The Value of Summer Play: Why Summer Is Great For Your Child’s Brain
Summer is a welcome, but worrying, time of rest for many. From working adults balancing end-of-quarter goals to students seeking productivity and growth, it seems the only people who get a real “summer break” are children. However, even they don’t get off easy. Parents still, understandably, worry about what they’re losing. While parents typically fill this time with camps, lessons. and playdates with friends, I often still hear them discussing their children’s academic performance outside of the academic year. Every June, parent WhatsApps and PTA meetings echo: Will my child lose everything they learned this year? It’s an earnest and fair question, but it relies on a fundamental misunderstanding about how learning works. According to neuroscience, the truth is so much more interesting! It’s easy to assume that a break from school is a break from learning, but the brain doesn’t really take summers off like we do. Neither does one of its favorite exercises: play. Let’s talk about it.
The brain is nowhere near “off” during summer
Neurons are firing and rewiring constantly, whether a kid is doing a math worksheet or building a fort out of couch cushions. Interestingly, our brains don't really distinguish between "school learning" and "life learning" in the same way as a report card — or even modern social culture. Researchers studying educational neuroscience have pointed out that both formal and informal learning are driven by the same underlying process called neuroplasticity, which reshapes the brain's structure and function in response to experience. The point is: Neurons are firing and rewiring constantly, so a child’s brain, like any other, never simply pauses and ceases to learn. The time a child spends building a pillow fort contributes to the same neural architecture that geometry, geography, and grammar do.
Play is brain training!
It’s easy to think of play as something on the far end of a spectrum between productive and unproductive, or even between learning and wasting time. It’s something we were taught we get to do after the “real” work is done, after we’ve tired ourselves out with some serious thinking. But neuroscience disagrees pretty strongly. Play is one of the most effective exercises for executive function, which is a set of skills that allows children to manage their own thinking and behavior. This includes planning, self-control, problem-solving, and creativity, to name a few of the skills. Children learn, through play, who gets to go next in line, what they should build first, when to press a button, where to find the right materials, why they shouldn’t knock over someone else’s work, and most importantly, how to invent their own little world out of nothing and live in it.
Play puts a child in charge of a low-stakes world or system without major consequences. Making a Jenga tower fall may be disappointing, but it doesn’t feel like a major setback the way a wrong answer on an exam can. Children take in information about the system and automatically try, fail, and adjust, training themselves subconsciously for the very things we strive to do as adults. This is the loop that strengthens executive function! Pretend play deserves a special mention! When a child roleplays and invents something, they’re doing something cognitively demanding: creating a cognitive map, holding a fictional scene consistent, and improvising conversation with other kids. Roleplays train flexible and critical thinking, nicely dressed up as make-believe.
None of these skills will show up in school in August on a multiplication quiz or a spelling test, but I’d argue they’re more important than that because they’re the foundation of just about everything else, from the ability to sit still enough to take that spelling test to the quick thinking and problem-solving it takes to solve a tough algebra problem.
Summer learning loss is a real thing, and it makes sense for parents to worry about their children’s retention. Of course, more lessons, worksheets, and practices can do a lot of good during the academic off-season — and Learning Buddies Network can help your kids through those! But remember, a summer of new experiences and whimsy does some serious cognitive work too.