Childhood in a culture that wants every activity to produce something
A parent encounters childhood twice.
The first time, we are inside it.
An afternoon is simply an afternoon. We do not know how brief childhood is. We do not know which skills will become difficult to acquire later, which habits we will be grateful for, which opportunities will disappear, or which things we will wish somebody had persuaded us not to give up.
The second time, we stand outside.
Now we know that childhood ends.
We know that learning to swim matters beyond the lesson itself. That practising an instrument can eventually make possible a pleasure unavailable to the beginner. That reading opens doors. That confidence can compound. That some opportunities become harder to recover once missed.
It becomes difficult not to see the future inside the present.
And there is often love in that.
A parent may be thinking:
I know something you do not yet know. This time will pass.
Or:
I know what I wish somebody had given me.
Or simply:
I want to keep doors open for you.
Seen this way, the modern tendency to ask what a childhood activity is good for is not especially mysterious.
We want to know what children are learning from play. Whether music helps cognition. Whether sport builds resilience. Whether drawing develops fine-motor control. Whether reading expands vocabulary. Whether free play contributes to self-regulation.
These are reasonable questions.
Some have good evidence behind them. Some have much less than popular parenting culture suggests. But the instinct itself is understandable. Childhood is temporary, and adults are responsible for a future the child cannot yet fully see.
The interesting question begins when this becomes the only language available to us.
A child reads a book, and we describe vocabulary acquisition.
They play outside, and we describe resilience.
They draw, and we describe motor development.
They have time without a plan, and we begin wondering whether it will make them more creative.
The developmental account may be entirely true.
But does it tell us everything we need to know about why the experience mattered?
The child has reasons too
There is a small difference between saying that an activity has benefits and saying that those benefits are what make it worth doing.
A child can enjoy a book and acquire vocabulary through reading it.
The vocabulary may matter. It does not exhaust what the book is for.
There is also the frightening page, the private joke, the character they want to see again, the particular pleasure of already knowing what comes next.
Adults rarely have difficulty understanding this distinction in our own lives.
We do not require dinner with friends to improve our social cognition before accepting that the evening was worthwhile.
A piece of music does not have to increase our productivity to deserve an hour.
Some experiences belong directly to a good life rather than merely preparing us to live one later. 1
Children often have purposes of their own too.
They want the game to continue.
They want to win.
They want the tower to stand.
They want to hear the story again.
They want another ten minutes with a friend.
They want to practise until they can do something they could not do yesterday.
These are reasons.
They simply do not always arrive in the language adults use to justify the same activity.
Play researchers sometimes use the word autotelic for activity pursued substantially for its own sake. That does not mean aimless. A game can have elaborate rules. A construction can have a desired form. A child can care intensely about succeeding. The distinction is that the purpose can belong to the activity and the person engaged in it, rather than existing only in some further result imposed from outside. 2
That seems a modest point.
It changes quite a lot.
What parents can see that children cannot
The obvious counterargument is that children do not always know what will be good for them.
That is true.
A five-year-old does not carry equal responsibility for deciding whether to go to school, brush their teeth, receive medical treatment or go to bed.
Nor would many parents want childhood to become an experiment in absolute autonomy.
Adults introduce possibilities that children may never find unaided.
Someone shows a child how to swim.
Explains the rules of chess.
Reads a book aloud.
Puts an instrument into their hands.
Insists that the first frustrating weeks of something are not necessarily a reason to stop.
And structure itself is not the enemy of meaningful participation.
Research on guided play makes the point nicely. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis found advantages for guided play over direct instruction or free play for some specific learning outcomes, while other comparisons showed no detected differences and implementations varied considerably. The useful conclusion is not that one mode wins. It is that adult purpose and child participation can coexist. 3
The same is true of motivation.
Self-Determination Theory distinguishes between intrinsic motivation and different forms of extrinsic motivation, including goals that a person may willingly adopt as their own. Autonomy, in this framework, does not mean doing everything alone or without guidance. A child may genuinely want to become a pianist while disliking scales on Tuesday afternoon. A teacher can support a project that still meaningfully belongs to the child. 4
This is why “letting a child be” cannot sensibly mean leaving children alone.
Sometimes making room means joining in.
Sometimes it means teaching.
Sometimes it means saying no.
Sometimes it means requiring something now because the child cannot yet see why it will matter later.
The harder question is what remains available to the child inside all of that.
Childhood, managed
There is also a wider social reality that makes the parental instinct to prepare difficult to dismiss.
