Kevin Stinehart: Rebuilding Recess and Why Play Is a Developmental Need, Not a Want

Name: Kevin Stinehart: Rebuilding Recess and Why Play Is a Developmental Need, Not a Want
Uploaded: 2026-06-15
Duration: 38 min 2 s
Description: We engineered the friction out of childhood, then acted surprised when kids could not handle it.

Summary

We engineered the friction out of childhood, then acted surprised when kids could not handle it.

Kevin Stinehart teaches third grade at Central Academy of the Arts in Pickens County, South Carolina, and is featured in chapter 11 of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. A District Teacher of the Year and Golden Apple Award winner, he founded his school's Let Grow Play Club: a before and after school program with no budget and no curriculum, where he opens the playground and lets kids play.

In this conversation with host Ryan Vet, Kevin makes the case that play is not a want but a developmental need. They dig into what happens when you give children back unstructured time, why many behavior problems are really design problems, and why the creativity play builds matters more in the age of AI, not less. Ryan ties it to his Loss of Friction thesis: the friction of real play builds capacities kids cannot learn any other way.

Key takeaways

Play is a developmental need, not a reward to be earned. Removing unstructured time removes the friction where kids build real capacities.

The Let Grow Play Club runs on no budget and no curriculum. You open the playground before and after school and let kids play.

After the club started at Kevin's school, physical incidents dropped from about 65 to 32 in a single year, with 100 percent parent approval on the report card.

Many behavior issues are not behavior issues. They are a consequence of school systems not designed around healthy child development.

Finland runs a 45-15 model all day, 45 minutes of instruction and 15 of recess. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends 60 minutes of play a day.

Terms defined

Plain-language definitions for the ideas in this episode. Structured for search and AI answers.

Let Grow Play Club noun · program

A before and after school program with no budget and no curriculum, where an adult opens the playground and lets children play freely.

In this episode: Kevin founded his school's club; incidents fell and parents approved.

Loss of Friction noun · framework by Ryan Vet

The idea that removing every obstacle and difficulty from life also removes the formation of character, resilience, and skill.

In this episode: Play is where kids meet the friction that builds capacities they cannot learn any other way.

the 45-15 model noun · education

Finland's schedule of 45 minutes of instruction followed by 15 minutes of recess, repeated throughout the day.

In this episode: Offered as a contrast to the American approach to recess.

park ranger, not cruise director metaphor

A mindset for adults: cultivate and protect what is growing rather than control or entertain it.

In this episode: Kevin's image for the shift teachers and parents need to make around play.

The guest

Kevin Stinehart

Third-grade teacher · Play advocate

Kevin Stinehart is a third-grade teacher and play advocate featured in Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. His work focuses on rebuilding recess and unstructured play as a developmental need, not a want.

Profile & episodes

Transcript

00:00 From struggling student to award-winning teacher

Ryan Vet · Welcome to another episode of The Ryan Vet Show. I'm so excited to have Kevin Stinehart with me today. He is actively a third-grade teacher at Central Academy of the Arts in Pickens County, South Carolina, and he has done some incredible, revolutionary work. I say revolutionary because it seems countercultural right now, but it goes back to the very basics of what kids need. I often say we are raising adults. Kids know how to be kids, but a lot of modernity has excluded them from being kids. We've put them in front of screens, introduced rigid schedules, and some of the simplest, most basic forms of childhood have been removed. Kevin has been very vocal and done incredible research on helping kids get out and be kids again, play, and really live life to the fullest. So Kevin, thanks so much for joining me today.

Kevin Stinehart · Man, thank you. So appreciate it, Ryan.

Ryan Vet · What I love about your story and a lot of your work is that at the core, you're still a practitioner. You're still a teacher every single day, and you're seeing the impact of your work. So could you give your origin story, where this passion came from to see kids play, get out, and do what kids need to do?

