Let Your Kids Have Some FUN!

Consider the word FUN. Overly concerned with development, parents are sucking all the fun out of childhood. They say manners are fun! Brushing your teeth is fun! Homework is fun! And activities that used to be genuinely fun—building forts, horseplay, and puddle-jumping get described as “good for you” or educational. And activities as simple as pretending are now being observed and analyzed. Is my child playing house as well as other children?

But parents can hardly be to blame for this over-analysis of childhood when institutions like the Association for Psychological Science and the American Society of Pediatrics releasing studies on simple childhood behaviors such as horseplay.

Do institutions really need to study such a thing? Don’t we intrinsically know that horseplay is good for kids? Do we need formal research to prove it?

Do you remember roughhousing as a kid? Do you remember how much fun it was (except for that one time you accidentally hit your head off the coffee table?)

Why do we have to examine every behavior as beneficial to our child’s development or as advantageous to his or her future? And why do we even try to hold childhood up to this impossible standard? Yes school and schoolwork is serious business, but we’re talking play here.