Ben Mardell, a professor of early-childhood education at Lesley University and the project director of the Pedagogy of Play initiative at Harvard’s Project Zero, observes that even when adults do incorporate play into learning, they often do so in a way that restricts free movement and agency. “The idea that there should be formal instruction makes it no longer play,” says Mardell. “In play the player is choosing to participate, choosing a goal, and directing and formulating the rules. When there is an adult telling the kids, ‘This is what we are supposed to do,’ many of the important developmental benefits of play get lost.”

The role of play has been established not just as a part of learning, but as afoundation for healthy social and emotional function. The National Association for the Education of Young Children has published widely circulated position papers on the need for developmentally appropriate teaching practices and for reversing the “unacceptable trends in kindergarten entry and placement” that have been prompted largely by policy makers’ demand for more stringent educational standards and more testing.  Some teachers are enacting changes, seeking ways to bring movement back into the classroom. Lani Rosen-Gallagher, a former first-grade teacher for New York City public schools and now a children’s yoga instructor, explains the shift in thinking: “I would have [my students] get out of their seats every 15 minutes and take a Warrior Pose or Lion’s Breath, and then I could get 15 more minutes of work out of them.” This kind of movement, she said, also gives children space to develop self-awareness and self-regulation, to get to know themselves as thinking individuals by connecting with the body.

Play-based preschools and progressive schools (often with open room plans, mixed-age groups, and an emphasis on creativity and independence) are seeing increased popularity. Enrichment programs engaging children in movement with intention (yoga, meditation, martial arts) are also gaining traction.

These kinds of methods seek to give children back some of the agency their young minds and bodies crave, as less play and mobility lead to an uptick in anxiety in ever-younger students and even, according to Durand, a growing number of cases of children who need to see occupational therapists.Mindfulness practices such as guided breath and yoga can help mitigate the core symptoms of ADHD in children, (an increasingly common diagnosis), while the arts encourage self-expression and motor-skill development.

Emily Cross, a professor in the School of Psychology at the United Kingdom’s Bangor University, explains the impact of movement on memory and learning: New neuroscience research, she said in an email, shows that active learning—“where the learner is doing, moving, acting, and interacting”—can change the way the brain works and can accelerate kids’ learning process. While passive learning may be easier to administer, she added, it doesn’t favor brain activity. Cross, whose research focuses on pre-teens and young adults, said she’s found “very clear evidence that when learners are actively engaged with moving their own bodies to music, in time with avatars on the screen, their performance is vastly superior to when they’re asked to engage in passive learning … [There are] striking changes in brain activity when we combine dance and music in the learning context.” In other words, people absorb a newly acquired skill-set better while doing, engaging their bodies rather than simply observing.

These research findings echo the observations and methodologies of educators who promote active learning. As Sara Gannon, the director and teacher at Bethesda Nursery School, a highly regarded play-based preschool in New Haven, Connecticut, that favors experiential learning over direct instruction, in an email notes: “Unfortunately, there has been so much focus on forcing the academics, and young children are being asked to do what they are just not ready to do … Of course, we do teach letters and sounds, numbers and quantities—but through experiences and within a context.  That means, hands-on: counting the number of acorns a child found on the playground, building with unit blocks, sounding out a child’s name as they learn to write it, looking at traffic signs on a walk.” Yet while such developmentally oriented programs may benefit children, for now they’re unlikely to become widespread given the current focus on assessment and school readiness, particularly in underserved communities.

As my girls continued creating their own activity stations and imaginary worlds, the contrast between how children operate versus what is often expected of them was apparent. It would be unwise and impractical to pretend that children do not need any structure, or that academic skills are unimportant in school. Yet it is necessary to recognize that the early-childhood classroom has been significantly altered by increasingly rigorous academic standards in ways that rarely align with how young children learn.