The Future of Creativity

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“We’re engaged in a huge experiment where we’ve fundamentally changed the experience of childhood,” says Ed Miller, senior staff member for the Maryland-based Alliance for Childhood. “We don’t know what the outcome is going to be. We’re robbing kids of their birthright: the access to free, unstructured play of their own making.”

Note that Miller—who has worked as a professor, policy analyst, and editor of the Harvard Education Letter—didn’t just say “Kids are not playing like they used to.” By “free and unstructured play,” he means activity that is unencumbered by adult direction and does not depend on manufactured items or rules imposed by someone other than the kids themselves. He is referring to the kind of play that is not dependent on meddling or praise or validation from well-meaning parents on the sidelines. In fact, free and unstructured play is so encompassing for children that the entire adult world evaporates; children lose themselves in their own world completely. Most anyone who’s ever jolted a child out of this state with a call for lunch or bedtime would attest that the child’s reaction is akin to being awakened from a dream.

This type of play, both potent and transporting, has all but disappeared from contemporary childhood, Miller observes. And cognitive scientists, who investigate the basic logic that allows children to learn so much about the world so quickly, are worried. Basic logic also “allows children to envision possible future worlds, very different from the worlds we inhabit now, and to bring those worlds into being,” says Alison Gopnik, an international leader in the field of children’s learning and author of The Scientist in the Crib (Harper Paperbacks, 2000). “This ability to imagine alternative possibilities and make them real—literally to change the world—is a deeply important part of our evolutionary inheritance.”

For many children, that inheritance has been jeopardized. Certainly, kids play. Playgrounds haven’t been abandoned; toys are not obsolete. Today’s kids, though, especially middle- and upper-income children, cram a lot of activities each week in between those 40-plus screen hours, from music lessons to soccer games to science club to supervised “play dates.”

Thirty-three years ago, Roger Hart, now a professor of environmental and developmental psychology at City University of New York, studied 86 children in a rural Vermont village. “I realized nobody had really studied the natural history of kids,” he says. “We know more about the ecology of baboons than the ecology of children.”

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