“The ability for kids to adapt and have fun … we just mess it up a lot of time.”
The words are from Jeff Francoeur, a former standout major league outfielder. He is now a youth sports podcaster and a father to school-aged kids who play organized sports.
‘Kids don’t play pickup games in the backyard anymore,” he told USA TODAY Sports during an October interview. “That’s where you would dream, right? You’d be out there with your buddies: ‘This is game seven of the World Series.”
Today, a kid’s reverie is likely to be interrupted by a coach urging him or her onto the next drill during practice.
We don’t mess it up on Thanksgiving, though. Families and friends traditionally get together for friendly — and sometimes super competitive — touch football games before turkey. It’s one day a year when we haven’t forgotten the concept of free play for our kids.
Francoeur suggested parents and youth coaches need to emphasize that type of free play more often. He even suggested working it into formal practices.
“Instead of having an organized baseball practice every night,” he told me, ‘on a Wednesday why don’t you let the neighborhood kids get together to play a pickup basketball game? Play something (where) they can imagine things.”
I wrote last week about how American kids scored a D- for overall physical activity on the 2024 United States Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth. More specifically, just 20-28% of kids ages 6 to 17 meet the 60 minutes of daily physical activity guideline set by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
A lack of free play is a contributor, especially for teenagers who are forced out of the ultracompetitive world of youth sports. Free play can be meeting your friends for a workout at the gym, or at the basketball court or the pickleball court. It’s not something done while sitting in front of phones or in school for long periods of time.
As the holidays arrive, with calorie counts and distractions rising faster than our rates of physical activity, remember the importance of free play for athletic and emotional health.
Here are four ways to bring back free play for kids, and for adults, no matter their sports skills.
1. Start a holiday tradition
If you organize a game, they will come. Encourage them to keep playing.
The ‘Turkey Bowl’ is an annual tradition in our neighborhood park. According to unofficial calculations, we have been playing the touch football game for 22 years.
We play parents vs. kids. Like Cal Ripken was with his son, we don’t let them win.
Winning, of course, no matter how much parents deny it, is not the point. We play because it’s fun and it’s tradition, the way sports should be.
Exercise can be “Miracle-Grow for the brain,’ Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey wrote in his book “Spark,” which details how fitness activities stimulate us intellectually.
It is especially enjoyable when they involve our friends. Sometimes we don’t even think about the fitness benefits – or even that we’re tired – when running or playing alongside them.
Organize your Thanksgiving morning to include free play: football, a hike or pickup basketball. Do it again on Christmas and New Year’s. Cheer for everyone. It’s amazing how different that might feel when you’re not worried about your kid’s batting average.
A morning game can help you feel less sluggish later in the day. Maybe the holiday game becomes Thanksgiving dinner conversation, and it fills further meals with discussions and ideas for your kids.
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2. Keep them moving in the classroom
When I wrote about the D- kids received in physical activity, and the opportunity if offered sports parents to take stock in our roles, I heard from a teacher in Maryland.
“In my experience, we ask children from kindergarten onward, to spend the majority of their day sitting still,” says Alissa Casey, who works primarily with third through fifth graders. “In my school system, most children in elementary school get a half hour of recess each day (although part of that time is eaten up in the transitions from lunchroom and classroom) and one 50-minute PE class week.
“If we rely on out-of-school time for physical movement and exercise, we’re asking a lot. Kids spend a lot of time in school and not a lot of that time moving around.”
Casey was looking for insight about how much physical activity other children get within the school day.
Ayanna McKnight, director of operations for the Physical Activity Alliance (PAA), told me states have varying requirements for physical education. She also says organizations such as SHAPE America, Active Schools, and Active Kids Active Minds lead the way in advocating for physical activity before, during and after school.
If you’re a teacher, talk to your administrators about allowing physical activity breaks in your classroom. Jordan Carlson, the committee chair of the physical activity report card, says teachers are finding short physical activity bursts help with on-task behavior.
“Sometimes teachers think it’s going to be disruptive, and then when they do them, they see that it’s very beneficial,” says Carlson, a professor of pediatrics at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “There’s been some evidence with studies with brain scans that have shown better learning, better functioning and more active brains and things like that, with just two minutes, five minutes periodically as a way to re-energize students in a positive way that facilitates learning.”
Try an activity where you don’t need a big space. Have kids march in place or (safely) move their arms and feet to music or instruction. GoNoodle has some suggestions.
3. Make devices a part of active free play
The physical activity report card was littered with Cs and Ds in a number of categories. A major contributor to the D- that kids received in ‘sedentary behavior’ was too much screen time.
“Over the last decade, there’s been a dramatic shift in more kids not meeting screen time guidelines of no more than 2 hours/day,” says Amanda Staiano, who co-authored the section in report.
She is the director of the pediatric obesity and health behavior laboratory at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University. According to nationally representative data, one in five children in the United States is obese, diagnosed when a person’s weight is higher than the healthy range for his or her age, sex, and height.
Staiano says less than an 85th percentile for Body Mass Index is considered healthy weight; 85th up to 95th is overweight; and 95th and above is obesity. High amounts of sedentary behavior increases several health risks, including obesity.
“Kids above the age of 4 should limit screen time as much as possible — international guidelines recommend no more than two hours per day on non-school screen time,” Staiano says. “We know very few kids are meeting these guidelines; some data show more 7-8 hours of screen time on average per day.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics has a link to create your own Family Media Plan. Encourage your family to charge tablets overnight in the living room, not the bedroom, and to put phones away when you eat. But during those dinner conversations, communicate to your kids kids that taking devices away is not a punishment.
Instead, tell them screens have a place when playing video games that require body movement. Phones have a place when we need to communicate with one another or to create competitions for the most steps in a day.
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4. Allow them to dream
Dreaming keeps kids playing sports.
Francouer, who is also a major league broadcaster, spoke to Yankees manager Aaron Boone this past postseason about Boone’s ALCS-winning home run for New York against the Boston Red Sox in 2003. It’s what Boone dreamed about doing as a kid.
I loved baseball when I was young, too, and playing in the yard spurred similar thoughts. But on frigid or rainy days when I was cooped up inside, I also dreamed of throwing touchdown passes to my friends when the weather cleared up.
Kids are too structured today, a major factor in the D- physical activity grade. Even if we are old enough to specialize in a sport, though, we are never too busy to dream.
The AAP recommends kids take one day of rest per week and two to three months off from participation in any specific sport. The months don’t have to be consecutive.
Fill their time away from their formal sports with free play. If it’s convenient, start with Thanksgiving.
I have been the organizer of our neighborhood ‘Turkey Bowl’ for about 10 years. We started out mixing up parents and children, making sure the kids got the ball most of the time. The game has evolved (or perhaps devolved, judging from some occasional trash talk) into parents vs. kids.
Under my watch, the kids still haven’t beaten us.
Our time is coming, of course. My oldest son is a baseball player who is up to 180 pounds and my younger son weighs 155 and is coming off a season of freshman football. The neighborhood is now full of high school and college kids.
One of these years, they’re gonna get us. Well, at least they can dream about it.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.