Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Kids Need Free Play

In the category of No Surprise Here, is this article from Parenting.com, Why we need to let kids be creative:

Children's free-play time in the U.S. has dropped an estimated 25 percent since 1981, according to a report published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.


"Youth-development programs and team sports are fantastic, but there needs to be a balance," says pediatrician Kenneth R. Ginsburg, M.D. "Kids without freedom to play won't find their creative selves." Free play allows the brain to leisurely meander, one of the best ways of stimulating creative thought, agrees Rex Jung, Ph.D., a clinical neuropsychologist with the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. When you take a break from gathering data, you allow the brain to loosely explore and reconfigure information -- which is why so many people have great ideas in the shower. TV and the Internet, however, interfere with this process -- and unfortunately, more than two thirds of kids under 6 spend an average of two hours a day using some form of electronic media, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. This constant bombardment, says Jung, can inhibit divergent thinking. "If you're just a sponge," Jung explains, "you may be able to regurgitate facts, but you can't combine them in novel and useful ways."

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