Too Little Play Negatively Affects Young Children

02/14/2022

Too Little Play Negatively Affects Young Children

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
Maya Angelou

“A state-funded pre-K program led to ‘significantly negative effects’ for kids in Tennessee,” proclaims an article in the online Hechinger Report. The study, which has been getting a lot of media attention lately, found that “children who attended Tennessee’s state-funded voluntary pre-K program during the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years were doing worse than their peers by the end of sixth grade in academic achievement, discipline issues and special education referrals. The trend emerged by the end of third grade and was even more pronounced three years later.”

The Hechinger Report describes a conversation with Vanderbilt University’s Dale Farran, who talks about the significance of the study:

“The negative outcomes in Tennessee’s voluntary pre-K program suggest a need to rethink pre-K, Farran said. The lackluster results may be related to the way America approaches pre-K and educating young children. Ideally, she said, pre-K should involve more play, with teachers frequently interacting with students and encouraging them to explore their interests. Based on years of observation and visits to classrooms, however, she worries that pre-K involves too much whole-group instruction, rigid behavioral controls, not enough time spent outside and too much time in which teachers are speaking, instead of listening to children.”

An article by Nancy Carlsson-Paige in the Exchange Essentials article collection, “Advocating for Play,” describes how “the focus on academic skills and scripted teaching, alarmingly, has pushed down even to preschools and kindergartens where play experiences are disappearing…We educators have an important role to play in taking back healthy play for children today.”

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