Why I’m Anti-Playdate

Okay, I’m as guilty of it as anyone nowadays. A parent suggests that our children get together and we whip out our calendars. It’s time to negotiate the playdate: time of drop off and pick up, snack or lunch or both, allergies, bring gear so they can play outside, etc, etc, etc.

At what point exactly did we start calling children’s time with a friend a ‘playdate’? I would venture to say exactly around the same time that helicopter parenting hit the vernacular. The same time that we all started to carry our calendars on portable electronic devices. The same time that we started to feel the necessity of putting our children’s activities into a schedule. (Check out Wikipedia’s definition of a playdate)

Of course, I’m very pro ‘play’. I’m just a tad resentful of the idea that we need to make play into a ‘date’ – a date that is sometimes planned weeks in advance.

Remember how we would play as kids? We’d head outside to see who was around. If there was nobody there, we’d knock on doors to see who could come out and play. I doubt my parents ever knew exactly where we were. They’d just ask my sister and I to come home in time for dinner. Occasionally they would call around to our friend’s homes until they located us.

Then there were the times that we’d randomly ask our parents if so-and-so could come over. We’d come out of swimming lessons, for example, and I’d ask if a friend could come over for dinner. No warning, no advance planning, just spontaneous company.

I had a quick chat about this with a friend of mine. I wondered if it was because I was raised in a small town. But she confirmed that she, too, had played this way as a child in the city. Distance between friends will always demand some advance planning. But as long as friends are in the neighbourhood, there should be no reason to turn play into a date.

I was thinking about playdates when I wrote this week’s Slow Saturday Challenge. I sometimes shy away from playdates because it feels like a burden when there is a schedule to follow. I get annoyed with an exact amount of time allocated to play. I’d much rather causal playtime…

I love that the Bear is now old enough to go out and knock on a neighbour’s door to see if a friend wants to come out and play. The kids grab their boots and head outside. No advance plan, just time to hang out. Sometimes they only play for about 15 minutes before one of them is called inside. But the children know that they are allowed to have that random, unscheduled, unstructured play between other obligations.

I was glad that we spontaneously invited one of the Bear’s friends over on Monday. It was spur-of-the-moment; just an opportunity for the two of them to get together. And, as I mentioned in the Slow Saturday Challenge, more kids often means less work. They just make their own fun and disappear to invent their own games. The more, the merrier. And spontaneous play will always trump planned playtime.