One way to give your kids more free play

An antidote to the phone-based childhood

As a parent of young kids, one of my biggest priorities is giving my children ample time in their days for open-ended, child-led play with a mixed-age group of kids. I wish I didn’t even have to elevate this as a priority — that it was just something that could happen magically without any effort on my part — but alas, that is not the way in 2025.

But I’ll gladly fight for it, if needed. Free play has been a pillar of how kids learn for centuries (millennia?), and was a foundation of my own childhood: “fishing” in the woods behind our house, creating obstacle courses for our dog, building forts, outlining chalk cities to ride our bikes through, hollering ghost in the graveyard long after dark — all with a motley crew of sisters, neighbors, and friends alongside.

Though I need little more than my own anecdotal experience to want to replicate this for my kids, the research backs me up: Jonathan Haidt spends a considerable amount of time advocating for play-based childhoods (as opposed to the phone-based childhoods that dominate now) in The Anxious Generation. Play is the work of childhood, he reminds us. In play, kids learn the skills they need to be successful as adults in ways that are natural, effective, and sticky:

“Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play. Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other. … It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair.” He goes so far as to posit that it is in play where we first develop the social skills necessary for life in a democratic society, including self-governance, joint decision making, and accepting the outcome when you lose a contest — which, you know, feels important.¹

So, play. We want more of it, but it can feel hard to squeeze in between the demands of school and extracurriculars. I’ve talked before about ways my family creates margin in our schedule, and that’s been a helpful first step to free up time for play. From there, for some, it really can be as simple as shooing your kids out the door to find some playmates in the neighborhood.² I’m so grateful we’re able to do that, and I do it often.

We’ve also found it powerful to specifically block time on our calendar each week for a standing playdate with another family, and that’s what I wanted to chat about today. If neighborhood playmates don’t feel readily available (yet!) perhaps this is the solution you need. Below, my friend Bethany and I share how our arrangement came to be, what we love about it, what we find challenging, and our best tips if you’d like to try it yourself. Let’s do it!