Recently, there has been a bunny in my backyard that is small enough to nest in a cereal bowl. It occasionally lies in the sun or nibbles on a plant. It primarily tests the boundaries of movement by trundling through bushes, zooming, darting, and feinting. I once witnessed it cornering so forcefully that it sprayed a huge, untidy arc of mulch. If a human child did that, they would most likely be called inside to clean up. However, the baby has carte blanche; I haven’t seen the adults in this bunny’s life in weeks. I wish more children I know were as fortunate.
Little ones spend a lot of time playing, fighting, jumping, and climbing because wild animals are the best movers on the planet. Human infants are born with the same capacity for erratic movement as animals; if left to their own devices, they would probably fall around like puppies. However, they are increasingly doing nothing of the sort.
This is caused in part by the structure of contemporary society as well as the human tendency toward self-domestication. According to the World Health Organization, 81% of teenagers globally do not engage in adequate physical activity, and sedentary behavior rates among youth typically increase as a nation’s economy grows. According to the Trust for Public Land, up to two-thirds of kids in some American cities do not have access to the kinds of parks that would be ideal for unstructured play. Additionally, a report by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative, a nationwide program designed to boost youth participation in sports, concluded that “free play is all but a thing of the past” in comparison to other activities like organized sports.
Some children don’t have access to fields, woods, or other open areas where they could run around unrestrained. Some people’s parents don’t allow that kind of foolish behavior. Due to social pressures to get their squiggly children unsquiggled and into places where children are expected to “behave,” such as waiting rooms, subways, stores, airplanes, and restaurants, many parents in the United States routinely restrict their children’s (or their furniture’s) play. However, at a time when children truly need to move, that impulse runs the risk of perpetuating the idea that being sedentary is better.
In the stream of health research, you’ll find plenty of reasons for kids to experiment with freedom of movement as well as warnings about the terrible effects of inactivity. Youngsters who exercise have stronger bones, muscles, and joints as well as a decreased chance of obesity and chronic illness in the future. Active children are more likely to stay on task, have better cognitive abilities, and receive higher grades than less active children, according to research. Children who are active are more likely to report feeling happy, according to a systematic review of studies. Additionally, a study that looked at the prevalence of adolescent depression among young people in England and was published in The Lancet revealed that a person’s mental health into adulthood may be impacted by increased sedentary behavior during adolescence.
Since developing brains prune unused potential during childhood, it may be especially costly to be inactive during this time. The Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman stated in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that “one extreme view” of this neurological dwindling “would be that you start out wired up for every possible contingency.” However, as you age, unused connections in the brain are permanently disconnected through a process called synaptic pruning, leaving you with “a narrower nervous system.” We’re used to the notion that young, plastic brains find it easy to learn how to play the piano or speak Mandarin; the same is true when learning how to throw a fastball, balance on a slackline, or perform backflips.
The primary responsibility of parents is to ensure the safety of their children. However, it can be detrimental to prevent children from experiencing challenging movement issues, like racing down a rocky slope at full speed or climbing high in a tree. “Your fear that your child will get hurt is depriving them of something they’ll never get back,” said Marcus Elliott, a doctor and one of the most well-known injury-prevention experts in the world.
Elliott is the director of the Peak Performance Project, also known as P3, a movement lab in Santa Barbara, California, where it has been discovered that many athletes, including a significant portion of NBA, NFL, and MLB players, are at risk of injury due to deficiencies in their movement quality. P3’s researchers concentrate on “kinematic movers,” whose bodies possess a ready solution to nearly any movement issue: they can jump in all directions, land on one foot or two, and change directions with ease. They may not always be the fastest sprinters or the highest jumpers, but they are likely to play for a long time without getting hurt, at least in a cohort that has been thoroughly studied.
Elliott advises kids to play like animals for this reason: Every adult kinematic mover, he believes, grew up playing freely like that squirt in my backyard. Getting in cardio, running fast, or jumping high have little to do with the robustness required to fend off injury. Rather, he claims that robustness is related to “movement quality,” which is as important to athleticism as fluency is to language.
This is consistent with journalist David Epstein’s finding that athletes from small towns achieve irrational levels of success in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. According to Epstein’s theory, small towns require the best athletes for their basketball, baseball, and football teams because there is a lack of players. Participating in a range of sports may help someone develop strong movement vocabulary.
Fortunately, it doesn’t cost a lot of money to give children more freedom. Most of the time, it just takes a little imagination.
Nearly every child who enters my home is compelled to play with the enormous yoga ball in our living room, which costs less than $20. They throw a sibling into it, Superman across its top, body slam it, and do other crazy things. When they see such behavior, many parents become agitated, give stern orders, or declare the ball off-limits completely. I know, of course; nobody wants to wind up in urgent care. However, I am also aware that children who begin by falling down quickly pick up new abilities. Some go on to become elite yoga-ball surfers. When my son was little, he had the amazing ability to stay on all fours on top of the ball while someone (honestly, me) pushed him around violently. We haven’t outgrown this game; he’s now a 6-foot-1-inch engineering undergrad.
Elliott told me that he would give his children little physical challenges, like “can you hop on your left leg all the way across here, and then clear that hurdle?” when work kept him glued to his laptop on the weekends. Is it possible for you to jump off that ledge, land, and then jump back up? One of his daughters recalls using her left foot to hop a huge lap of the backyard in order to earn dessert. Elliott also engages in puppy-like wrestling with his kids. He clarified that this is how his children learn to execute intricate movements while protecting one another—for example, by avoiding the coffee table’s corner.
When children begin to engage in more serious play, all of this unstructured play can be beneficial. Poor landing form is the cause of a lot of sports injuries. Elliott’s lab has discovered that kinematic movers perform well because they land with active feet that touch the ground and hips, knees, and ankles that flex nicely in unison. This may be because the movers engaged in a lot of unstructured play as children. As teenagers or adults, P3’s trainers devote long hours to helping athletes master landing technique; these remedial lessons seem to have a significant effect. According to a 2022 study, young female athletes who received ACL injury prevention training—which typically entails landing and explosive movement—saw an average reduction in ACL tears of 64%. (This is consistent with studies on ballet dancers, who are one of the few groups that receive early training to land correctly. Compared to other athletes who jump as much, they have a startlingly low number of ACL tears, despite the fact that they may suffer from numerous sprains and other overuse injuries.)
The president of P3 and a movement scientist with over ten years of experience analyzing the movement data of top athletes is Eric Leidersdorf. He also has a daughter who is 18 months old. I asked him if he planned to use the parenting lessons he learned from his day job. “Yes,” he answered. Then, in two minutes, he used the word “play” ten times.
Leidersdorf told me, “I really hope she travels the world. I want her to enjoy and love moving.” A bunny I know most likely gets it.