Kevin Stinehart · It really originally started with being a student myself. I really struggled in school. I had ADHD before we knew what that was or had words for it. So I didn't like school, and I think a lot of my teachers probably didn't like me. I was very active, needed to move, needed to talk. When I finally graduated, so many people over the years, my parents included, said, you need to go back and be a teacher. And I was like, why would I be a teacher? I don't even like school. They said, you're so good with kids. So it was a long, winding road. I got my undergrad in film and video production, and then finally realized everyone was right and I should have become a teacher. When I switched careers, I noticed a lot of the veteran teachers talking about how kids today are so different than kids in the past. Through asking questions, making observations, and then having my own daughters, I noticed a lot of kids really are struggling today. When I dug into that, that's where I started to see that the developmental conditions our kids are growing up with are very different than what I was raised with. I'm an elder millennial, and all past generations really had a play-based childhood growing up, and a lot of kids today are not having that.

02:35 What a play-based childhood actually means

Ryan Vet · Let's talk about play-based childhood, your core thesis. What is that? A lot of people, especially those who haven't seen your work cited by books like The Anxious Generation, would say, well, my kids play, they're playing video games, they're playing with friends, they're socializing. And that's not what you're talking about. Could you define your thesis on play-based childhood?

Kevin Stinehart · Essentially, a play-based childhood is what all previous generations had since the dawn of humanity up until now, where kids spent copious amounts of time in unstructured free play with peers. In my context, in the eighties growing up in West Michigan, we went out after school for hours and played until the streetlights came on, or until our parents called us in for dinner. When I added it up, I was spending just as much time in unstructured free play with kids around my neighborhood as I was in school, if you count summers and weekends and evenings. We thought we were just having fun, because kids have a natural drive to play, even if we don't always see it, especially modern kids, where a lot of that is co-opted by algorithms and screens. So a play-based childhood is really just what kids have always been doing. It shouldn't be revolutionary, but it feels revolutionary just to have kids outside a few hours each week if possible, and even if your context doesn't allow that, some time each week to interact with other kids, to hone those interpersonal skills. They don't know they're doing that. They just think they're having fun. And when kids are surveyed, in general they say, I'd much rather hang out in person, but for this reason or that we're not allowed to. So those kids often turn to devices, video games, or social media to get that connection we all need.

04:45 What changed: fear outpaced the facts

Ryan Vet · I completely agree, and I think we have a lot in common. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, you grew up in West Michigan, so those Midwest summer nights were unbeatable. My whole childhood was playing with friends and the freedom we had. We would bike all throughout the suburbs of Chicago as preteens, probably not much older than the kids you currently have in your class. So what do you think changed? Kids haven't changed, but culture and society have. What are some of the major triggers that have changed the way kids see play, and maybe the way parents and even teachers see it?

Kevin Stinehart · That's such a great point, because biologically kids have not changed. So why do we see them looking so different, or struggling in ways we didn't, with higher levels of anxiety and stress? Really it comes down to society changing. There are so many villains. We could throw out the 24-hour news cycle and more fear of crime, even as a lot of crime levels are going down. People are more scared of crime than they were back then. We could talk about milk-carton kids, and how a lot of those kids were actually runaways, but that wasn't clearly stated. It just looked like kids were being kidnapped off the street by random strangers, even though that's incredibly low. The fear of it is incredibly high, and that's the fear I hear the most from parent friends of mine: they might get kidnapped. I'm like, if you look at the history of our town here in central South Carolina, how many kids has that ever happened to? Literally zero. If it was happening, then yes, we should be scared. But if one child gets kidnapped, and that's horrific, obviously it's going to be on the news 24 hours a day for weeks or months, as it should be. But it's not a common thing, and yet the fear of it is very common. As parents get less trusting of neighbors, a lot of parents are not letting their kids go out. So we've had to be really intentional in my family about taking our kids outside, getting them familiar with talking to people, even at a store talking to a sales clerk, making sure they recognize that not all strangers are dangerous. Crime is real, but the level of fear is not at the same place as the crime level.

