for skateboarding or roller hockey, but we have many kids on our block that use the street just as we did for these past 14 years. As I write this, however, I do wish all the kids on our block played outside even more than they do. Most are involved in after school activities and many a weekend goes by with no kiddos playing outside on our street. That makes me sad.

So, my advice to all the kids on my block and all the blocks in the East Bay, read this book and go out and play! Now.

Preschool Readiness

I was watching an episode of the offbeat comedy Portlandia last night and it showed an intense couple preparing their 4-year-old for preschool.  They had made up graphs to show their little boy how he needed to get into a private preschool otherwise his future was doomed to Community College and poor jobs for the rest of his life.  I was rolling with laughter when I watched this, but also a bit sad because I know some parents (though they won't admit it) actually feel this way.

I wanted to remind you to check out the Alliance for Childhood.  They post articles like, "Preschool Tests Take Time Away From Play" and many other child advocacy articles and resources.

This is the Alliance for Childhood poster that hangs in my office:

Childhood

Childhood is a time for learning about the essentials—

about the heavenly world and the earthly,

about goodness, beauty, and truth.

Childhood is a time to be loved and to love,

to express fear and to learn trust,

to be serious, to be calm,

and to celebrate with laughter and joy.

Children have the right to dream,

and to grow at their own pace.

They have the right to make mistakes,

and the right to be forgiven.

Children have the right to be spared violence and hunger,

to have a home and protection.

They need support for growing up healthy,

with good habits and sound nutrition.

Children need people to respect,

adults whose example and loving authority they follow.

They need a range of experience—tenderness and kindness,

boldness and courage, even mischief and misbehavior.

Children need a loving relationship with the earth—

with animals and with nature,

with families and community.

Children need moments for reflection and space for curiosity,

protective boundaries and freedom to create,

and time to play, to work, to rest.

Children need to be introduced to a life of principles,

and given the freedom to discover their own.

The spirit of childhood calls for protection and nurture.

It is an essential part of every human being

and needs to be kept alive.

The Importance of Play

Here are 3 paragraphs from a recent New York Times article called “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?” By PAUL TOUGH

To read the whole article, go here.

Kindergarten:

“Kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress,” warned a report released in March by a research group called the Alliance for Childhood, which is advised by some of the country’s most esteemed progressive-education scholars. There is now too much testing and too little free time, the report argues, and kids are being forced to try to read before they are ready. The solution, according to the report’s authors, is a return to ample doses of “unstructured play” in kindergarten. If kids are allowed to develop at their own paces, they will be happier and healthier and less stressed out. And there will still be plenty of time later on to learn how to read.

Check out The Alliance for Childhood and their recent report called Crisis in the Kindergarten. I once visited a Waldorf kindergarten and was so impressed at the simplicity of their kindergarten routines. The children were self-motivated, engaged, busy, exploring and happy. None of them were supposed to learn to read by the end of the year. Their day wasn’t divided into separate chunks of time for learning different subjects. They were baking, singing, chatting, playing make believe and fort building all day long. It was so soothing and refreshing and it felt so unhurried and developmentally appropriate.

Rewards and punishments:

In the past, when psychologists (or parents or teachers or priests) tried to improve children’s self-control, they used the principles of behaviorism, reinforcing good and bad behaviors with rewards and punishments. The message to kids was that terrible things would happen if they didn’t control their impulses, and the role of adults, whether parents or preschool teachers, was to train children by praising them for their positive self-control (“Look at how well Cindy is sitting!”) and criticizing them for their lapses. And in most American pre-kindergartens and kindergartens, behaviorism, in some form, is still the dominant method. But Bodrova and Leong say that those “external reinforcement systems” create “other-directed regulation” — good behavior done not from some internal sense of control but for the approval of others, to avoid punishment and win praise and treats. And that, they say, is a kind of regulation that is not particularly valuable or lasting. Children learn only how to be obedient, how to follow orders, not how to understand and regulate their own impulses.

Alfie Kohn writes and lectures on rewards and punishments for both teachers and parents. Check out his books Punished by Rewards and Unconditional Parenting. I feel like there is too much rewarding done in classrooms across America. Children need to do something for the sake of doing it, not because they will get an extrinsic reward for completing a task. Only then will true motivation take place. Please, let’s stop the carrot and stick mentality! It’s so superficial and insulting to a student’s intelligence and ability.

Play vs. Work:

Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. “We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do,” she explained. “Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”

Yes, why can’t play and work be fun? If school were more like summer camp and enrichment programs then students would have fun and enjoy working on their goals. Why do we separate school from fun? Why do most children remember field trips, friends and extra-curriculars fondly when they reminisce about school instead of remembering the subject matter they were supposed to have learned? We need to find students’ passions to help them learn what is engaging and give them a reason to work toward a goal. We need to stop telling them what their goals should be, but instead help them explore what it is that is both fun and work at the same time. Isn’t that the adult mantra -- love what you do, do what you love?

Unplug and Play

I recently received information from the Alliance for Childhood about a month-long play day campaign in the Bay Area to promote unstructured play and time in nature for children and adults. The campaign is called “Let’s Play Outside” and you can link to it here. Isn’t it sad that we are so busy we have to be reminded by an organization to set aside unstructured time to just get outside and play? Yikes! I’m glad they are promoting this campaign, and I completely support them, but I’m also very sad at the same time that it’s come to this in our busy, technology driven lives.

In 2001 my friend Jamie and I spearheaded a playground project in our neighborhood. We (along with help from many other neighbors and friends) convinced our homeowners association to tear down three unsafe, outdated structures and replace them with new ones. At the time my boys were 5 and 7 years old and still very interested in playgrounds, so I was highly invested in this project. The new parks were built with a whole crew of neighborhood volunteers, saving us over $15,000 in installation and demolition expenses, and I’m still thankful today to all who helped with the project.

Eight years later the parks still look great and are being used. (See above photo of one of them.) Every time I walk my dog by one of the parks I have to smile and think how great it was that our neighbors pulled together to make these parks a reality. My only regret is that the parks are not used often enough. More kids should be playing in them and in the surrounding fields more often.

I do have one more regret. When I see parents and caregivers talking on their cell phones instead of playing with their kids in the parks, I get irritated. And, it saddens me that thousands of babies and toddlers are being pushed in strollers every day while parents and babysitters are talking to someone else on their phones. I used to talk about the big trucks or barking dogs with my boys when they were in strollers and try to have little conversations with them about whatever we’d see on our walks. I hope there are still parents and caregivers out there doing that today.

I now have teenagers and often they like to be plugged in to music or movies or computers. It’s an almost daily conversation we have about unplugging and reducing “screen” time. I’m glad I had all those years with them before I even had a cell phone to really be present with them. I think it will be an even bigger struggle for new parents now to authentically communicate with their teens if they are regularly plugged in when their children are little.

Anyone have any other thoughts on technology and unstructured play?