Annette Lareau’s work on American families famously described concerted cultivation: the organised development of children’s capacities through activities, conversation and active parental involvement. Her work also showed how such practices could confer advantages when children and families interacted with institutions. 5
That complicates any easy argument against optimisation.
It would be comfortable for a publication to tell parents to opt out of competition while leaving their children to bear the consequences of competitive schools, universities and labour markets.
Parents are not inventing every pressure to which they respond.
Some opportunities genuinely are scarce.
Some skills genuinely are easier to acquire young.
Some organised activities provide friendship, competence and pleasure.
And a full calendar is not, by itself, evidence of an unhappy childhood. Nor is an empty one evidence of freedom. 6
A child with few scheduled activities may have a garden, neighbours and safe streets to wander.
Another may have nowhere accessible to go.
A class may feel oppressive to one child and become the highlight of another’s week.
So perhaps the useful question is not:
How many activities are too many?
It is closer to:
How much room does this child have within the life available to them?
Research asking children directly about play offers a useful reminder here. What adults label “free play” may contain rules, expectations and peer pressures; organised settings can contain genuine choice. Children’s experience cannot always be inferred from the timetable adults have drawn around it. 7
The schedule matters.
So does the person living inside it.
A right before a return
There is nevertheless something revealing about how often childhood experiences are defended by reference to what they produce.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises rights to rest, leisure, play, recreation and participation in cultural life and the arts.
The wording does not make those rights conditional on demonstrated gains in school readiness or later productivity. 8
And in its interpretation of Article 31, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child describes play as intrinsically motivated and undertaken for its own sake, while also recognising its developmental significance. 9
Those two things are not in conflict.
Play can contribute to development.
And children can still be entitled to play even when we cannot establish what a particular game accomplished.
That distinction matters because evidence is always specific.
Research can ask whether a particular form of pretend play is associated with a particular developmental outcome.
It cannot automatically answer whether all pretend play is indispensable to development. A major review found insufficient support for some strong causal claims made on behalf of pretend play; later meta-analytic work has nevertheless found positive associations with social competence, while noting that much of the underlying evidence is cross-sectional and cannot establish direction of causation. 10
None of this makes developmental research unimportant.
It makes it more precise.
But there is another question research of that kind is not designed to settle:
If the measurable benefit fails to appear, was the play therefore wasted?
When freedom becomes another assignment
This question becomes especially interesting when we try to protect children from an overly instrumental childhood.
We may decide that children need more free play.
Why?
Because it improves executive function.
More outdoor time.
Why?
Because it builds resilience.
More boredom.
Why?
Because boredom produces creativity.
The calendar may become less crowded while the agenda remains surprisingly full.
Freedom itself begins to carry a performance target.
Boredom is a particularly revealing example.
The popular claim is attractive: leave children bored and creativity will emerge.
The research is far less conclusive. A 2024 scoping review of 27 empirical studies found heterogeneous results and did not establish a consistent positive or negative causal relationship between boredom and creativity. 11
But perhaps the more interesting question comes before the evidence.
Why must boredom produce creativity before we allow an unfilled hour to exist?
Suppose nothing impressive happens.
A child complains.
Then asks to call a friend.
Then reads something familiar.
Then wanders around.
Then the hour ends.
Has anything gone wrong?
The same applies to free play.
If we insist on unstructured time because it will create more independent, self-regulating, imaginative children, then unstructured time has quietly become another intervention.
The child is still required to produce a return.
Only the KPI has changed.
A new ideal child
There is a particular danger here for Stillfolk.
It is easy to imagine the child who belongs aesthetically within this world.
Quiet.
Absorbed.
Turning a stone over in one hand.
Reading alone.
Arranging small objects.
Content with very little.
That child can become just as prescriptive an ideal as the high-achieving one.
A quiet child might indeed be deeply engaged.
They might also be tired.
Anxious.
Lonely.
Or bored in the ordinary, unpleasant sense of the word.
A child running loudly through a room can be paying extraordinary attention to a complicated social game.
A child who wants twenty people around them is not experiencing a lesser childhood than one who wants an hour alone.
Developmental research makes similar distinctions around solitude. Being alone by choice is not the same experience as being isolated unwillingly; shyness, social withdrawal, loneliness and a simple preference for solitary activity are not interchangeable. Nor does solitary play establish superior imagination. 12
This seems particularly important for a brand attracted to quietness.
The visual language we prefer should not become a theory of the better child.
There is no requirement that childhood look like Stillfolk.
And there is another trap.
Once we decide that absorption is valuable, we can begin evaluating that too.
