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The Importance of Play: Resources and Research for Parents

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Johnathan Haidt   

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. 

His second book, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff – The Coddling of The American Mind

argues that the decline of free play and unstructured time, along with the rise of social media, contribute to a generation of young people who are anxious, fearful, and less resilient, due to a culture of overprotection and “safetyism”

In his last book, The Anxious Generation, he did something that had never been done. He employed a highly collaborative process with mental health professionals, academics, and developmental specialists worldwide. Haidt, along with his lead researcher Zach Rausch and Jean Twenge, created open-source Google documents to collect and organize research on the topics of adolescent mental health trends and the impact of social media on youth mental health. These documents served as a way to keep track of the vast amount of research, especially the conflicting studies, and to invite other academics to contribute and provide feedback. It was peer-reviewed in real-time as it was being written chapter by chapter. The documents included abstracts and direct links to each study, making it easy for anyone to access and review the research literature. 

In his book “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt argues that the decline of play-based childhoods and the rise of phone-based childhoods, particularly after 2010, are major contributors to the current epidemic of adolescent mental health issues. He advocates for a return to more unstructured, real-world play and independence for children.

National Institute For Play

Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of NIFP, has dedicated much of his career to the study of human play: what it is, how it affects our health, and the devastating consequences if it is suppressed. His early scholarly research on violence, thirty-five years of clinical practice, independent scholarship, and rich relations with play scholars have convinced him that we are “built to play and built by play.”

Link: National Institute for Play

Rough-and-Tumble Play and the Regulation of Aggression: An Observational Study of Father–Child Play Dyads

Link: Rough and Tumble Play

The Relationship between Father–Child Rough-and-Tumble Play and Children’s Working Memory

Link: Rough and Tumble Play

Link: The Impact of Father-Child Play

Richard Reeves

One of the areas Reeves has highlighted in his research is the decline in boys’ participation in organized sports, while girls’ participation rates are rising.
Sports play a vital role in boys’ development. They offer opportunities for physical activity, mental well-being, and social skills, while also providing a platform for learning valuable life lessons such as teamwork, discipline, and resilience. 

Richard V. Reeves is a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Formerly, he was a senior fellow in Economic Studies, where he held the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair. His research focuses on boys and men, inequality, and social mobility. Richard’s publications for Brookings include his latest book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It” (2022) and 2017’s “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It.”

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