07:41 Teaching kids the world isn't a scary place

Ryan Vet · In a minute I want to talk about the statistics you've shared, but you just said something interesting. You make your daughters order, make them interact with the cashier. I do that with my own kids, and I think it's so important. Even simple eye contact. We joke about the Gen Z stare, and I want to stay away from stereotyping a whole generational cohort, but there are certain things we've seen dissolve. So when you encourage your own kids to interact with adults, what's going through your head, and what's the why behind it?

Kevin Stinehart · Really the why is getting them to recognize that the world isn't always a scary and dangerous place, that for the most part, most people you encounter are good people. So we tried to instill enough of that from a young age. Now they're older, I have a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old, and they're able to do things a lot of their peers aren't. My daughter can drive by herself, go to a store, buy things off the shopping list. Some of her friends are still nervous to do those things. She can go to the doctor by herself, make her own appointment, talk to the doctor. And not that we're amazing parents, this isn't revolutionary. This is what my parents did with me, and what previous generations did. But for many reasons, parents today aren't necessarily doing all of that. A lot of it was based in the research I was doing around play, as I realized my students were struggling. I found that the way those skills are learned is through real experiences, whether it's a parent-forced experience or, a lot of it, just unstructured free play. If we want kids to have those skills, we have to give them time to practice, and play builds resilience, creativity, problem-solving, social skills, confidence, self-direction, all the things we say we want our kids to have. We've been inadvertently, systematically taking away the experiences that give them those skills.

10:12 Learning through friction

Ryan Vet · Do you think kids encouraged to have these conversations, or to go out and play... A lot of parents would say my 16-year-old daughter driving herself to an appointment is absurd, which it isn't. I was riding my bike at 10, grabbing groceries, riding one-handed with a Coke. Do you think some of these intentional interactions actually make them more streetwise, so that when they're on their own at 12, 14, 16, 18, they're more equipped to be aware of the dangers of the world, but also less fearful? Do you have any research on that, or even anecdotal thoughts?

Kevin Stinehart · As they're encountering things, things often do not go well, and that's kind of the point. That's a good thing. When I set up my daughter, this is how you cross the road safely, this is the route to the coffee shop, and then eventually weaned her off me having to be with her, she was able to go by herself. Not just pushing kids out to do whatever, but training them to be safe and what to do when things don't go well. That's where they learn to adapt. What do I do when this thing happens that I haven't seen before? There are so many stories with my students where I purposely place them together in groups where I know there's going to be friction, because I want that friction. It's through those experiences that they learn those skills. I always tell teachers hesitant about adding more play-based learning: if we want students to have skills, we have to give them time and space to practice them. If I teach math and want them to know their multiplication facts, I have to give them time to practice those facts. It's the same with adaptability, regulation, self-direction, all those things we know are going to be incredibly important in the future, especially as technology assists in so many of the other things.

12:24 The barriers to intentional parenting

Ryan Vet · You used the word intentionality, which I love. Whether you're a policymaker, a teacher, or a parent, there's so much power in intentionality. And sometimes people are hesitant to be intentional in any one of those roles. Why do you think adults are hesitant to be intentional with kids in helping train them? It's not that you're kicking them out of the nest. You're training them, taking those steps, weaning them. So what are some of those barriers to intentionality that you see in leaders of any capacity, teachers, policymakers, parents?

Kevin Stinehart · A lot of what I see with parents, teachers, and administrators is overprotection, for different reasons. For parents, it's because we love our kids, we want them to be safe, we don't want them to have difficulties. But when you look at the psychology of child development, it really is through those tiny scrapings of the knee and tiny conflicts with friends that kids learn to adapt, learn to be capable, learn to be self-reliant, and learn how to work with others. For administrators and teachers, it starts with that too, but a lot of times there's also fear of litigation: what if something happens and someone gets hurt, or someone's feelings get hurt? So a lot of times we're overprotecting, both at school and at home, maybe for different reasons, but the core reason is still the same. We want kids to be happy, grow up, feel loved. Those are good things, but protection can turn into overprotection.

