I run Playborhood, which is a family of online communities devoted to encouraging parents to let their kids play outside in their neighborhoods. You can find our main site at http://playborhood.com.

I wrote the following email to Robin Henig, the author of the NYT Magazine article you cite. She responded, but what she said was decidedly underwhelming:

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I have a couple comments regarding your NYT Magazine article on play. First, you didn’t mention the following justification for letting kids play: because it’s fun for kids. In other words, this justification is concerned not with secondary benefits, but purely the happiness of the child. I think it’s tragic that parents in our society doesn’t seem to care about kids as they are. Rather they seem to care primarily about their vision of what they want their kids to be decades in the future.

We ran a survey at Playborhood on this topic, and I’ll provide you with two links to results below. The first confirms that parents aren’t happy with the amount of play their kids have, and the second discusses why they want their kids to play (top answer: fun!):

http://playborhood.com/site/article/playborhood_survey_i_kids_arent_playing_much/
http://playborhood.com/site/article/playborhood_survey_ii_parents_just_want_girls_and_boys_to_have_fun/

Lastly, I want to say that I fundamentally disagree with the premise of the very last paragraph of your article, where you say it’s a simple “matter of trade-offs” between hours of play versus hours for achievement. Because of the positive effect on emotional well-being of play, there isn’t a zero-sum substitution between play and academic achievement. Insofar as play makes kids happy, it can raise the overall level of their performance in their life.

I’m sure you’re aware of studies of longevity and happiness. Basically, happy people live longer. Similarly, I’d posit that happy kids do better in school, at least in the long run (after we account for the time it takes for emotional problems to take their toll), and kids who play are happier, in general. I don’t have hard data on this, but, well, this makes a heck of a lot of sense to me.
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WONDERFUL article, Betsy! SURE took me back in time….just wish I could do it all over again…and do it JUST THE SAME way!!! I think we must have grown up in the same neighborhood…;-)

(Wish now I would have paid more attention to you!)

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