1KHO 650: An Antidote to the Crushing Pace of Childhood | Heather Shumaker, It's Ok Not to Share

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast

Ginny Yurich

Kids & Family, Parenting

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if the most loving thing you could do for your child today is protect their right to play? In this landmark 650th episode of The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast, Ginny Yurich sits down with Heather Shumaker, author of the modern classic It’s OK Not to Share, to talk about why childhood no longer feels like childhood and how we can change that. Together, Ginny and Heather paint a compelling vision of kids outside for hours, solving their own conflicts, learning impulse control while they wait for the truck or the swing, and discovering that deep, creative play (and not early academics) is what truly prepares them for life. If you’ve ever felt the pressure to enroll in one more class, push early reading, force sharing at the park, or make everyone “be friends,” this conversation will feel like a deep exhale. Heather gives you concrete scripts (what to say instead of “be nice,” “share,” or “say you’re sorry”), shows why “play fighting” and chase games are often exactly what kids need, and shares the powerful toolbox behind her follow-up book It’s OK to Go Up the Slide and her middle-grade novel The Griffins of Castle Cary. As we celebrate 650 episodes, Ginny invites you to join the mission: listen in, send this episode to a friend who’s worried they’re “behind” because their child just wants to play, and leave a podcast rating and review. Your share might be the nudge another parent needs to slow the schedule, protect those long, muddy hours outside, and finally believe: there will always be time for academics, but there won’t always be time for play. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Gin here, I'm the founder of 1000 Hours
0:04.3	Outside and I have just read the most fantastic book. I'm late to the game. I'm late to the game, but it's so good. I took like 900 pages of notes. It's called It's Okay Not to Share and other renegade rules for raising competent and compassionate kids. The author, Heather Sheemaker, is here. Welcome, Heather.
0:25.8	Oh, thank you so much. You are not late to the game. You know, every parent comes when they come and the kids are, they're the same as they were when the book first came out. You know,
0:31.2	they still need the same confidence and things from their adults around them.
0:37.5	And I would imagine a book like this becomes more valuable and more sought after year after year
0:41.8	after year because play is being pushed out of childhood.
0:45.4	And you talk a lot about these cultural norms of like forcing kids to share and you know,
0:51.3	forcing them to interact and include this kid in the play and you talk about
0:55.7	other ways that you could do it and why and it comes out of science it comes out of research
1:01.5	and so there is a lot here to think about I think every parent should read it so let's just start
1:07.0	off with relaxing so you talk about that there is a crushing pace of childhood, crushing
1:12.5	pace, and you say, look, we can all just relax? So can we start off there with where we're at,
1:18.7	like the current state of things, and why play is still one of the most important things for our
1:23.6	young children? Oh, yeah. I mean, this morning, I picked up the newspaper this morning,
1:28.9	and front of one of the sections is about how a Michigan study, they surveyed almost a thousand
1:35.3	parents, I think it was one in ten had their kids playing outside once a week, and the rest was
1:43.5	less than that.
1:45.0	Right?
1:46.0	I mean, we know that intuitively because we don't see the kids.
1:50.0	When I take my neighborhood walk, I don't see the kids outside.
1:53.0	Even the kids waiting for the school bus are inside a car,
1:57.0	being sheltered from, I don't know what, the chance to see an earthworm, you know, what is it
	...

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