Big Kids Need Play Too: Nobody Decided Play Ends at Ten, It Just Got Replaced
Walk into a high school lunchroom at 11:40 on a Tuesday and it is quieter than a library.
I did it for eleven years. Three hundred teenagers, shoulder to shoulder at long tables, and almost nobody talking, because almost everybody was looking down. The room that in every movie about high school is the loud one, the one where things happen, had gone silent, and it had happened over about five years while the adults in the building called it progress. I’d watch kids leave that room and walk into a wall, actually into a wall, because their eyes hadn’t come up yet.
Those kids were not done playing. Nobody is done playing at fifteen. What had happened was that the thing play used to fill got filled with something else, and the something else was engineered to fill it better, and the kids didn’t have a chance.
At what age do kids stop playing?
They don’t, or they shouldn’t, and the real range for “outgrowing toys” is wide and personal. What changes is the form. A four-year-old plays with a stick and a puddle. A nine-year-old plays a game she made up with two friends and a set of rules that take longer to explain than to play. A thirteen-year-old plays by building something, skating something, filming something, arguing about something, wandering somewhere with no adult and no plan. Peter Gray, the psychologist who has written most carefully about this, defines play by how it’s done rather than what it is: chosen by the kid, directed by the kid, done for its own sake, with room to imagine and change the rules. By that definition a sixteen-year-old in a garage with a broken bike and a friend is playing, and a six-year-old on a tablet in the back seat is not.
So the question isn’t when play ends. It’s what’s still allowed to count, and by ten most kids have been taught that what counts is a screen.
What actually replaced it
The Common Sense Census, which surveys American kids about their media use every couple of years, found that in 2021 tweens aged eight to twelve were spending five hours and thirty-three minutes a day on screen media for entertainment, and teens were at eight hours and thirty-nine minutes. Not school. Not homework. Entertainment. Both numbers had jumped 17 percent in two years. Add a seven-hour school day and whatever sleep is left, and there are no hours in a tween’s day where free play could happen even if she wanted it to. The hours are spoken for.
Gray’s own argument, in the American Journal of Play and then in Free to Learn, is that children’s free play has been declining in the United States for more than half a century and that the decline tracks almost exactly with the rise in anxiety, depression and helplessness in kids. I agree with him about all of that, completely. Where I part ways with him, and I’ve said this to him directly, is on what did the displacing. He doesn’t think screens are much of the story. I taught the lunchroom. I think they are most of it, for this age group, in this decade, and I don’t think you need a study to see it if you’ve stood in that room.
What I watched it become
The fifteen-year-olds in my classroom could not fill an unstructured minute. When I handed them ten minutes of open time they reached for a phone or looked at me for instructions, and the idea that they might go do something, make something, start something, was foreign. When I asked what they wanted to be, they said TikToker, YouTuber. Most of a class couldn’t name a thing they did for the pleasure of doing it that didn’t involve a screen. They weren’t broken kids; they were kids who had spent the years from about nine onward with every open hour pre-filled by a device built to fill it, and the muscle for filling it themselves had never been used.
That’s the systems layer, and the blame goes on the design. A tween’s free time got sold out from under her, by companies whose business is her attention and by a culture that decided, without ever saying so, that play is for little kids and screens are what big kids do. Nobody sat down and voted that play ends at ten. It got replaced, and the replacement is very good at its job.
What play looks like at eleven (mine)
My oldest is eleven. He has a watch that texts and calls a handful of approved contacts, no phone, no tablet, and he will not have a phone for a long time. What he has instead is time, and this is what he does with it: he climbs trees higher than I’d like, rolls down hills with his siblings, jumps off rocks, balances along branches, reads for hours, and disappears into games with the other three that I don’t understand and don’t ask about. None of that is scheduled. None of it is an activity. It is what an eleven-year-old does with an afternoon when the afternoon hasn’t been filled for him, and he is not an unusual kid. He is a kid with a gap in his day.
I say that with some care, because I know how it reads to a parent whose eleven-year-old has had a phone for two years and hasn’t climbed a tree since he was six. That kid isn’t broken. He’s been given a better toy, in the engineering sense, and he’ll pick up the worse one again when the better one isn’t there, though not on the first day and not without complaint.
