Why are kids on their phones and tablets all the time? How could we stop this?
Easy, you let them have unstructured playtime, that’s it, that’s how you do it.
When I stayed with my cousin for the holidays, I noticed that my nephew used Minecraft as an unstructured play environment. He would basically just run around with his friends and do dumb shit and make up games etc.
Obviously this is worse in a lot of ways to in person unstructured play as you can’t run around together and move and touch, but there’s a lot of benefits compared to the logistics of having to get everyone together as well
I imagine that some of this replacement of offline unstructured play would be happening regardless of whether it was made harder to meet in person in the ways mentioned here, but that it being harder is driving kids towards online unstructured play even more.
When I stayed with my cousin for the holidays, I noticed that my nephew used Minecraft as an unstructured play environment. He would basically just run around with his friends and do dumb shit and make up games etc.
Obviously this is worse in a lot of ways to in person unstructured play as you can’t run around together and move and touch, but there’s a lot of benefits compared to the logistics of having to get everyone together as well
I imagine that some of this replacement of offline unstructured play would be happening regardless of whether it was made harder to meet in person in the ways mentioned here, but that it being harder is driving kids towards online unstructured play even more.