The Benefits of Play: Interview with MomsWhoThink.com

The way you spend your childhood matters. Some have the opportunity to explore, digging ditches, playing with worms, jumping off retaining walls, and, invariably getting hurt. The luckiest of these have parents that don’t just go along for the ride, but are riding along with them – getting excited about how deep the ditch is, flipping over rocks to find more worms, catching them as they jump, and cleaning up injuries to send them back out again.

The benefits of that kind of free play are easy to forget. Kids are naturally drawn to dangerous situations and try to find that sweet-spot between too-dangerous and exhilarating. This is why kids all over the world jump down stairs, go sledding, and slide on smooth surfaces in their socks. When they have the opportunity to explore these limits, kids grow confident that they can handle what the world throws at them. This is especially true when they get hurt. When kids get hurt, which they all do, many parents take the opportunity to scold them for running, or make it into a teaching moment and instruct them how bad it could have been. Other parents will clean the wound,  slap a band-aid on, and send their kid right back outside. The message that is sent is: you’re fine, I am here to take care of you but you can handle whatever life throws at you. Kids that don’t get to feel that can become anxious about the world, scared that the next risk might bring consequences they cannot deal with.

Maureen Wilkey of MomsWhoThink.com reached out to Madison Park’s founder and clinical director, Jordan Conrad, PhD, LCSW, to find out what is so essential about play for her article "The Unexpected Benefits of A Backyard Tree Fort". Play, and free play especially, offers kids the opportunity to make their own rules, enforce them, and negotiate disputes between each other: “That is something that has been lost in the digital age, where kids largely communicate by text (not in real-time) and where parents intervene to resolve almost every problem”

When kids are inside any building really, they are confined by the rules adults set up. But, he explains “When you are outside, those rules don't really apply. Parents don't tell you to stop running around, or that you are going to break something. They don't tell you to stop playing with that stick, or that you're laughing too much. Outside is a kid's space”

Wilkey asks Dr. Conrad about treehouses in particular. He explains that treehouses are excellent opportunities for children to feel a sense of control of their own space: “even if your treehouse doesn't have a door, or even a roof, having it be outside gives your child a sense that it is really for them — that they make the rules.” Having that space to feel autonomous can be a bigger thing than people realize.