When did play stop being enough?
Screens did most of the displacing for this age group, but they had help, and the help was a culture that decided childhood was something to optimize. Somewhere along the way play stopped being childhood and became something that has to justify itself. When a child climbs a tree, we wonder what they’re learning. When they build a fort, we ask whether it counts as STEM. When they pretend to run a restaurant using sticks and rocks, someone inevitably points out the executive functioning skills they’re developing. All of that may be true (play does strengthen executive function, and language, and emotional regulation, and social negotiation), but we began to treat play as something that needed a résumé, something that required explanation in order to be taken seriously.
Many of today’s parents grew up while childhood was increasingly framed as preparation for adulthood. College admissions grew more competitive, sports expanded into year-round commitments, and parenting advice became saturated with messages about maximizing potential. Which preschool? Which sport? Which instrument? Which coding camp? Even an ordinary afternoon could feel like an opportunity that might be used wisely or wasted, and so a free Saturday started to feel like something that needed to be filled. Most parents didn’t arrive there because they believed children should always be productive. They absorbed it from the systems around them, because schools emphasized measurable outcomes, social media highlighted packed schedules and visible achievements, and entire industries grew up around enrichment. No one needed to argue directly against play. It was enough for everything else to appear more valuable.
Enrichment itself isn’t the problem. Music lessons, sports, theater, robotics can all be meaningful and joyful parts of childhood, and kids often love them. The tension comes when those structured activities crowd out the kind of time that has no predefined purpose, the spaces without instructors, without rubrics, without constant adult direction.
And I think we’ve confused supervision with participation. Kids today spend more time in the presence of adults than previous generations did, but that proximity doesn’t translate into independence, because the adults organize the teams, explain the games, settle the disagreements, design the crafts, set the goals and evaluate the outcomes. Even moments labeled free play arrive with instructions attached. We’ve become highly skilled at creating activities for children and much less comfortable stepping back and letting them create their own…and that difference matters, because a child who invents a game is using a different set of abilities than one who follows rules already in place. Imagining, negotiating and adapting build something deeper than participation alone.
What to do about it
Give the time back before you give the play back. A tween can’t play in a day with no gap, so the first move is to find or make one: an afternoon a week, a Saturday morning, the hour after school. Then take the screen out of that hour, all the way out, and expect the first few weeks to be bad. She’ll be bored, she’ll be irritable, and she’ll tell you she has nothing to do. (I’ve written about what to do with that here, and about why a kid who can’t fill an hour isn’t broken here.) Hold the gap open anyway.
Then get out of the way. Play for a big kid is almost never something you set up; it’s something she finds when there’s nothing set up. Other kids help, unscheduled, in a yard or a street or a park with no adult running it. A place to make a mess helps. Materials that aren’t toys help: tools, wood, a bike that needs fixing, a kitchen she’s allowed in. And your not watching helps most of all.
And if you’re at the point where you’re deciding about a phone, know that the phone is the thing that closes the gap for good. Every kid I taught who could not fill a minute had one, and had had it since about ten. I’ve written about the tablet question here; the phone is the same question with higher stakes.
One thing
This week, find one hour in your tween’s schedule that nobody has claimed, and don’t claim it. Put the devices somewhere else and see what happens by the end of the hour. Then notice whether you can stand to do it again.
If you’ve watched your big kid’s free time disappear into a screen and started to suspect it wasn’t your kid who chose that, You’re Not Imagining It is where I’d start; it’s free. I also write every week; you can find me on Instagram or join the list.
Sources
- Common Sense Media, The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021 (released March 23, 2022). Tweens 8–12: 5:33 per day (from 4:44 in 2019); teens 13–18: 8:39 (from 7:22); 17% increase in both. Link
- Gray P, “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents,” American Journal of Play 3(4), 2011; Gray P, Free to Learn (Basic Books, 2013). Definition of play (self-chosen, self-directed, intrinsically motivated, imaginative, with rules the players can change) and the play-decline / anxiety-rise argument.
