Unstructured play for kids: better for development

Children who spend more time in less-structured activities — from playing outside to reading books to visiting the zoo — are better able to set their own goals and take actions to meet those goals, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The study was published earlier this Summer in the on-line journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Senior author of the study, Yuko Munakata says that the more time kids spend in less structured activities, the better their self-directed executive functioning.