14:04 Why recess is every kid's favorite subject

Ryan Vet · "Protection can turn into overprotection." I love that quote. So one of the things I think is so powerful: whenever you ask a kid what their favorite subject is at school, and I don't know at what age this stops, but I think it goes well into the teenage years, they almost always say recess. Do you think that's a coincidence, or is there something innate in them, that that's where they're learning and growing? Or is it just because they want to get out of the classroom?

Kevin Stinehart · In my very early days, that's exactly what I thought: they just want to get out of the classroom, nobody wants to work. I saw play as very frivolous. That's where my head was originally. But the more research I did, and the more I read from psychologists who have been studying this for decades, it showed me that play is a fundamental need. Kids need to play. Every mammal needs to play. If you've ever had a kitten or a puppy, all they want to do all day is play. It's a need all of us have, people, animals, mammals. But I didn't realize why we had that need. I thought it was just to depressurize from the struggles of the day. When I started to piece together what others had said, I recognized this is where kids learn those crucial capacities and characteristics we want them to have when they grow up. For example, it's not that I don't teach my daughters directly, or never give them a lecture about why it's important to be trustworthy or ethical. But when kids learn those things naturally through unstructured free play, like things I see in my play club, a kid who might cheat time after time, breaks the rules, and then all of a sudden no one wants to play with them, they internalize the message: it's really important to be a person of integrity. We could do social-emotional lessons, have a poster on the wall about why integrity is important. But it's not until they experience things in real situations that they internalize that message and actually learn it for themselves.

16:36 Inside the Let Grow Play Club

Ryan Vet · You brought up your play club, so I want to hear about that. And it's not just your school now. I had a conversation with a headmaster at a K-through-12 private school who cited some of your work, and how they're revamping their entire school schedule to include more structured play. They've opened up drop-off early and allow kids of all ages out on the playground together, where before that was confined to certain grade levels. A lot of people use the word frivolous, but the data shows otherwise. So first, let's talk about your play club, then let's dive into the stats of the impact it's making.

Kevin Stinehart · There's a nonprofit called Let Grow, and they came up with this model of Play Club. Technically the name is Let Grow Play Club. We use their model exactly. They have tons of free resources and implementation guides, and this is now our seventh year. Basically it's just time before and after school for unstructured free play. The great thing is that it's completely adaptable to whatever your context is. For us, it was easy to open up our school playground from 7:30 to 8:00, because kids are already in the car-rider line at 7:30, but we don't open the doors until 8:00. So rather than make them sit, why not let them play? We also have an hour-and-a-half play club after school where it's mixed-age play, and that's another big component the research says a lot of kids today are not getting. When you and I went outside, it probably wasn't the same-age kid all the time. You had a couple of younger kids, a couple of older kids, and there are huge benefits in that for both. We've seen incredible results. We were the first in South Carolina to implement it, but other states have had play clubs and it's been incredibly successful. Our school culture has been incredible. We're actually, I think, the first school ever to get 100% parent feedback on our school report card. In public education, there's never 100% approval on anything, especially in divisive times. And the great thing about Play Club is that it's before and after school, so you're not taking time away from instruction, you're not taking funds away from anything, you're not having to prep for it, because the kids do all the work. It's completely unstructured free play. The teachers are just there as lifeguards to step in if something really happens. But fortunately, things very rarely happen. The kids just play.

