Feeling Anxious, Depressed? You Should Have Been Playing
Have you been feeling frustrated, stressed, down in the dumps? Maybe it’s because you spent too much time preparing for adulthood as a child, and too little time playing: Suicide rates quadrupled from 1950 to 2005 for children less than fifteen years and for teens and young adults ages 15-25, they doubled. Gray believes 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 should reassess the role of free play and the factors that seem to have all but eliminated it from our children’s lives.…