Give the Kids a Break! Why Children Need Free Time at School
Creating a Happy Class
Do you ever wonder if your students actually need a recess?
No? Yeah, me neither.
And prior to getting started writing this blog post, I didn’t think anyone else wondered about it, either. In fact, I was so sure that no one was asking this question, that I honestly had no plans to write on this topic at all. I actually started researching this blog post with an entirely different set of questions in mind - questions like how long a break do students need? Or, how should breaks be spaced out? Or, where should they be spent? I even jotted down in my notes that there was “no need to get into why we have breaks” because “teachers and parents already understand children need breaks.”
I suppose it was naive of me, but I just assumed that children having unstructured free time at school wasn’t a contentious topic. I mean, I’d never personally encountered any elementary schools in either Canada or South Korea (where I spent almost a decade) that don't have daily recess, and it just hadn’t occurred to me that there might be schools without them. It wasn't until I stumbled on an observational study from a “no-recess school district” in Atlanta that I even realized that break time for young students was up for debate.
But as I clicked and scrolled my way through teacher forums and newspaper articles about the American education system, I discovered that I had been very wrong in my assumptions. Schools with little or no unstructured free time for children don’t just exist — they are disturbingly commonplace. Statistics are hard to come by, but a found a few sources that suggested close to ten percent of schools had no regularly scheduled recess.
I didn’t think giving children unstructured free time at school was a contentious topic, but it turns out that there are many schools throughout America where students are granted little or no recess at all. Image by Freepik.
Meanwhile, schools that do have designated free time for children are providing far less of it than they used to - schools that do have scheduled breaks give students an average of about 27 minutes of free play time per day. This is less than half of the 60-90 minutes children were getting in the 1980s and 90s.
So what happened to recess? That’s a big complicated questions, but suffice to say, no one set out to get rid of it. Rather, recess was collateral damage - a casualty of government policies that placed undue emphasis on standardized tests, and school districts taking drastic measures to improve student performance. Nor did we lose recess in one fell swoop. Instead, schools slowly chipped away at free time for kids, hoping that more class time would translate to higher test scores.
We are beginning to see a reversal of this trend now, but the damage runs deep. The vast majority of states still have no regulations guaranteeing recess to students. A shocking number of schools still offer no daily recess at all, and many continue to provide even less than the CDC’s minimum recommendation of a paltry twenty minutes a day. Meanwhile, a growing trend of structured recess - where private companies plan and manage recess for students - means that even schools that do have enough quote-unquote “recess” are not necessarily providing free and unstructured play time for students.
And though change is coming, it’s not coming fast enough for the children who are in school today. In spite of a plethora of research to the contrary, some education leaders and policymakers continue to treat recess as unnecessary, or a privilege granted to students, rather than crucial for a child’s health, well-being and development.
In spite of a plethora of research to the contrary, some education leaders and policymakers continue to treat recess as unnecessary, or a privilege granted to students, rather than crucial for a child’s health, well-being and development. Image by Fabian Centeno on Unsplash.
Or, maybe more often, they just don’t understand why recess is an issue worthy of their notice. In 2016, for example, one state governor vetoed legislation to make recess mandatory for primary and junior students because it was “a stupid bill”, arguing that “with all the other problems we have to deal with, my Legislature is worried about recess for kids from kindergarten to fifth grade”.
And it’s not just policymakers who devalue recess, as it turns out. Of course, this is just anecdotal, but discussing this with topic with some of my own acquaintances, I got some surprising reactions to the idea of mandatory free time for students. Certainly, everyone seemed to agree that children ideally should have recess. And yet, a surprising number voiced the opinion to me that reducing recess in favour of more class time “makes sense” or “seems logical”, where student performances are lagging; several thought it was natural for teachers to withhold recess as a punishment for children; and some thought that adult-organized recess actually sounded preferable to unstructured free time.
The more I delved into this topic, the more it was becoming clear to me that student break time isn’t a given, the way I assumed it was, and that we really do need to talk about why children need unstructured free time during the school day.
So, let’s talk about it. What are the benefits of break time for children at school? How to they impact a child’s performance at school? Are they really necessary?
Why Breaks are necessary for health and well-being
How breaks improve student performance
How breaks help children learn
Breaks may be important for
Cognitive Fatigue
For one thing, taking breaks can actually contribute to both our mental and physical well-being.
I know we don’t tend to think about studying or office work as particularly strenuous activity. But here’s the thing - it actually is. And if you’ve ever come home tired after a hard day at your desk, or a long stretch of time studying in the library, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. Days like that can leave you feeling completely exhausted, in spite of having barely left your chair.
This phenomenon is known as cognitive fatigue, and it is essentially tiredness or energy depletion caused by prolonged challenging mental activity. This mental activity could be anything that has your brain working on overtime, be it studying, essay writing, piano practice, or even less deliberate tasks, like anxious worrying.