Is the child playing deeply enough?
Are they sufficiently imaginative?
Are they experiencing authentic wonder?
Have we purchased the correct objects to produce it?
The pressure survives. It has simply learned better manners.
Childhood from both directions
Perhaps this is part of what makes parenting so difficult.
The child experiences time forwards.
The parent experiences it forwards and backwards at once.
We look at what is happening now while remembering our own childhood and imagining our child’s adulthood.
Our memories add another layer.
We remember what we wish we had learned.
The instrument abandoned too soon.
The sport never tried.
The language lost.
The opportunity our parents could not provide.
It is understandable that we want to correct for those absences.
But memory also preserves apparently useless things with strange tenacity.
A route home.
A drawer in somebody’s house.
A particular book.
A friend’s garden.
A game whose rules have disappeared completely.
A whole afternoon from which nothing measurable remains.
That does not prove that unscheduled childhood is better.
Memory is selective, unreliable and shaped by everything that came afterwards.
But it does raise a question worth leaving open:
Were some experiences important partly because nobody had decided in advance what they were meant to become?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps that is merely how memory works.
The uncertainty is more useful than a doctrine.
Childhood is already happening
There is a philosophical version of the same question.
How much should childhood be valued as preparation for adulthood, and how much as part of a life already underway?
Consider two children spending an afternoon together.
They invent a game.
Disagree about a rule.
Change it.
Start again.
One becomes annoyed.
They recover.
Eventually somebody has to go home.
Suppose we somehow discover that this afternoon produced no measurable improvement in executive function, emotional regulation, creativity, resilience or later academic performance.
Would that mean nothing of value occurred?
It is hard to believe so.
The companionship happened.
The game mattered to the players while they were playing it.
It was part of their lives.
That does not mean the present should always defeat the future.
A parent may rightly end a wonderful game because the child needs sleep.
Insist on treatment the child dislikes.
Require learning whose purpose will not become obvious for years.
The child who exists now and the adult they may become are the same person. Care has to take both seriously. 13
But the way we describe the trade-off matters.
If childhood is only preparation, then present experience matters principally when it contributes to preparation.
If childhood is already part of a life, present experiences can have weight of their own.
They can be outweighed.
They do not therefore become worthless.
Letting a child be
For Stillfolk, this lands as much on the limits of design as on its possibilities.
We are interested in objects that prescribe less.
Stories that do not always have to teach.
Activities whose result can remain uncertain.
But those are preferences about design and editorial practice.
They are not proof that a particular wooden object produces imagination, that an unfinished story produces creativity, or that a quiet room produces attention.
Those things are not ours to manufacture.
At most, a designer can decide not to specify everything in advance.
And even then the child may do something entirely different from what was imagined.
A restrained object may be ignored.
A loud electronic toy may become the centre of a remarkable shared game.
A tightly structured book may become the story somebody asks for every night for a year.
Stillfolk should not become another argument for the correct kind of childhood.
Our objects cannot manufacture attention, creativity or imagination; at most, design can avoid crowding them out. And even that depends on the child, the setting and the way the object enters their life.
So “letting a child be” cannot mean withdrawal.
It cannot mean permissiveness.
It cannot mean abolishing goals.
Sometimes it means teaching.
Sometimes joining.
Sometimes protecting.
Sometimes insisting.
And sometimes leaving an interval open.
A parent encounters childhood twice.
The first time, we do not know how brief it is.
The second time, perhaps we know too well.
We want to prepare our children for what is coming because we have already travelled further down the road.
There is wisdom in that.
There is love in it too.
But childhood is not experienced from the end looking backwards.
To the child, the game is happening now.
The friend is here now.
The story is worth hearing again now.
Perhaps the question is not whether childhood should be structured or free, productive or purposeless.
Most childhoods will contain all of these.
The smaller question is whether, alongside everything we hope children will learn and become, we can leave some room for the reasons that belong to them now.
A game because they want to play it.
A story because they want it again.
An afternoon that may lead somewhere.
Or may simply have been a good afternoon.
Sources and notes
Gheaus, Anca. 2015. ‘Unfinished Adults and Defective Children: On the Nature and Value of Childhood.’ Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9(1). DOI: 10.26556/jesp.v9i1.85. A philosophical argument about childhood’s present value, not evidence for a developmental intervention.
Gray, Peter. 2017. ‘What Exactly Is Play, and Why Is It Such a Powerful Vehicle for Learning?’ Topics in Language Disorders 37(3): 217–228. DOI: 10.1097/TLD.0000000000000130. A conceptual account of play, including intrinsic motivation and the distinction between an activity’s internal purposes and external rewards.
