Specifically, do they play in active, imaginative, kid-directed ways, off screens and in the real world? It’s a question I’ve gotten in many forms since I started this newsletter, from the reader who asked if kids are still learning “Ring Around the Rosie” to the dad who wondered if it’s possible to give kids independence in a sometimes unsafe world.

Such concerns aren’t unwarranted. Research shows that kids’ unstructured playtime has declined significantly since the 1980s, as fears of kidnapping, traffic accidents, and violence have made parents more wary about letting their kids play outside on their own. Studies in the US, UK, and Europe have found a decrease in children’s outdoor play in recent decades, along with an increase in screen time.

It’s true that smartphones and tablets have, at least to some degree, replaced physical games with digital ones. As any parent of a young child can tell you, “technology has changed the way kids play,” Ruslan Slutsky, an education professor at the University of Toledo who studies play, told me. On the one hand, kids can now play video games with people all around the world. On the other, “there’s been a big disappearance in general neighborhood play,” Slutsky said.

Growing up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in the 1950s, University of Delaware education professor Roberta Golinkoff used to play outside for hours on end, with no adult supervision in sight and technology no more advanced than an old rubber ball. “That rubber ball can play a thousand games,” says Golinkoff, who has studied children’s play for decades. “Childhood is so different now.”

Replacing physical play with phones and iPads can be bad for kids’ gross motor skills and social development, including their ability to read faces, Slutsky said. Free, unstructured play is also necessary for developing cognitive abilities such as self-control, experts say. Some even believe that the rise in anxiety and depression among young people in recent years can be linked to decreased play.

However, I’ve also heard from experts, parents, and kids alike that kids do still play, and that the creativity that has turned rubber balls into hot potatoes and shot puts and cannon fire since time immemorial is alive and well in children today.

But they need help from adults to make their neighborhoods safe for playing — and to give them the time for unstructured fun.

Kids’ play started to change in the 1980s, many experts say, after a series of high-profile kidnapping cases, including the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz. These cases didn’t actually represent a spike in stranger kidnappings, which remain relatively rare today. But headlines about children snatched off the streets — alongside a short-lived but impactful campaign that placed some of their photos on the backs of milk cartons — struck fear in the hearts of American parents, who started keeping their kids indoors.

At the same time, parents and educators became concerned about kids’ academic performance, as a number of studies showed American students lagging behind their counterparts around the world. School years began to get longer, making summer break shorter. Recess, too, began to dwindle, with school districts in Atlanta, Chicago, and elsewhere eliminating it entirely in hopes of boosting test scores. Kids in the 1990s and 2000s simply had less free time to play than their elders.

Then came the smartphone. iPhones and iPads have taken a lot of blame for ruining American childhood, and in some cases, the evidence is weak — there’s no research, for example, definitively showing that social media hurts kids’ mental health. But phones and tablets have crowded out some more analog forms of fun.

“In our research, we found that kids were spending a lot less time outside,” Slutsky said. “They were spending a lot less time in traditional forms of play because they were playing with devices.”

Play on devices isn’t all bad. Children can use them to learn more about special interests, such as birding, Golinkoff said. (As a longtime birder, I can attest to the value of Merlin.) Meanwhile, one Norwegian researcher (and former preschool teacher) has found that young children can continue online play in the real world — using Minecraft concepts to play with blocks, for example — and take small risks in online environments that mirror the kind of unpredictable play that experts say is crucial for development. Some research also shows that children’s play was resilient during the pandemic, with kids enjoying drawing and other activities that were available to them — purchases of outdoor toys like trampolines and bounce houses also rose during this time.

Despite larger shifts in kids’ free time and independence, they also retain their ingenuity, as well as their willingness to play the kind of active games that would be recognizable to their elders. “I have a three-year-old boy who seems to have learned about tag, hide and seek, and even ring around the rosie with almost no input from us parents,” one reader wrote to me. “I’m still not sure he gets the rules of any of them, but all three practices are alive and well here in Kansas.”

(My 2-year-old also likes to play “Ring Around the Rosie,” though he does not understand dizziness and sometimes walks into walls afterward.)

Flower, age 8, told me that she recently invented a game called “steamroller.” “Somebody lays down and rolls around,” she said, and then other players “try to dodge the person rolling. It’s really fun.”

She and her friends at school also enjoy a game they call “tag off the ground” — players are safe from tagging as long as their feet don’t touch the playground. Her 4-year-old sister likes to play “Crocodile”: She’s a crocodile and chases Flower around.

“She likes games where she gets to be some sort of predatory animal,” their mom said.

Flower lives in rural Wales, so she has more access to outdoor space than many American kids. At the same time, debates about kids’ screen time and outdoor play are raging in the UK as well as in the US. And what struck me most about our video call was actually a toy she showed me. A simple stuffed animal, in Flower’s hands it could transform into many different objects. “It can be a top, or it can be an accordion,” she said.

Like Golinkoff with her rubber ball, kids are still using their creativity to bend and shape the world around them. However, today, they may need a little help to make that world safe for their play.

“If we want kids to be outside playing, we need to have spaces for them to do that,” Slutsky said.

That means spaces where kids feel safe, and adults feel comfortable giving their kids freedom to roam. Such spaces have declined in recent decades, for very real reasons, experts say. While kidnappings may not be on the rise, cars today are much bigger and heavier than in the past, making them more dangerous to pedestrians — especially children, who are shorter and smaller, said Robert Schneider, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies pedestrian safety. Many parents understandably fear that streets aren’t safe for their kids.

Some kids also have to contend with fears of police brutality or racist violence when they play outside. Black moms of sons, in particular, have told researchers of “a baseline of concern every time their child walked out the door,” J. Richelle Joe, an associate professor of counselor education at the University of Central Florida, told me last year. Kids of color and children from low-income families are also less likely than wealthier white kids to have access to green spaces for outdoor playtime.

Traffic calming measures like curb extensions and medians, along with lower speed limits and pedestrian-only streets, can go a long way in making neighborhoods safer for outdoor play, Schneider said. Cities like San Francisco and Boston have had some success improving street safety with their Vision Zero plans, he said, and in New York City, 71 streets will be closed this year for schoolchildren to play during recess.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land has worked with schoolkids to renovate playgrounds into inviting community parks in areas with less access to outdoor space.

Kids also need the time to play outside. To that end, California and Washington recently passed laws mandating 30 minutes of daily recess for elementary school students, and such laws are under consideration in other states, too.

We’re not going to go back to the days before smartphones. For one thing, Slutsky notes, kids play with their devices because they’re fun. We can, however, foster an environment where children can come together offline. We just have to create safe, inviting spaces, and then get out of kids’ way so they can do what they do best.

As Golinkoff put it: “Let the kids play.”