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Free play is unstructured play among children without adult supervision who decide themselves how and what to play and make up the rules as they go along. Free play is crucial for child development, and promotes social skills, emotional health, resilience, cooperation, confidence, cognitive growth, and brain development.
A lack of free play has negative effects in childhood and through adolescence and beyond, but it isn't clear how serious the consequences are. Declines in unstructured outdoor play among children in the last few decades has led to concern among experts about negative physical and mental effects in many countries including increased obesity, depression, anxiety, and other issues.
Peter Gray defined free play as unstructured play among children without adult supervision "in which the players themselves decide what and how to play and are free to modify the goals and rules as they go along. Pickup baseball is free play; a Little League game is not."
Ellen Greenlaw defines it as "any type of unstructured play that is directed by the child".
Free play is play that isn’t organized or directed by adults or older peers and that generally doesn't have a defined purpose or outcome.
Free play has been termed "self-directed", as opposed to play which is guided by adults. An earlier term for this is unstructured play.
The term free play was used in its current sense in the 1967 educational film Organizing Free Play, produced by Vassar College for project Head Start (program) training programs.
Make believe, also known as "pretend play", "fantasy play" or "imaginative play", is a loosely structured form of play that generally includes role-play, object substitution, and nonliteral behavior.
The age group involved when discussing "children" is the years between about six and twelve. This the time when children, not yet affected by puberty, are involved in making friends, engaging in athletics, hobbies, and other non-sexual activities.
Friedrich Fröbel, the founder of kindergarten, also invented the Sandpit as a place to stimulate free play among children in the 1830s. He also employed free play outdoors in nature to teach children motor and creative skills. By the 1850s, sand gardens () were established in Berlin, and by 1885, reached Boston, and by 1889 a dozen other U.S. cities.
Jean Piaget analyzed play as activities engaged in for pleasure in three behavioral categories: sensorimotor (repetitive bodily interactions with an object or themself without purpose), symbolic (using one object to stand in for another), and games with rules. These develop in parallel with thought, as it passes through each of these stages in turn.
Lev Vygotsky was a Russian and Soviet psychologist, best known for his work in the 1920s on psychological development in children. In contrast to Piaget, Vygotsky focused on just one type, symbolic play. Where Piaget considered that a child had already separated referent from object (e.g., a stick that was a pretend item from the horse it represented) Vygotsky believed that it was through symbolic play that a child learned to make this separation, and in doing so, develop their faculties of abstract thought.
Vygotsky‘s work on childhood was brief, but innovative and ahead of his time. He stressed the importance of representational play (make-believe; fantasy play) that flourishes in the preschool years and that later evolves into structured play with games and rules in middle childhood. It was central to his theory, and he viewed it was a leading factor in the development of fantasy play. He saw children as advancing themselves in psychological development, using make believe as a zone of development enabling such progress. Vygotsky saw play as having two unique features: it creates an imaginary situation that allows the child to work out unrealizable desires, and there are social rules based on real-world situations that define the parameters of the imaginary scenarios constructed by the child. Thus he saw this type of play as being an imaginary situation governed by socially determined rules.
A 2009 international study reported a decline in spontaneous play in the two decades preceding the study due to multiple factors such as increased time other activities, especially with television and digital media, as well as organized sports and other extra-curricular activities, lack of nearby venues for play, and reduction of recess in school. It found that the amount of time spent on outdoor activity was being replaced by indoor activities like television, video games, and computers, and this was universal across multiple countries, whether in developed or developing countries, with the latter having the highest levels of television watching and least outdoor play.
It is a natural and critical period of child development that is crucial for developing social skills, emotional health, resiliency, stress management, cooperation, confidence, building cognitive skills, and even brain size.
A 2014 study investigated development of executive functions in children, and found that the more time children spent in unstructured activity, the better their self-directed executive functioning was. Conversely, the more time spent in structured activities, the worse it was.
It's hard to isolate playfulness from other developmental factors, so the best evidence for the benefits of play comes from its use in mental health treatments. For instance, structured play in an Indian orphanage led to major gains in motor, cognitive, and social skills despite continued deprivation in the orphanage setting.
Physically, free play contributes to motor skills, coordination, and overall health by promoting active movement.
After free play during recess at school, children pay more attention than they do following after adult-led, structured physical activity.
Research from animal studies shows that play deprivation hinders development in key areas of the prefrontal cortex. There is less data for human children because of ethics considerations, but similar effects were observed in severely maltreated children, such as those in Romanian orphanages, who showed impaired brain development and abnormal play behavior.
Studies in prisoner populations have found an overrepresentation of inmates that were deprived of free play opportunities. A commission established following the Texas tower shooting in 1966 found that the shooter's motivation was tied to a severe restriction of free play during childhood.
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