Let Them

5 hours ago
4 min read

Why letting kids explore, fail, get bored, and get creative this summer is one of the most important things we can do for the whole child.

Let them wander the backyard with no plan. Let them get bored on a Tuesday afternoon. Let them build the fort wrong, fall off the balance beam, lose the pickup game, and try again anyway. It sounds like the opposite of good parenting or good coaching: shouldn't we be filling every hour with something enriching? But a growing body of research says the opposite: some of the most important developmental work of childhood happens precisely in the moments we don't structure, schedule, or supervise closely. Summer is the single best season to let it happen.

This isn't a case against enrichment. DashStrom exists because structured, coach-led programming builds real skills. It's a case for recognizing that exploration, failure, boredom, and unstructured play aren't gaps in a child's development to be filled. They ARE the mechanism.

The Case for Boredom

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), unstructured play (play that isn't organized or directed by an adult and has no defined outcome) is a fundamental necessity for children to thrive physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially. Psychologists interviewed by the APA point out that everyday active play builds healthy bodies and reduces anxiety, while manageable risk-taking, like climbing or jumping from a safe height, teaches kids to calibrate risk and regulate their own emotions. None of that happens on a schedule someone else wrote.

Boredom, specifically, is doing real work in that process. When a child has nothing assigned to do, they're forced to generate their own goal, figure out how to reach it, and sit with the discomfort of not knowing how, before they get there. That's the exact muscle a child needs for leadership later; the ability to see a gap, decide what to do about it, and act without being told.

Free Play Builds Smarter, More Resilient Kids

It's not just emotional development. A feature in Scientific American summarizing decades of play research, including psychologist Peter Gray's interviews with more than 6,000 people about their childhoods, found that a lack of unstructured, imaginative play can keep children from growing into happy, well-adjusted adults. Researchers call it “free play,” and it's tied to becoming socially adept, coping with stress, and building cognitive problem-solving skills. One classic study cited in the piece even found that preschoolers given open-ended objects to play with freely later solved problems more creatively than peers who were simply shown how to use the same objects.

In other words: the sandbox, the cardboard box, the empty afternoon with no camp on the calendar aren't downtime from development. They are where confidence and grit actually get built, one small, self-directed success (and failure) at a time.

The Access Gap Nobody's Talking About

Here's the harder truth: not every family gets to choose “let them.” For millions of households, the barrier isn't too much structure. It's no access to enrichment at all. The Afterschool Alliance's America After 3PM survey, one of the largest household studies of how U.S. families spend the hours after school, found that roughly 22.6 million children have parents who want them enrolled in an afterschool or enrichment program but cannot access one, largely due to cost, availability, and transportation. That's three out of every four children whose families want enrichment being left out.

That gap is a social determinant of health in its own right. Safe, structured spaces to explore, take risks, and build relationships with caring adults shape mental health, physical activity, school engagement, and long-term outcomes just as much as clinical care does. When 22 million kids are shut out of youth enrichment, the cost isn't just a missed activity. The cost is missed practice at confidence, grit, and leadership during years when those skills are still taking shape.

What This Means for Summer

For families who do have the flexibility, summer is the season to actually practice “let them.” For programs like DashStrom, it's a reminder that access to well-coached, developmentally sound enrichment isn't a nice-to-have for the kids who already have everything else, it's one of the most direct levers available for closing a real gap in child health and opportunity. A few practical shifts:

Leave real unscheduled time on the summer calendar, not just gaps between camps.
Resist rescuing kids from every small failure. A lost game or a flopped fort is data that needs to be processed, not a crisis.
Treat boredom as a starting point, not a problem to solve for them.
Where structure exists, make sure it still leaves room for a child's own choices and risk-taking.
Support the push for broader access to enrichment programs, the benefits of “let them” only reach the kids who have somewhere safe to practice it.

The Real Takeaway

Letting kids explore, fail, get bored, and get creative isn't the absence of a plan. It's the plan. The research is consistent: unstructured time builds the confidence, grit, and leadership that structured lessons alone can't teach, and every child deserves a real shot at it, not just the ones whose families can already afford it.