Lack of Free Play in Today's World

An observation of current parent/child relationships is the trend for parents to be extremely protective of their children when it comes to allowing them unsupervised free play. This paper investigates research literature about children not having the opportunity for as much unsupervised free play and how this might be impacting their psychological, social, and/or cognitive development. This paper explores this topic in more depth by reviewing a number of peer reviewed scholarly articles and their findings.

For the purposes of this paper, “free play” is broadly defined to include all types from pretend play to unsupervised physical activity. Brussoni, Pike, & Sleet (2012) define free play as the broader physical activity category which includes object play (i.e. with toys), pretend play (i.e. acting out parts, socio-dramatic), and risky play where the activity is defined as “thrilling and exciting” with some risk of injury.

The narrowest form of free play that has no physical parameters is pretend play. (Lillard et al., 2013) reviews the claim that children’s (age 3 -5) participation in activities where they share some alternative reality amongst themselves, might lead to some additional cognitive developmental benefits. This robust study systematically dissects this claim by locating references supporting claims of pretend play’s benefits, and subsequently investigating whether this research supports pretend play affecting their six main topics concerning nonsocial cognitive skills. These include creativity, intelligence, problem solving, reasoning, social cognition, social skills, language, executive function and emotion regulation and were compared against the relationships and positive developmental outcomes of P.K. Smith (2010), who believed that pretend play was somewhat facilitative to the developmental role or what he calls “equifinality.”. Vygotsky’s (1978) stance was that pretend play was “crucial” to development. Piaget (1962) rated pretend...