Go Play!

This weekend, I found myself behind our school on a Saturday evening at a little community event. It was one of those beautiful fall nights where the weather was perfect, the sun was starting to set, and kids were just everywhere playing. They were running around, making up games, laughing, chasing each other, falling down, getting back up, and becoming best friends with another kid for twenty minutes.

Standing there watching it, my heart felt huge. I spend a lot of my life around kids, so obviously I see kids play all the time, but there was something different about watching it outside of the structure of a school day. There was no bell coming, nobody was trying to squeeze in one more lesson, and nobody cared if what they were doing was productive. They were just playing, and it reminded me that play is not what kids do when the important stuff is finished. Play is important stuff.

When kids make up a game, change the rules, disagree, compromise, lose, try again, and figure out how to keep playing together, they are practicing problem-solving, communication, flexibility, self-control, creativity, and how to handle frustration. A huge amount of social and emotional learning happens in moments that, from the outside, just look like kids messing around.

And honestly, I don't think we outgrow the need for that. Adults just stop calling it play. We call it hiking, playing music, cooking, skiing, games, hobbies, laughing with friends, throwing a ball around, or doing something ridiculous simply because it is fun. Somewhere along the way, though, we get very serious, and even our hobbies can become things we are supposed to improve at, track, optimize, or be good at.

Saturday night was a nice reminder that not everything has to accomplish something. The sun was going down, kids were running everywhere, people were laughing, and I kept thinking how good it felt to just be part of it and watch it happen.

So this week's Sunday Scaries assignment is simple: go play. Let your kids play, and find something this week that you do for no reason other than it makes you happy. Maybe play is not the opposite of all the serious things in life. Maybe it is one of the things that makes all the serious stuff worth it.