ParentData's Emily Oster Wants You to Let Your Kids Play Alone
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If you’re not familiar with KiwiCo, give me a second to get you up to speed. They are a longstanding, celebrity-loved subscription box company that creates and curates educational boxes with toys and activities for kids ages infant to 12 years old. (Although they swear even a 100-year-old would love the boxes!)
And if you’re not familiar with Emily Oster, you’ll soon want to be. The mom of two felt she lacked clear information to guide her decisions during her pregnancies. And, as a doctoral graduate from Harvard with a PhD in economics, it’s fair to say that Oster loves clear information.
With her expertise in reviewing and analyzing data, she launched ParentData, a data-driven site that helps parents decode all the scary statistics and big numbers and make decisions throughout their parenting journey.
She’s also the author of Expecting Better, Cribsheet, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected.
Most recently, she partnered with KiwiCo founder Sandra Oh Lin to help the company reimagine their baby line. And, in speaking with SheKnows’ Editor-in-Chief Erika Janes, she now has us reimagining what playtime could look like in each of our homes.
“There’s so much evidence that play — especially for little kids but even for older kids — is such a crucial part of the way they kids learn,” she tells SheKnows exclusively. “And I think that we, more so than in the past, spend so much time thinking about questions like, ‘How do I get my kid ready for school? How do I get school readiness?’”
Many people think of ABCs and 123s as the key to school readiness. And while that’s true, Oster said kids also need to learn how to play together and independently.
“I think we’ve moved away from the importance of play in a way that’s probably not always so great for our kids,” she says. “So the more we can push them [to be] sitting around and just messing with something and seeing what happens … that is how you learn things.”
Sounds simple, right? Sounds fun, right? Or do you — like many parents — now have this nagging feeling that you haven’t spent enough time playing with your kid?
Well, there’s actually some “good” news. Oster says that data shows parents spend so much more time physically engaging with their kids than they used to. And one of the costs of that is a loss of independence.
“Parents feel like, ‘If I’m not engaging with my kid every second that’s somehow terrible parenting and every minute is an opportunity for me to invest more,'” she says. “And I think there’s a lot of value in stepping back and saying, ‘Actually, your kid playing by themselves and figuring out what to do when they’re bored and finding their own fun — that is part of growing up and part of learning to adapt to being a person.'”
“And we could simultaneously take so much pressure off parents in terms of what we expect out of them and probably do better for our kids by encouraging them to do things for themselves and figure things out for themselves, which is part of what one learns to do as an adult,” she continues.
How freeing is that? To know that you don’t have to — and it’s probably better if you don’t! — have a hand in every single puppet show. But maybe you also worry that the, er, stage hasn’t been set for independent play.
That’s where things like KiwiCo can come in and help kids of any age find fun in all kinds of toys and activities. KiwiCo boxes arrive on a subscriber’s doorstep each month and lean into the idea that there is a certain value in having a schedule or routine. It may sound silly, but Oster says you can (and should) go ahead and set a plan for when your kids will be independent.
“You need to tell them, ‘This is the time of the day that we’re gonna all be independent. And I’m not gonna talk to you. And you have to be bored on your own.’” she says, knowing it’s easier said than done without having some kind of incentive to give the kiddo. “… Having a toy they play with independently, or you can say, ‘Here, this is something you can go build on your own’ is a way to kind of back into that independence. Now, they’re doing this by themselves, then there’s a sense of accomplishment, they want to do more things by themselves and sort of build that over time.”
And that can start as early as 3 weeks old! (While keeping an eye on them, of course.) Infants can have independent time in their playpen.
“That is something you could do immediately,” she says. “I think the more that kids get used to that idea, the easier it is to follow it through…If they have a routine and this is their routine, they’re way more likely to accept that than if all of a sudden when they’re 17, you’re like, ‘By the way, you need to learn some independence; college is coming and I’m not coming with you.'”