Spend enough time around elementary school teachers, and you’ll probably hear some version of the same observation: Kids don’t seem to know how to play together anymore. Recess conflicts feel constant. Students struggle to agree on the rules of a game, someone gets upset when things don’t go their way, and a disagreement over whose turn it is somehow turns into a situation requiring three adults and a phone call home. Playing together feels exceptionally harder than it used to!
Teachers are spending an enormous amount of time helping students navigate interactions that, at least from an adult perspective, seem like they should be relatively straightforward. It’s easy to conclude that children today are simply worse at getting along than previous generations.
I’m not entirely convinced that’s true.
I do think there are some important things worth examining about how children spend their time, the opportunities they have to practice social skills, and whether the environments we create actually allow all children to participate.
Playing Together Is More Complicated Than It Looks
We tend to think of play as something children naturally know how to do. Give a group of kids a playground, some toys, or a ball, and they’ll figure out the rest. Exceptttt – playing with other people requires a surprisingly sophisticated collection of skills.
Children have to communicate their ideas, interpret social cues, negotiate rules, manage disappointment, tolerate uncertainty, and respond when someone else has a different opinion.
They also have to navigate situations where the rules aren’t particularly clear.
A game of tag might begin with everyone agreeing on how to play, only for someone to introduce a new rule halfway through. Another child disagrees, someone feels excluded, and suddenly the entire game falls apart. From the outside, this might look like a group of children arguing over something insignificant. In reality, they’re navigating a complicated social situation involving flexibility, perspective-taking, communication, and emotional regulation.
These skills develop over time, and children don’t always demonstrate them consistently, particularly when they’re excited, frustrated, tired, or deeply invested in what they’re doing.
Kids Need Opportunities to Practice Being Kids
One factor worth considering is how much of children’s time is structured by adults. Between school, extracurricular activities, organized sports, and other scheduled commitments, some children have relatively few opportunities to engage in play without adults directing the experience.
Structured activities certainly have value. Children learn important skills through organized sports, clubs, and adult-led games.
However, unstructured play offers something different. When adults aren’t organizing every aspect of an activity, children have to make decisions together. They invent games, establish rules, negotiate disagreements, and figure out how to keep an activity going when everyone has different ideas.
Sometimes those interactions go beautifully. Other times, someone gets upset, the game falls apart, and the children have to decide what happens next. That process is part of learning!!
Research on play and child development has consistently identified opportunities for play as important for social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development. The American Academy of Pediatrics has also emphasized the developmental benefits of child-directed play.
That doesn’t mean we can definitively attribute today’s playground conflicts to a decline in unstructured play. There are plenty of factors influencing children’s experiences, and we should be cautious about making sweeping claims about an entire generation.
Still, opportunities to practice social problem solving matter.
Sometimes Adults Are Doing Too Much of the Problem Solving
As educators and parents, we’re understandably motivated to intervene when children are struggling with one another. Nobody wants to see a child excluded, hurt, or overwhelmed. Teachers also have legitimate responsibilities to maintain safety and keep the school day moving.
However, there’s a difference between supporting children through conflict and immediately resolving every disagreement for them. When adults consistently determine whose turn it is, decide which rules are fair, or instruct children exactly what to say to one another, students may have fewer opportunities to practice those skills themselves.
Of course, adult support is essential when children are being bullied, unsafe, or genuinely unable to navigate a situation without assistance.
The goal is to provide the amount of support children need while gradually creating opportunities for greater independence. Sometimes that means helping students identify the problem, consider different perspectives, and generate possible solutions rather than immediately telling them what to do.
It also means accepting that successful social interactions won’t always look perfectly peaceful. Disagreements are a normal part of relationships. Learning to navigate them is an important part of growing up.
Recess Isn’t Automatically Accessible Just Because Everyone Gets to Go
We often talk about recess as though it’s an inherently inclusive part of the school day. Everyone goes outside, everyone gets a break, and everyone has an opportunity to play. Unfortunately, being physically present on a playground doesn’t necessarily mean a child has meaningful access to what’s happening there.