Cognitive fatigue is tiredness or lack of energy caused by sustained mental activity. This mental activity could be anything that has your brain working on overtime. Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik
And an important thing to know is that persistent cognitive fatigue is not good for our mental, emotional or physical wellbeing. While tiredness and difficulty focusing are the main symptoms of mental depletion, it has other consequences, too. Cognitive fatigue impairs our ability to regulate our emotions, leading to increased irritability and upset, and leaving us with less mental resources to handle emotionally challenging situations. Mental fatigue caused by cognitive load has also been associated with increased stress, which of course comes with its own lengthy list of potential health implications.
There are physical symptoms as well. Mental exhaustion can cause bodily fatigue, and has been shown to negatively affect physical performance. And because it impairs our decision-making, increases impulsivity, and decreases motivation, in addition to causing tiredness, we can speculate that cognitive fatigue may have other implications for our health, such as not have the willpower for our regular workout, or opting for less healthy eating choices.
By contrast, breaks, when taken the right way, give us a chance to recover from cognitive fatigue, if not delay or prevent its onset in the first place. Break times have been shown to help maintain energy levels thoughout the day, reducing exhaustion and the need for post-work recovery, as well as increasing overall vigour and energy (Coffeng; Korpela). When used effectively, allow us to activate our parasympathetic nervous system, and better manage our stress (Harvard).
Additionally, breaks can provide the opportunity for intermittent physical activity, which is crucial for our long-term health. And this is true even for quick intermittent activity, like climbing the stairs or taking a quick walk. Regular short bursts of exercise throughout the day are associated with significant reductions in risk of serious illness like cardiovascular disease and cancer (Stamatakis). For children, who use their free time to engage in physical activity far more regularly than adults, unstructured break time therefore has the potential for a significant positive impact on their health. The health benefits of physical activity for children include reduced risk of mental illness and chronic diseases, improved heart and lung health, bone and muscular strength, and even greater acacdemic performance.
It is unsurprising, given all that we’ve discussed, that both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics have clear policy statements emphasizing the belief that recess is crucial and necessary for a child’s development.
Unstructured free play time offers children a needed break from the rigours of the classroom. It offers mental, emotional, and social benefits, all of which contribute to both their overall wellbeing and healthy development. It also provides an opportunity for physical activity and the health benefits that accompany it.
But health and development isn’t the only reason our students need break time.
Cognitive fatigue has a very real impact on performance and productivity. It has been shown to make us more forgetful, increase our difficulty concentrating, and cause us to make more frequent mistakes. It makes it harder for us to regulate our emotions and has been linked to lower motivation, increased distractibility, greater impulsivity, and poor information processing. It can also compromise our decision-making skills. (Blain; Boksam 2005; Boksam 2006; Grillon). And those symptoms have real world consequences; cognitive fatigue has been linked to workplace accidents, unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions, and harsher judicial decisions, to name just a few examples. (CITE)
Avoiding cognitive fatigue means we have more mental resources at our disposal for cognitive challenges. This is likely why taking breaks has been shown to help maintain focus, complete more tasks, and stay on task for longer stretches of time. (CITE; Natasi) Taking breaks, it would appear, can actually make us more effective and productive workers. And they likely make children more effective students, as well.
In 1998, Dr. Olga Jarrett and her colleagues received permission to sit-in on two fourth-grade classes in a no-recess school district. For the study, students were permitted to have recess once a week, giving Dr. Jarrett’s researchers the opportunity to observe students on both recess and no-recess days. Unsurprisingly - at least to me - students were noticeably more effective on the days when they were able to take recess. In fact, the results of their research showed that a substantial 60% of the students stayed more on task and did more work on days with recess, while they appeared to be more fidgety and distracted on days without recess. (Jarrett)
Similarly, a 2009 study published in Pediatrics found a positive association between break time and better classroom behaviour. The study, which surveyed data from classes of over ten thousand 8- to 9-year-olds, concluded that having a minimum of one daily recess period of at least fifteen minutes was linked to better teacher’s rating of class behaviour scores.
In short, for children in the classroom, breaks may lead to greater focus and productivity, and better classroom behaviour. And breaks may result in improved academic performance, as well.
A research article published in 2016 found that the cognitive fatigue which set in for students in the latter part of the school day was leading to a dramatic drop in standardized test scores - a 0.9% drop for every hour later in the day the test was taken. However, giving students a 20 to 30 minute break was shown to have the opposite effect. In fact, providing students a break not only eliminated the decrease in test scores, but actually improved the performance overall.
And believe it or not, I’m not done (I warned you this was a mountain), because breaks may also be beneficial to actually helping students learn and retain information more effectively. A 2021 study conducted by the National Institutes of Health mapped out the brain activity of volunteers resting after learning a new skill. The researchers found that during wakeful rest time, the volunteers’ brains repeatedly replayed versions of the activity, and that the more their brain replayed the activity, the better they performed in subsequent practice sessions. Break time, it seems, is the period of time when our brains are able to compress and consolidate memories of what we’ve just learned, in turn leading to better memory retention and comprehension. (Buch)
For children, whose still-developing brains and lack of experience means they don’t process information as effectively as adults, the need for an opportunity to consolidate and compress memories may be even greater.
