Rethinking Recess: Helping Kids Build Their Future, One Brick at a Time

Homework. Extracurriculars. Standardized tests. It’s easy to see how the youngest among us can become the most overburdened. The lack of downtime to balance out those responsibilities can create a domino effect that breaks down kids’ mental and physical health and leads to burnout, even among elementary school students.

Although the benefits of recess and play in learning are quite difficult to quantify due to other factors, such as disparities in socioeconomic status and access for children with disabilities, the research largely shows that breaking up the day between instruction and play sets up students for success.  

The fact that researchers have devoted years of study to the importance of recess and play in learning is, on its own, evidence of how vital these opportunities are to child development.

The Missing Bricks in Childhood

Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has dedicated his career not only to emphasizing the importance of play but also to highlighting the sometimes tragic consequences if play is suppressed. Brown was a member of the “Tower Commission,” and one of his earliest research projects as an assistant professor of psychiatry was delving into the life of Charles Whitman, who committed the largest mass murder in U.S. history: the 1966 tower shooting at the University of Texas at Austin. In his research into Whitman’s life and those of other males incarcerated for homicide, Brown examined the consequences of suppressed play—not focusing solely on the traumatic events experienced by those he researched, but how the absence of crucial life experiences also shaped them.

Does this apply to every adult deprived of the ability to play as a child? Of course not—but it shines a light on the very real consequences of not allowing children the opportunities and experiences they need to develop into healthy, well-adjusted adults.

Deprivation of play might not always be so malicious as to come at the hands of an overbearing or abusive authority figure, but perhaps it also can come at the hands of an overzealous education system that treats the children within it as numbers rather than people.

From Bricks to Blueprints

As ATPE Engagement & Learning Specialist Andrea Hutlock writes in this issue’s Teacher Down the Hall column, when we reclaim fun, we reclaim what learning was always meant to be. Some of the fondest memories and the most valuable life lessons can stem from incorporating play into the classroom. When “fun” is destigmatized and even embraced, it becomes clear that it’s not a distraction from learning but rather a learning experience in and of itself. When kids are allowed to be kids, they can see where creativity takes them. They can think for themselves and play the way they want to, even if it means making mistakes or losing at a game—because even experiences that seem negative in the moment build the resilience they need to thrive in the real world.

Today’s education climate threatens this by emphasizing metrics over movement and production over play, leading to stifled creativity and lost opportunities to inspire ingenuity and innovation in the youngest minds. When kids aren’t allowed to be kids, they miss out on building crucial life skills that equip them for adulthood, such as problem-solving, conflict resolution, and leadership.

The constraints of time, curriculum, and the pressure to adhere to ever-changing guidelines and policies in the classroom threaten to create a culture more reminiscent of a prison, where the day is decided down to the minute.

But can success be quantified in these conditions? Although data points such as test scores and attendance and graduation rates can paint a bigger picture of a school’s success, how do they stack up when talking about an individual student?

LiiNK (Let’s inspire innovation ‘N Kids) is a whole child school intervention project launched by Texas Christian University (TCU). LiiNK is dedicated to developing recess strategies for students and shifting the focus from standardized test scores to the whole child. Dr. Deborah J. Rhea, LiiNK Project Director and Professor of Kinesiology at TCU, says: “Standardized tests contribute to a large majority of children exhibiting chronic stress and burnout by third grade.”

Through the LiiNK Project, which implements four 15-minute outdoor, unstructured play breaks throughout the day in participating schools, students experience a 40% reduction in off-task behavior and a 70% decline in chronic stress among students in grades three through five.

Access to recess, along with other enrichment activities in the classroom, offer cognitive and social benefits that can’t be achieved by the rote memorization often required to perform on a standardized test. The LiiNK Project found that incorporating these breaks into the day yielded a 10% and 7% increase in math and reading scores, respectively, on standardized tests by fourth grade.