19:54 The data: fewer incidents, happier school

Ryan Vet · If a lot of listeners who are elder millennials, Gen X, boomers, and some Gen Z think of our own childhood, that was the play we had, and we're all here. We survived. It was okay. But you talked about the 100% participation on the report card, which is profound. And that's not the only interesting statistic. You saw massive improvements in specific categories: physical acts, kicking, hitting, pushing. Bus violations. Within Play Club you talked about physical acts. You had about 65 one year, the following year 32, so it got cut by more than half. How does that work? Tell us what's going on in a kid's brain. This doesn't mean the kids aren't hitting, pushing, kicking, they're still doing it at least once. So how does that change, and what's the real timeframe?

Kevin Stinehart · Absolutely. Most of those come from our boy students who are a lot like me when I was growing up: need to move, need to get out energy, need to communicate. When our school systems are not aligned to the developmental needs of our students, we're of course going to have issues, and issues for kids come out as behaviors.

21:26 Behaviors that aren't really behaviors

Kevin Stinehart · A lot of what we see across public school systems are behaviors that aren't necessarily behaviors, even though we quantify them as those. For example, if one of my students gets out of their seat after sitting for an hour doing math work and goes over to talk to a friend, they'd be documented as this kid is not compliant, they're misbehaving. But developmentally, kids need to move. They need to talk to friends. They need other kinds of brain stimulation besides just math. Not saying math is not important, but they're hardwired to move, to communicate. So when our system doesn't recognize that, of course we're going to have issues. A lot of our behavior issues are not necessarily behavior issues. They're a consequence of school systems not being designed around healthy child development. There are so many countries way ahead of us on this. I got to visit Finnish public schools a few years ago, where they do the 45-15 model: 45 minutes of instruction and then a 15-minute recess, all day, every day. Their behaviors obviously are far fewer than ours, because they're able to get the movement, interaction, and communication they need. So when they come into the classroom, they come in ready to sit and focus. Whereas if they've been in a classroom for three hours listening to me drone on, even if I try to switch it up, it's still not developmentally appropriate for kids to sit in seats for hours on end. So a lot of what we saw when we implemented Play Club made sense biologically. When we give kids time and space to move and interact, not only are they learning interpersonal skills, communication, how to negotiate, how to be resilient, they're actually more prepared for academic settings. Even in that same day, if they've played for half an hour, talked about the football game last night, then they don't come into my classroom needing to talk about those things, because they've already had the chance. So obviously those behaviors are going to go down.

24:17 Adult-led all day: what kids are missing

Ryan Vet · I think Steve Jobs actually had an interesting take on this. There's a book called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, and they analyzed countless presentations, and Steve Jobs wouldn't talk more than a certain amount of time before putting in a video or a product demonstration, because he knew our brains couldn't handle it. And this is sophisticated adults we're talking about. You can see the timetables of each of his presentations, and like clockwork there was always something breaking it up. One of the quotes I love from your work, you were talking about how kids need time to be kids, and we don't need time to do other things. And I've totally lost the quote here.

Kevin Stinehart · Yeah, you're good.

Ryan Vet · Do you know which quote I'm thinking of?

Kevin Stinehart · I mean, it is true. Kids need to be able to not just be in adult-led systems all the time. When our kids come to us, they're being led by adults all day. They get home and they're being led by adults as well, by their parents. Or if they're lucky enough to do an after-school activity, it's almost always still an adult-run activity, whether it's learning a musical instrument, or tutoring, or going to soccer. Not that any of that is bad, but they're going from one adult-led system to the next, and then maybe a screen for an hour before bed. Kids aren't having time to just experience childhood, to find out what they even care about, what their passions are, to communicate with other kids. And especially as AI becomes more of a thing all of us are using, some of those skills are going to be more important, some less important. AI can do some of those things far faster than our human brains can. But the things that are built through play, those capacities like creativity, adaptability, and learning how to be self-directed, are going to be more important in the future. They're already important, but as we see the way things are going, they're going to be even more important.

26:49 What AI means for play

Ryan Vet · Since we're talking about AI briefly, we saw technology emerge, whether you start with video games or the computer. And in The Anxious Generation, it kind of hinges on the year 2012 and that major change with social media adoption, a tipping point. Where do you think AI is going to take this play-based learning? What are some of the dangers, warnings, or cautions you'd throw out to those in roles where they're influencing the next generation, so we don't have a repeat of what we did with social media and cell phones?

