It shouldn’t be this hard to decide.
…
Yet some parents seem to be absorbing the message—especially from social media, the great flattener of nuanced communications—that in playing with their kids, they might be doing them a disservice, and that all children, regardless of age, temperament, or ability, should be capable of initiating and sustaining play for long periods. I asked Roberta Golinkoff, a developmental psychologist and the founder of the Child’s Play, Learning, and Development Lab at the University of Delaware, if she has come across any research supporting such interpretations. “I’ve been in this business a long time,” she said—50 years. “I have not seen anything about that.” The developmental psychologist Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, who leads NYU’s Play and Language Lab, also put it to me bluntly: “It’s entirely wrong, according to science.”