OPINION: It’s time to stop teaching the fun out of childhood and let kids be kids. Give them a ball and get out of their way
by Lenore Skenazy, The Hechinger Report
August 10, 2026
How do kids learn how to kick a ball?
If you think that’s a silly question — kids just kick things, don’t they? — you are thinking like me: Old school.
Recently Ginny Yurich, host of the “1000 Hours Outside” podcast, sent me some pages from a pre-K curriculum she’d seen at a conference last year. Kicking is just one of the skills it offers instructions for. And it’s not just, “Give ’em a ball and get out of the way.”
No, the guidance is much more granular. Teachers facing the complex and detailed task of teaching kids to kick are told to first “invite” kids outside, earnestly discuss safety issues (kids must stand far apart!) and then “Demonstrate how to kick the ball, and talk through each step as you complete it: ‘Now that I’ve looked around to make sure it’s safe, I’ll run up and kick the ball. I’m going to keep my foot under the ball when I kick.’ ”
Then, “Tell the child to place the ball on the ground and take at least four large steps back.” How far back? That, too, must be prescribed: 8 to 10 feet. Next: “Have the child move quickly up to the ball and place the nonkicking foot next to the ball. Help him or her swing the kicking leg forward so the foot hits the ball below its center. …”
The instructions keep going! But if someone told four-year-old me to kick a ball by moving quickly up to it and being sure not to use my “nonkicking foot” — surely a popular phrase among preschoolers — I think I’d have kicked something else.
And I wouldn’t need an adult’s “help” swinging my other leg forward, thank you very much.
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Note that these instructions are for all kids, not kids in early intervention programs. What’s most disturbing is they seem perfect … for a robot.
Kids don’t need to be taught to kick a ball. Put a ball in front of one and see if you can keep them from kicking it. They really don’t need much instruction in having fun. So why does this “curriculum” exist? It has to do with the way we think of education and fun itself.
Universal public schooling has only existed for the blink of an eye, historically speaking. In the U.S., it wasn’t mandated in every state until 1918. For most of human history, kids learned how to become functioning adults with no formal classrooms, lessons or teachers.
But once the modern model of education took hold, “school” gradually became synonymous with “learning.” That connection has become so cemented that it can be hard to think of kids learning anywhere but school, or learning in any way but being taught by a teacher.
Once that’s the case, we forget how much they learn through curiosity and the simple impulse to try things. If you think of kids as basically lying fallow anytime they aren’t being formally instructed, it becomes the adults’ job to make sure that all fallow time is minimized. We rush to fill it with something officially useful.
This explains why kids are so busy today. They are in adult-run classes and activities because the alternative appears to be “sleep mode.” It also explains why adults are so busy: We’re driving kids to and from all those lessons and often staying to watch.
Eventually this leads to the point where we can’t imagine kids developing almost any skills, even how to play, without adult tutelage. So someone draws up instructions to teach kids how to do something every human kid (and probably every primate) has done since the invention of legs: kick.
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Any teachers forced to follow that curriculum have to act like they believe kids need this, too. They’re just as programmed (and condescended to) as their students.
Here I must quote a little more from the manual, because it is such a perfect example of the adult takeover of childhood. For instance, to “teach” kids to bounce a ball: “Ask the children to hold the ball out in front of their bodies and drop or throw it to the ground. Explain that when you drop or throw down a ball, and it comes back up, it is called bouncing a ball. ‘Watch as the ball hits the ground and then bounces back up!’ ”
Because they otherwise wouldn’t watch?
The teacher is told to turn the ball-dropping (which is not how you bounce) into an even-more-teachable moment by pointing out “how high the ball bounces when it is simply dropped and how hard it bounces when it is thrown to the ground.”
But watch out! the manual warns teachers: Don’t let kids play too long. They are delicate! The manual’s hopping instructions (“Spring off the floor on one foot and land on the same foot”) tell teachers that “hopping can be tiring for many children. This skill is difficult for young children to master; they may lack the strength and balance to hold one leg in the air while hopping on the other.”
So our kids are going to preschools at age 3 or 4 where they are treated as clueless, exhausted, dumb, dull, decrepit near-humans who need boring, didactic and confusing instructions — as do their teachers.
If we really want kids to learn how to kick, bounce, hop or be happy, here’s the best advice: Give ’em a ball. Get out of the way.
Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, the nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and author of Free-Range Kids.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about kids and fun was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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