Hi and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on I Heart Radio. A friend said to me recently

that the way to protect your child from depression and anxiety to some extent is to let

them have a lot of unsupervised play and minimal screen time and I thought to

myself this is not rocket science but it's so hard to achieve.

I think a lot of people realize that this is the path

to having kind of a happier child,

but are unable to do it.

And I thought back to when my own kids were eight, five, and two in Brooklyn, and I noticed that my then eight-year-old didn't have peers at the playground. The child population of the park abruptly cut off at a certain

age. My two-year-old was saddling up to other two-year-olds who enjoyed you know

pushing objects like strollers and scooters around the perimeter of the park. My five-year-old would join a

crew of other five-year-old boys and getting inexplicably dirty and turning all available

sticks into weapons. But my eight-year-old would often find herself

with no one her age around and end up hanging off the monkey bars by herself.

Where were the kids? And of course it turned out they were all in after school or weekend

programs. Some did coding, some learned another language, some took art or

music. My daughter did all of this too, at least in part because everyone else did it and it'd be weird not to, but we still left her with a lot of time to do nothing much, especially outside.

And it got harder and harder to find kids her age to do the same.

Now my kids are 13, 10 and 8 and we still prioritize them hanging out with friends,

limiting their screens, but it's rare to see

the kids just playing outside on their own. There are a lot of kids on our block

but very few just run around outside, ride their bikes or scooters or whatever and just play outside with no plan and no structured event.

One neighbor told me that kids used to play outside a lot, but COVID moved everyone indoors and they just never reverted to form.

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