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At about 10 am local time on school playgrounds across the United States, kids are climbing on jungle gyms and whooshing down slides. They’re playing bandage tag or foursquare. They’re walking around the track, quietly catching up with their friends.
Those are the lucky ones. Recess, experts agree, is one of the most crucial parts of a child’s school day.
“When kids get to play, and especially outside, they get to feel joy, they get to feel connection, they get to feel like they belong at school,” Elizabeth Cushing, CEO of the nonprofit Playworks, told me. “That’s the kind of experience we all want for them.”
But parents and advocates around the country say that, too often, kids are now spending recess in their classrooms, where they don’t get the full benefits that outdoor play can provide.
In Western states, extreme heat is increasingly keeping kids indoors, said Allison Poulos, a professor at Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions. In one study conducted from July to September — the hottest months of the year in Arizona — her team found that kids were inside for recess about 40 percent of the time.
In colder areas, a variety of factors are at play. “We’ve heard a principal say he didn’t want the kids messing up the playground,” said Shanée Garner, executive director of Lift Every Voice Philly, a parent organizing group. “We’ve heard some folks say there’s no staffing. We’ve heard other folks say that the kids don’t get along with each other.”
When kids have recess inside instead of on the playground, they’re typically sedentary and often watching a movie, experts told me. In the Arizona study, kids who had recess in their classrooms were less ready to learn when lessons resumed than kids who actually got to play outside.
Now, families around the country are pushing for more outdoor time, and researchers are exploring ways that schools can get kids outside — or at least get them more active indoors — as the climate changes. These changes are necessary, advocates say, because without play, kids can’t learn.
“Recess is a very important period and time for children’s growth and development,” Poulos told me. “We have to be thinking of this and taking this seriously.”
Why kids aren’t getting outside
Recess isn’t just a break from class; it’s also a time when kids practice the social and emotional skills they’ll need throughout their lives. During play, kids learn “how to collaborate, how to communicate, how to resolve conflict,” said Rebecca London, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has worked on recess research. They also learn emotion regulation: “If I lose a game, can I keep it together and keep playing?”
Free play is critical to children’s development, and for some kids, recess is “the only unstructured play they have any time in their day,” London said.
Recess in general suffered after the introduction of high-stakes testing with No Child Left Behind in 2001, as educators came to believe that kids needed as much instructional time as possible to increase test scores, London said. Average weekly recess time declined by 60 minutes between 2001 and 2019 to just 25 minutes a day.
A few states, like California, have passed laws setting a minimum amount of recess time for kids, but they don’t necessarily require that time to be spent outside. Meanwhile, as extreme heat becomes ever more common as a result of climate change, kids around the country are routinely facing temperatures over 100 degrees at recess time. Moreover, many playgrounds are exceptionally bad places to be when it’s very hot out; they often have minimal tree coverage and are made of materials like blacktop that can become dangerously hot to play on, Poulos said.
In many parts of the US, poor air quality from wildfires is also becoming an issue. In California, “there could be days or even weeks where kids cannot be outside because the air quality is so bad,” London said.
Unlike summer heat, winter temperatures are getting milder across much of the US. However, severe storms and unusual cold snaps are becoming more common, potentially disrupting kids’ outdoor time.
Temperature thresholds for outdoor recess vary from district to district, and it’s sometimes left up to individual school administrators to decide how cold is too cold. “I’ve been to places where the cutoff is 35 degrees, and I’ve been to places where the cutoff is 10 degrees,” London said.
Parents at some schools have complained that, even on mild winter days, kids aren’t getting outside. “There are constant excuses, whether it is too wet or students don’t have the right clothes,” one mom said during a school board meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts, last March.
Beyond the weather, schools sometimes struggle to recruit or train enough aides to supervise kids outside. Recess and lunch monitors “are some of the lowest paid folks in the entire school district,” Garner said.
Often, “the adults who are in charge of recess are not given any training, any support,” Cushing said. When recess monitors aren’t trained in conflict resolution and facilitating play, fights become more common, and schools may keep kids inside to limit the chaos.
But the lack of training and attention for recess staff is a symptom of a larger deprioritization of children’s fun and autonomy, some say. Schools have lost “an understanding that kids are going to play,” Garner said. Instead, “kids are expected to be managed.”
How to bring back recess
When kids are inside, that play is dramatically limited, experts say. Most elementary schools don’t have a gym, Poulos told me. Instead, they’re usually in their classrooms, where they miss out on movement, the chance to socialize with kids who aren’t in their class, and the opportunity to choose where they go and what they do.
“Indoor recess is not the same as outdoor recess,” London said.
Around the country, children in lower-income areas, cities, and districts that serve a higher percentage of families of color have less access to outdoor recess than their counterparts in more affluent, suburban, or predominantly white areas, London said. One 2019 investigation of Seattle public schools by KUOW came to a stark conclusion: “White kids typically get more recess. Black kids get less.”
But, advocates and researchers are working to make outdoor recess — or at least a reasonably active alternative — available to all kids. Some schools in colder areas have large shelters on their playgrounds to protect kids from rain, London said. Such shelters could also be constructed in hotter climates to provide shade.
Arizona State University has partnered with the city of Tempe and other groups to plant trees in schoolyards. Meanwhile, some schools are removing blacktop and replacing it with native plants or other ground cover. And if recess has to be indoors, principals have given students a bit more flexibility by designating certain classrooms for certain activities and allowing students to move between them, Poulos said.
Beyond facilities improvements, simple training for recess monitors can help reduce fights, Cushing said. Even something like having monitors use rock, paper, scissors to resolve disputes can help cut down on conflict.
When school leaders see the benefits of a well-run recess, including students who transition more quickly back to class, “they’re more likely to accept the drizzle,” Cushing said.
Others are pushing for policy change at the district level. In Philadelphia, Lift Every Voice has called for an end to 12 damaging practices in schools, including withholding recess.
For Garner, the issue is simple: “Kids are kids, and they should be treated like human beings, not like bots.”
What I’m reading
Officials in Los Angeles say families’ fear of ICE raids is discouraging them from enrolling their children in school, contributing to a significant enrollment drop in the district.
The first year of the Trump administration has been devastating for education research, Jill Barshay writes for the Hechinger Report: “Rebuilding confidence in federal data — and recovering the institutional knowledge lost in a single chaotic year — will take far longer than the dismantling.”
The Easy-Bake Oven is back, apparently.
My little kid has been enjoying Ada Twist, Scientist, about a family coming to terms with their daughter’s passion for scientific exploration (which initially manifests as a desire to climb furniture and conduct experiments on the cat).
From my inbox
How do the kids in your life feel about recess? Do they wish it was longer? Do they get to play outside? Why is recess important to them? And what are your memories of recess as a kid? Let me know at anna.north@vox.com.
