Play is Productive

Parents want their kids to be successful. To many, the best way to ensure this success is to fill every second with so-called productive activities. This means that after the strict schedule of the academic day, kids are shuttled off to other structured activities—music lessons, sports teams, art classes—for much of their remaining free time. This leaves little, if any, space for unstructured play. Dr. Gail Saltz is a professor of psychiatry at the NY Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornell School of medicine and a psychoanalyst with the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She’s the author of multiple books, most recently The Power of Different: The Link Between Disorder and Genius.