All Work and No Play... Makes Jack More Polarized
Since becoming a parent a little over six years ago, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been reminded through our pediatrician, our preschool, our kindergarten, articles, blogs, and Instagram posts, that encouraging free play for kids is necessary to their development. Free play allows children to learn by doing, and in doing so, to become independent, resilient, and confident. Free play, especially with other children, helps them learn social cohesion and cooperation. A common response to a child’s appeal for adults to adjudicate playground disputes is “find a way to play together.”
What I haven’t read as much about, but experienced myself, is that letting children enjoy free play is also a benefit to parents or caregivers. Watching children play is boring. Talking to other parents on the playground becomes a lifeline to sanity. Some of my most cherished friendships have come through meeting other parents on the playground or through my sons’ schools.
I met C on a hot, sunny June morning in 2020 at a playground in Del Ray, a neighborhood in Alexandria VA. My then-two-year-old son and her then-two-year-old daughter were playing with each other and eventually began chatting. We were three months into the Covid-19 pandemic at that point and starving for connection with people outside our families and bubbles. C and I discovered that we lived in the same apartment complex, that we had spent our 20s in New York City, that we had gotten married around the same time in 2017, and that we had a shared faith. We exchanged numbers to plan for another playdate, since our kids had really hit it off.
That summer, over the course of many more hot playdates, C and I, along with our kids, became friends.
Image provided by Freepik
When summer turned to fall, our families began to meet up for dinner outside. Here and there little hints about each other’s politics would come out–it was an election year, of course–and it became obvious that we had different political beliefs. I’ll admit that had C or I led with politics, we’d likely never have become friends. But because we were thrown together through our kids’ free play with each other, we discovered what we had in common was more important than what we disagreed about. C and I realized that we liked playing with each other too. It seemed silly to blow that up over politics.
Just like our kids were having fun while learning how to get along, C and I were too. Through disagreements over vaccination, politics, even just how we parent, C and I found a way to play together.
It won’t be news to readers of this newsletter that Americans are experiencing a period of toxic political polarization. There are a lot of theories as to why and how this has happened: siloed news media consumption, geographic sorting, the decline of religious practice,etc. But the Listen First Project and Team Democracy have a theory of their own: Americans will be less polarized if they get a chance to play together. And Ken Powley, Team Democracy’s CEO and co-founder came up with a fun and ingenious way to make this happen. R.A.F.T. for America (RAFT stands for Reuniting America by Fostering Trust) pairs up rafters of different political persuasions in boats and takes them whitewater rafting for an afternoon. After watching the riot at the Capitol on January 6, Powley, who spent 50 years in the whitewater rafting business, felt that he wanted to do something to heal America. “It has to come from the bottom up,” he told me. “And it's got to be ordinary people and I looked in the mirror that night and… I said I’ve got to do something.”
Photo from recent R.A.F.T. trip
Powley's experience in the rafting business helped him see the transformative power of play. He shared, “In the morning people show up, they're still in their old grumpy world, they're still stressed. By the end of the day, they are 12 year-olds.. They're all reduced to the same thing, which is we are just having a blast and we're dumping buckets of water on each other and we're laughing and we're splashing and swimming. … It makes us kids, we get to be kids again.”
Playing together doesn’t just create good vibes. It is also healing for our brains. Karissa Raskin, Listen First Project’s Director of Coalition Engagement explained that “there's neuroscience to back that when we are physically active doing things with people… that we are better able to have communication around difficult topics and topics that we have differences of opinion on when we are active.”
What makes the concept of whitewater rafting to reduce political polarization so interesting, is not just its bridge-building potential. Having fun is a way to boost your mental health. And as readers of this newsletter also know, America has also been experiencing a mental health crisis. Another way to boost your mental health is to spend time in nature, or to “touch grass.” Beyond the thrill of rafting down a river and finding common ground with someone you thought was an “enemy,” R.A.F.T. is getting people outside. “It's fun to do this work in places that are so beautiful and pristine and cool, on their own right aside from the mission,” Ken pointed out. “They're just beautiful places to be.” And it's for this reason that R.A.F.T for America might be able to help heal more than just our toxic polarization.
For a lot of adults, we might feel that play is a luxury, not a necessity. It’s something that children do, but adults focus on more serious matters. But to paraphrase a famous biblical passage, maybe in these things we need to become like little children and imagine together what a better life together could look like.
“We are still going to not agree on a lot of things and that is perfectly fine but it’s a lot harder to hate someone who you just went down a river with for four hours and were laughing with and learned about their family.”
Listen First’s Karissa Raskin is doing just that. “My hope is that we will be able to inspire people to use these spaces of play, recreation, team building even and find that the people that they engage with while yes, we do have our differences, we be civil and kind and see the humanity in each other,” she shared.