Kevin Stinehart · There are so many takes on this right now. We see some countries going completely the anti-tech route, getting rid of computers completely in the classroom. I want to say it was Sweden that announced that a few months ago. And then others are leaning into it. You have alpha schools now that are almost entirely technology-based for part of the day and then project-based for the rest. So there are so many philosophies. But really, at the end of the day, no matter what, we need to recognize the biology of our kids: they need to move, they need to interact, they need to play. All the things that are as ancient as people themselves, that kids have done, they're going to continue to need to do. You can develop apps, you can develop so many things trying to teach those skills, but nothing's going to come as close as the real stuff, organic, child-led play. That is still going to be supreme no matter what happens.

28:25 Why taking recess away as punishment backfires

Ryan Vet · Now I want to ask one last question about recess. In some of your work and your Substack, you've talked about the idea that banning recess, or taking it away as a consequence, is actually far worse than allowing the kid to participate and finding an alternative consequence. Can you talk a little about that? It's a huge paradigm shift for many. It's like, don't let the kid have fun, punish them. But really, you're saying that could be more detrimental than helpful.

Kevin Stinehart · Absolutely. And I know why teachers do it, because kids really want to play with their friends. Most teachers would see that as a want. I would see it as a need. So teachers think, this is the one leverage I have: if you don't do this math worksheet, you don't get recess. For most kids, that's going to motivate them. But we've seen too much how it backfires. I had a student years ago who frequently had behavioral issues. He had three different office referrals from three different teachers over the course of a week, so he was constantly being punished by having his recess taken away. He was a kid who walked around with a chip on his shoulder, didn't really have any social connections. I couldn't change the whole system, but I could invite that kid to Play Club. I sat down with his parent and asked, would she sign him up? And she said, absolutely. So for the first hour, he did what we all thought he'd do. He just walked around, arms crossed, chip on the shoulder. But then somebody kicked him a ball and he kicked it back. Then he started running with another kid, and we don't really get to see him run very much. Then he started smiling. We never saw this kid smile. Eventually, by the end of Play Club, he was laughing. The teacher supervising with me had tears in her eyes, because it was such a dramatic change. After just an hour and a half of play, he started to make social connections. As time went by, week after week, he's making friends. He's finding his place in our school community. And through play, those behaviors actually completely went away. He never had another office referral for the rest of his time at our school. And from all accounts, he's doing great in middle school and now high school. It was a fundamental shift when we stopped looking at play as just a want and started looking at it as a need, that it's in play that kids have those needs satisfied, needs for connection, communication, and movement. When we look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, schools do a really good job at those base levels. We provide a safe building, often free breakfast and free lunch. Then we want to jump all the way up to academics, and we skip those middle levels of belonging, feeling loved, feeling cared for. I think we assume as a school system that kids are still getting that outside of school, which when you and I were growing up, we were. But society has changed so much that most kids are not, and schools are their one chance to be around other kids face-to-face. So we can talk about how much recess is important each day. The American Academy of Pediatrics says 60 minutes a day, whether that's through recess, or, like in my school, before and after school as well as recess. I don't really care exactly which time of day it is, as long as they're getting breaks throughout the day.

32:23 Practical steps: boredom, trust, and less refereeing

Ryan Vet · One of the things I want to land on is that this is not hard nor expensive. For so long we had many, and I'd say great, initiatives in schools where they had to get budgets for computer labs. I remember when my middle school got the colored iMacs and overhauled our computer lab, and that was a big deal that took years of funding. But this is something more rudimentary. So as we wrap up, I'd love you to think of policymakers, parents, and teachers. What advice do you have for them, and what resources do you have to share to start implementing this today?

