Support Play for Our Kids!

If you want your child to do well in life, the most important thing you can do as a parent may to be to play with them. As Stuart Brown notes in his recent book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, play is essential to the physical, social and emotional development of kids and parents have a huge role in making sure that kids experience safe and healthy play.

There are many things you can do to support recess at your schools. Here are just a few:

• Learn what you can do to keep recess thriving
• Keep updated on new activities and opportunities at Playworks
• Learn more about Playworks Training and how it can help your school
• Is Playworks in your city? Want to help bring it there? Here's where we are.
• Learn about opportunities to volunteer with Playworks.
• Do you want to help bring play to more kids? You can get in the game.

Research by Dr. Ramona Barros published in the journal Pediatrics found that kids who get more than 15 minutes of recess a day show better behavior in class than those who have little or none. The problem is that most grown-ups, even the ones who work in our schools, are often not focused on how to make recess fun and playful for kids. In some schools, recess is a free-for-all. Games break down before they get going. Inevitably arguments breakout because kids don’t know the rules. Meanwhile, kids just stand around on the sidelines unengaged and too intimidated to play.

Recess can be so much more. At Playworks we have seen countless schools make the most of their recess by having a single trained adult on the playground. That’s why parents should grab a kickball and head out to the school playground as a volunteer coach.