The Surgeon General is right: Loneliness is a massive problem. It’s not just sad, it’s unhealthy. So, let’s look at the quickest, easiest way to solve it, at least among children.

Get them playing. Really playing — organizing games, working through arguments, sometimes yelling, sometimes laughing — without an adult fast-forwarding through all of that.

Playing is the most organic way to make a friend. As my Let Grow co-founder and a Boston College Psychology Professor, Peter Gray, points out: Almost by definition, when you’re a child: a friend is someone you play with.

Yet since play has been pretty much replaced by adult-run activities — and homework — we need to literally create a play sanctuary — a time and place where children of all ages are guaranteed a chance to JUST PLAY.

Otherwise, it won’t happen. It’s like the way housing developments encroach on the local woods: Pretty soon, there’s no woods left. The housing developments have money behind them. The trees are just trees.

Similarly, most child programs have someone running them, so they represent someone’s salary and perhaps even a business. That someone, or business, naturally must market their program. So, they do. “This will make your kid smart! Or talented! Or scholarship-eligible!”

The problem is simply that free play is too free for its own survival. 

What can be done? Just as we have “wildlife preserves,” where those in power guarantee that something ancient and precious will not be destroyed, we also need to guarantee children a “child-life preserve.” That is, a time and place when children, no less than gazelles and hippos, can cavort as — dare we say it? — nature intended.

Because when children play on their own, they’re developing all the skills — compromise, communication, collaboration, creativity — that they need to become successful humans. Less-likely-to-be-lonely humans.

And the byproduct of all that playing is … fun. Fun arises from playing.

Yet fun isn’t what play is really about, developmentally. The pursuit of fun is just what gets children going. It’s because play is fun that children are willing to do all the hard stuff of regulating themselves, planning, rule-making, and frustration-tolerating to get to the point where the fun finally happens.

Fun is the spoonful of sugar. The “medicine” going down is all the lessons in socialization. It’s all the self-control and resourcefulness it takes to make something fun happen … unless an adult is organizing it FOR the children.

At which point, it’s just the sugar.

What children need, then, is a place where they can pursue fun and make it happen without adults stepping in. When adults take charge, they skip over the hard, annoying stuff — the squabbling and compromising that the children would otherwise have to do. That means the children don’t get as much of a chance to practice the skills of getting along.

So if we want to raise a generation of happy, healthy children, we can’t keep denying them the chance to make their own fun. Free play is the greatest engine for health, joy, connection, and learning. That’s why all animals do it.

Except, increasingly, us.

Lonely, sad us.

How can you create a “child-life sanctuary” full of play for your children?

If you’re lucky, you live in a place where you can get your neighbors to agree to send their children out to have fun together. Maybe, each afternoon, one parent takes a turn sitting outside like a lifeguard.

If that’s not happening, you might see if your school would consider starting a Let Grow Play Club. That’s where the school stays open for mixed-age, loose-parts, no-electronics, free play before or after school. An adult is present, but they don’t organize the games or solve the spats, so the play is as close to “natural” as can be. At LetGrow.org, we have a free implementation guide for schools.

Free play may be too free for its own good. Yet it’s also priceless.

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