“Papa, tell me a story from when you were a boy!” I’ve heard this request so many times from my now ten-year-old twin grandchildren that I’ve had to resort to reruns. For some reason, they love hearing about life in the old days, and my adventures growing up in a neighborhood full of kids. Truth be told, I’m as fascinated with comparing my childhood experience to theirs, as they are with comparing their childhood experience to mine.

Recently, my story-time recollections took them back to that suburban neighborhood outside of Philadelphia and tales of all the different things we kids used to do and get into during those precious after-school hours between getting off the bus and having to head back home for dinner. Of course, there are adventures that I wisely haven’t chosen to share with my grandchildren, some of them including fire, knives, BB guns, rock fights, and trips on foot and bicycles way beyond the boundaries our parents had set for our afternoons. But one recent conversation centered around baseball, a game I grew up loving and playing, and a game which two of my grandsons are playing now. They not only wanted to hear about the different Little League teams on which I played, but were especially interested in our daily spring and summer neighborhood pickup games. Fresh off the bus and quickly out the door in our “play clothes”, we would converge on our backyard field with gloves hung on our handlebars and wooden bats over our shoulders. Bikes were carelessly dropped to the ground, Captains would be appointed, teams would be picked, arguments would ensue, punches might get thrown, and kids would always be getting cut, bruised, and hurt. In between all that, we did manage to get in a game. Then, we’d come back the next day and do it all over again.

For today’s kids, baseball – and virtually all youth sport – is typically of the organized variety. With each passing year, the game takes up much more time and money. Always under adult supervision and direction, there are clinics, camps, practices, and even tournaments with costly travel, and all this long before a young player is out of elementary school! Would I be wrong if I said that to me this all seems far less attractive and beneficial than what I experienced in my real-life version of The Sandlot “movie”?

My opinion has been reinforced as I just read Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Simply stated, Haidt makes a compelling case for the fact that the nature of childhood has fundamentally shifted since the late 1980s, from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood.” What this means for play is that our kids now tend to stay inside to play and socialize online, leading them to lose exposure to the kind of physical and social experiences that lead kids to develop needed competencies, overcome their fears, and launch into a healthy and resilient adulthood. While Haidt recommends some very noble reforms in regard to smartphones, he also calls for us to push our kids out the door and into the neighborhood for unsupervised “free play” and greater childhood independence.

Haidt writes, “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.” If all our kids are doing is spending time focused on their screens, they miss this important developmental opportunity. And if their play is always organized and led by adults, they are missing out on what is the most valuable type of childhood play experience of all. You see, research is showing that our kids want to play and need to play. When they are deprived of free play, they come out socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired.

Parents, we want our kids to grow up to be spiritually, relationally, intellectually, and physically healthy and mature adults. These are all aspects of God’s creational design for His image-bearers. I believe that carefully guiding how and where our kids spend their time is crucial if we are to parent in obedience to our calling to “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). To that end, send them outside to play!