Kevin Stinehart · For parents, probably the biggest advice I have is to allow for more boredom. My wife always tells my daughters on the first day of summer vacation, I'm not your cruise director. Try to take off that cruise-director hat as a parent, and look at yourself more like a park ranger. I'm here not to control the wildlife, but to make sure that if things get out of hand I can jump in, I can step in, but I'm just here to cultivate what's growing. I'm not here to control it. Another is more trust as kids are developmentally ready for it. I don't let my toddler walk to the coffee shop by herself, but now that she's 12 and I've trained her how to do it, she's able to. So more trust at developmentally appropriate ages and stages. Even having that dialogue. I've had it many times with my own daughters, just saying, what do you think you're ready for that we haven't let you do yet? And oftentimes it starts pretty simple, like popping a bag of popcorn in the microwave. Those things snowball, and as they gain independence and realize, oh, I can do things for myself, it really transforms the way they see themselves. Also, more unstructured time with peers is huge, before school, after school, during school. If you're a school leader, recognizing that schools really are the only place, sadly, that a lot of kids have time with peers. So if you're not able to change the whole system and give more recess, where can you sneak it in? As a teacher, my principal will tell you I was sneaking a couple of minutes every day after recess. Just doing what we can within the system to make things as healthy as possible for child development. And then just less curating of every moment, less adult direction and more kid direction as much as possible, using our own wisdom now that we're the adults to sense what's appropriate. Less refereeing and being the judge is a huge one, whether it's through siblings or, if you're a teacher, letting kids work things out for themselves, because it's not until they have those moments of friction that they'll learn those capacities and skills.

35:56 Where to find Kevin Stinehart's work

Ryan Vet · That's so helpful, Kevin. Well, how can people find more of your work? Where would you point them for resources for their own home, school, church, community, wherever they might have a gathering of people?

Kevin Stinehart · I'm glad you brought up churches, because there are so many other components in a community besides the school. Parks and rec departments can do their part, churches can do their part to provide an open space. Our church, for example, has a lot of space that on weekdays is pretty open. Could we provide some play for kids? Same for a parks and rec department: instead of just offering organized sports, and nothing against organized sports, you could offer play every Saturday from nine to ten, open free play, bring a basketball, bring whatever you want, screen-free time for just open play. As far as finding my work goes, if you just search my name, Kevin Stinehart, S-T-I-N-E-H-A-R-T, you can find my work on LinkedIn and on Substack, where I've written several articles.

Ryan Vet · That's awesome, Kevin. Well, I appreciate it, and I want to thank you for all you've done in your work and your school. You've been district-wide Teacher of the Year, a South Carolina State Teacher of the Year candidate, and a Golden Apple Award-winning teacher. You've done a lot for your school, your community, your own family, and the way you're training your daughters. Thank you for sharing it with the world, helping us with a concept that shouldn't be revolutionary but seems so groundbreaking. And yet it's how most of us who are now parents or grandparents grew up. So thank you so much for your time and for investing in the next generation.

Kevin Stinehart · Absolutely, thank you so much, Ryan.

Ryan Vet · Well, thank you everyone for tuning into this episode of The Ryan Vet Show. Until next time, I'm Ryan.

Frequently asked

Who is Kevin Stinehart? +

He is a third grade teacher at Central Academy of the Arts in Pickens County, South Carolina, a District Teacher of the Year and Golden Apple Award winner, and the founder of his school's Let Grow Play Club. He is featured in chapter 11 of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation.

What is the Let Grow Play Club? +

It is a before and after school program with no budget and no curriculum. An adult opens the playground and lets children play without structure, which Kevin argues rebuilds skills that structured time cannot.

Does unstructured play actually reduce behavior problems? +

At Kevin's school, physical incidents dropped from about 65 to 32 in a single year after the club started, and the program earned 100 percent parent approval. He argues many behavior issues come from systems not designed around how children develop.

