In "All Work & No Play" author Esther Entin verifies how children's free time is continually decreasing and is keeping them from turning into confident adults.
One example that supports my answer is when peter Gray states, "In another study, mothers were asked to compare their own memories of their playtime, to their children's current schedule. Eighty-five percent noted that their children played outdoors less frequently and for shorter periods of time than they had. The mothers noted that they restricted their own children's outdoor play because of safety concerns, a fact echoed in other surveys where parents mentioned child predators, road traffic, and bullies as reasons for restricting their children's outdoor play.
Another example that supports my answer is when Gray announces, "There has been a significant increase in anxiety and depression from 1950 to present day in teens and young adults, and several studies documenting this rise. One showed that five to eight times as many children and college students reported clinically significant depression or anxiety than 50 years ago and another documented a similar trend in the fourteen to sixteen year old age group between 1948 to 1989.
I found this article very interesting because many parents today feel as though they can live the life they wanted as children through their kids. Many adults try to force their kids to do something only they wanted to do and make them do certain things that they couldn't do when they were younger.
Although, author Peter Gray states a very important fact that I believe should be read multiple times over and over.
"Suicide rates quadrupled from 1950 to 2005 for children less than fifteen years and for teens and young adults ages 15-25, they doubled. I believe that the loss of unstructured, free play for play's sake is at the core of this alarming observation and that as a society, we shoud reassess the role of free play and the factors that seem to have all but eliminated it from our children's lives."
This statement stood out to me because it shows that Gray isn't afraid to speak his mind and stand up against parents taking away their children's free time.
I also thought this article was very interestign because it was compared tro my life as a child also.
Although not including the depression but my parents used to watch me as I played on the playground, but they constantly told me what I could and couldn't do at that matter of time.
However, until this day my mom still tells me about what she couldn't do when she was younger and she refuses to let me do certain things that I want to do because she couldn't do it.