Skene, Kayleigh, Christine M. O’Farrelly, Elizabeth M. Byrne, Natalie Kirby, Eloise C. Stevens and Paul G. Ramchandani. 2022. ‘Can Guidance During Play Enhance Children’s Learning and Development in Educational Contexts? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.’ Child Development 93(4): 1162–1180. DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13730. The review covered 39 studies; 17 entered the meta-analysis. Advantages concerned particular outcomes, not the universal superiority of guided play. The concluding sentence in the essay is an interpretation of the review.
Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. 2020. ‘Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation from a Self-determination Theory Perspective: Definitions, Theory, Practices, and Future Directions.’ Contemporary Educational Psychology 61: 101860. DOI: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101860. The piano example is illustrative, not a case reported in this paper.
Lareau, Annette. 2002. ‘Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families.’ American Sociological Review 67(5): 747–776. DOI: 10.1177/000312240206700507. Ethnographic evidence about American families and institutional interactions; not a universal description of parents.
Mahoney, Joseph L., and Andrea E. Vest. 2012. ‘The Over-Scheduling Hypothesis Revisited: Intensity of Organized Activity Participation During Adolescence and Young Adult Outcomes.’ Journal of Research on Adolescence 22(3): 409–418. DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-7795.2012.00808.x. This observational study concerns adolescents and later outcomes. It challenges a general equation of busy schedules with harm; it cannot establish what schedule is appropriate for an individual younger child.
King, Pete, and Justine Howard. 2014 (online 2012). ‘Children’s Perceptions of Choice in Relation to Their Play at Home, in the School Playground and at the Out-of-School Club.’ Children & Society 28(2): 116–127. DOI: 10.1111/j.1099-0860.2012.00455.x. Children’s structured play diaries support the discussion of perceived choice across contexts; this was not a causal experiment.
United Nations. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 31. Treaty text, OHCHR. The article recognises rest, leisure, play, recreation, cultural life and the arts; it contains no requirement to demonstrate a developmental return.
UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. 2013. General Comment No. 17 on the Right of the Child to Rest, Leisure, Play, Recreational Activities, Cultural Life and the Arts (art. 31), CRC/C/GC/17, 17 April, especially paragraphs 9 and 14(c). UN document via Refworld. This is the Committee’s interpretation of the Convention, not a developmental experiment.
Lillard, Angeline S., Matthew D. Lerner, Emily J. Hopkins, Rebecca A. Dore, Eric D. Smith and Carolyn M. Palmquist. 2013 (online 2012). ‘The Impact of Pretend Play on Children’s Development: A Review of the Evidence.’ Psychological Bulletin 139(1): 1–34. DOI: 10.1037/a0029321. Read alongside Smits-van der Nat, Mireille, Femke van der Wilt, Martijn Meeter and Chiel van der Veen. 2024. ‘The Value of Pretend Play for Social Competence in Early Childhood: A Meta-analysis.’ Educational Psychology Review 36: 46. DOI: 10.1007/s10648-024-09884-z. The latter synthesised 34 studies of children aged 3–8; predominantly cross-sectional designs limit causal interpretation. Neither source establishes that play has no value.
Zeißig, Anke, Julia Kansok-Dusche, Saskia M. Fischer, Julia Moeller and Ludwig Bilz. 2024. ‘The Association Between Boredom and Creativity in Educational Contexts: A Scoping Review on Research Approaches and Empirical Findings.’ Review of Education 12: e3470. DOI: 10.1002/rev3.3470. Nineteen publications contained 27 empirical studies. Results and methods varied; the review does not establish a reliable prescription that making children bored increases creativity.
McVarnock, Alicia, Tiffany Cheng, Laura Polakova and Robert J. Coplan. 2023. ‘Are You Alone? Measuring Solitude in Childhood, Adolescence, and Emerging Adulthood.’ Frontiers in Psychiatry 14: 1179677. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1179677. Distinguishes time alone from motivations for solitude and from withdrawal. The essay’s rejection of ‘superior imagination’ is a limit on what can be inferred, not a finding that solitude reduces imagination.
Wolbert, Lynne, Doret de Ruyter and Anders Schinkel. 2021. ‘The Flourishing Child.’ Journal of Philosophy of Education 55(4–5): 698–709. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9752.12561. See also Gheaus in note 1. These philosophical accounts inform the discussion of present goods and future interests; the imagined afternoon is the essay’s own thought experiment.