Why does play matter more in the age of AI? +

Kevin and Ryan argue that the creativity and adaptability unstructured play builds become more valuable as AI automates routine work, not less.

Resources mentioned

Books

Cover

The Anxious Generation Jonathan Haidt

Also mentioned

Nonprofit Let Grow — letgrow.org →

Research American Academy of Pediatrics: 60 minutes of play a day

Parenting & childhood Raising the Next Generation: restoring friction →

Full show notes

We engineered the friction out of childhood, then acted surprised when kids could not handle it. Kevin Stinehart, the third grade teacher and play advocate featured in chapter 11 of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, joins The Ryan Vet Show to make the case that play is not a want. It is a developmental need.

Kevin Stinehart teaches third grade at Central Academy of the Arts in Pickens County, South Carolina. He is a District Teacher of the Year, a South Carolina State Teacher of the Year candidate, and a Golden Apple Award winner. He also founded his school’s Let Grow Play Club, a before and after school program with no budget and no curriculum. He opens the playground and lets kids play. In this conversation with host Ryan Vet, Kevin walks through what happens when you give children back unstructured time, and why the results are anything but soft.

The data is the part that stops people. Inside the Play Club, physical incidents dropped from about 65 in one year to 32 the next, cut by more than half. The school hit 100 percent parent approval on its report card, a number that almost never happens in public education. And Kevin reframes the behavior conversation entirely. A lot of what gets labeled a discipline problem, he argues, is really a design problem. The third grader who cannot sit still after an hour of math is not misbehaving. He is doing what a developing brain is wired to do inside a system that was never built around healthy child development.

Ryan connects this directly to his Loss of Friction thesis. Every scraped knee, every argument with a friend, every game where the rules break down is a rep. That is where kids build the capacity to adapt. Remove the friction and you remove the practice. Kevin’s fix is not expensive, it is a mindset shift: stop being the cruise director, start being the park ranger. As he puts it, he is not there to control the wildlife, he is there to cultivate what is already growing.

The conversation closes on why this matters more now, not less. AI will do the fast, factual work faster than any human brain. The capacities built through play, creativity, adaptability, and self direction, are exactly the things that get more valuable from here. Play was never frivolous. It is how kids become capable.

In this episode:

Why protection can quietly turn into overprotection, and how to tell the differenceThe Let Grow Play Club model: no budget, no curriculum, just unstructured play before and after schoolThe data behind the club: physical incidents cut from about 65 to 32 in a single year, and 100 percent parent approval on the school report cardWhy a lot of behavior issues are not behavior issues at all, but a consequence of school systems not designed around healthy child developmentFinland’s 45-15 model: 45 minutes of instruction, 15 minutes of recess, all day longThe American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation of 60 minutes of play a dayThe park ranger versus cruise director mindset for parents and teachersHow friction in play builds the capacities kids cannot learn any other wayWhy play and the skills it builds, creativity and adaptability, become more important in the age of AI, not lessWhat it means to treat play as a fundamental need rather than a reward to be earnedReferenced in this episode:

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Kevin is featured in chapter 11)Let Grow: letgrow.orgCentral Academy of the Arts, Pickens County, South CarolinaFinland’s 45-15 recess modelAmerican Academy of Pediatrics: 60 minutes of play a dayConnect with Ryan Vet:

Website: ryanvet.comCOLLIDE Newsletter: ryanvet.com/collideLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanvetInstagram: instagram.com/ryancvetBook Ryan as a Keynote Speaker: ryanvet.com/generational-speakerSubscribe to The Ryan Vet Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. The guest era continues every Monday at 6am ET. Next week: Lenore Skenazy, founder of Free Range Kids and president of Let Grow, on why we stopped trusting kids with independence and how to give it back. The COLLIDE essay podcast continues every Thursday at 7am ET.

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About Ryan VetRyan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold.

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Kevin Stinehart: Rebuilding Recess and Why Play Is a Developmental Need, Not a Want

Kevin Stinehart

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