Consider how many playground activities rely on skills we rarely think about explicitly. Students need to understand rules that may change without warning, process rapid verbal directions, navigate crowded spaces, interpret gestures and facial expressions, and coordinate their movements with other children. For some students, these demands create significant barriers to participation.
A child who uses augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) may have plenty of ideas about how to play but struggle to contribute when the conversation moves faster than their communication system allows. A student with a physical disability may be surrounded by playground equipment and games that aren’t accessible to them. Another child may find the noise, unpredictability, and sensory demands of recess so overwhelming that participating in a group activity feels nearly impossible.
Even seemingly simple expectations, like joining an existing game, can be complicated when the rules are unspoken or other children aren’t accustomed to different communication styles. We can imagine that could make playing together a lot harder.
Supporting these students might mean providing accessible equipment, teaching peers how to communicate with AAC users, offering quieter play spaces, or making game rules available through visual supports.
It also means recognizing that participation doesn’t have to look the same for every child. Some students enjoy large, active group games. Others prefer imaginative play with one friend, building something independently alongside peers, or participating in a quieter activity.
There’s value in all of these experiences. We shouldn’t automatically interpret a child’s preference for solitary or parallel play as evidence that they’re missing an important social skill.
The goal of inclusive recess is meaningful access to play, connection, and choice, rather than requiring every child to participate in the same activities in the same way.
Teaching Social Skills Doesn’t Have to Mean Another Curriculum
Teachers are already being asked to fit an unreasonable number of priorities into the school day, so I’m certainly not suggesting that every playground disagreement requires a formal SEL lesson. Many of the most valuable opportunities for social learning happen during ordinary classroom experiences.
Social scripts, visual supports, role-playing, and mini lessons can also help students understand their options and practice skills in a manageable environment. The Behavior Supports Library includes ready-to-use social scripts, visuals, and hands-on activities designed to make this kind of instruction easier to incorporate into everyday classroom routines.
For students who need more individualized support, social interaction and problem-solving skills may also be appropriate areas to address through IEP goals. The important part is identifying meaningful skills that help students build relationships and advocate for themselves rather than simply expecting them to behave in ways adults consider socially acceptable.
What Teachers Can Actually Do Tomorrow
If playground conflicts are taking up a significant amount of your time, start by looking for patterns rather than treating every disagreement as an isolated incident. Pay attention to which activities consistently create conflict, whether students understand the rules, how accessible the play options are, and which interactions seem to need the most adult assistance.
Then choose one small adjustment. When we bite off more than that, our overwhelm kicks in. Small adjustments can make huge differences.
You might explicitly teach students how to enter an existing game, provide visual reminders of commonly used playground rules, introduce a few cooperative games, or practice language for disagreeing respectfully.
It’s also worth asking students directly about their experiences. A kid who spends recess alone may be perfectly content, while another may desperately want to participate but lack an accessible way to join. Those situations call for very different responses.
When a conflict happens, consider whether students need immediate adult intervention or whether they could benefit from guided problem-solving. Adults can help children identify the issue and consider possible solutions without automatically making every decision for them.
Kids Aren’t Necessarily Worse at Playing Together. They’re Still Learning!
It’s entirely possible that some children today have fewer opportunities for independent play than children in previous generations. It’s also possible that adults are more attentive to peer conflict, more likely to intervene, or working with different expectations about what successful play should look like. I really don’t believe that we have enough evidence to confidently declare that an entire generation has lost the ability to play together. Which to me, is a relief.
What we do know is that social skills develop through instruction, experience, relationships, and opportunities to practice.
Children need support learning how to navigate friendships, disagreements, and group activities. They also need environments that make those experiences accessible, along with opportunities to make mistakes, work through manageable conflicts, and discover that playing together doesn’t always mean everyone agrees.
I think the most useful response to concerns about social skills is to create more opportunities for meaningful, accessible ways for kids to keep playing together. Preferably without requiring teachers to spend every recess refereeing a heated debate over the rules of four square.
