Are kids getting too soft these days, coddled by iPads and AI chatbots?
In New York City, the Wall Street Journal reports, some parents are sending their children to the ultimate screen-free experience: a junkyard playground called “The Yard” where they’re let off the leash and free to do proper adolescent activities like roll around in mud, scrape their knees — and, of course, screw around with random bits of scrap.
They’re not punching digital trees or vegging out to vertical videos, but playing with actual saws and hammers and knives, just as God — or adults whose conception of childhood is shaped by repeat viewings of “Stand By Me,” “The Sandlot,” and “The Goonies” — intended.
Adult “playworkers” supervise the youth from a distance, but otherwise try not to butt in. This is “unstructured playtime.” Let kids do what they want so they can start building some of the independence that’ll carry them through life, the thinking goes. Parents bring them here to save their offspring from the perils of screen time. (Kids succumbing to a tech dominated world is clearly an anxiety shared by many NYC parents; the WSJ notes another “microschool” that offers parents “worried about AI” a place where their children “can get away from the sensory overload.)
