An early start may be too early

A great deal of attention is paid to the opposing bookends of institutionalized learning, early childhood education and higher education. When considering the two together, we’ve come to the conclusion that a strong early start gives kids a far better chance of excelling later on.

So in recent years the focus has been on encouraging families to expose their children to early childhood learning and improving access to preschool. Parents, fearful that their kids will start their traditional school years already behind, now look to preschool and pre-kindergarten programs to ensure that their children are prepared to maximize their academic potential from day one.

But according to some education specialists, there’s a big problem with the direction we’ve taken with early childhood education, one that’s beginning to garner significant attention.

In short, many people believe that we’re too often doing preschool all wrong. And the way we’re getting it wrong is that little kids simply aren’t playing enough.

You read that right. The message we’re now getting is that very young children, in order to do well in school as they get older, need to play more.

That might seem counterintuitive to some people, while others might greet such advice with a reaction more along the lines of “Aha! I knew it.” Either way, this trend in thinking is gaining steam, as increasing focus is put on trying not just to get more young children into preschool, but on making sure they’re getting what they need from it.

It’s important to make one point clear: When these early childhood education specialists behind this idea talk about the need for more play in preschool, they aren’t exactly calling for unsupervised, mud-flinging free-for-alls, although, in hindsight, I just loved it when the director of the Newport Beach preschool that one of my sons attended warned parents not to dress their kids in their finest clothes because “they will get dirty.”

But the points these more-play-in-preschool enthusiasts are making are a bit more substantive than that. First, they contend, it’s critical to understand the first piece of the problem, that many preschools these days are mistakenly piling on too much academic rigor too soon.

Flash cards, rote memorization, vocabulary lessons and other scripted learning we’ve increasingly employed when kids are very young amount to putting the educational horse before the cognitive cart, they say.

These overly structured programs — seen as a trickle-down consequence of the outsized importance placed on standardized testing — will ultimately backfire by stressing out little brains while robbing them of time they need to develop their natural creativity and curiosity. These specialists believe this approach has even contributed to a trend many educators report seeing in recent years, of more anxious kids with attention and self-control issues.

Instead, the thinking goes, by allowing preschool children significantly more time for free play, we are more apt to encourage the kind of development that will serve them well later on. These preschool reformers refer to the sound social skills that kids learn through meaningful play, like how to communicate and interact well with others, wait their turn, control their emotions and flex their imaginations.

When we create environments in which these qualities are nurtured, advocates say, kids will benefit in the long run. As they progress through school they’ll be more focused, inquisitive and ready to absorb information and understand abstract concepts. They might also be less prone to anxiety issues as academic demands increase.

One of the highest-profile champions of this idea is Erika Christakis, a Yale University early childhood specialist whose book, “The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups,” presents an impassioned case for ditching the workbooks and letting the little ones freestyle it more.

Christakis, by the way, is not without controversy for other reasons. An email she wrote last year defending students’ right to wear inappropriate or offensive Halloween costumes stoked an uproar on the Yale campus and led to a nationwide debate over whether the backlash was a case of overly extreme political correctness.

But now, with her views on preschool, Christakis is winning a sizable following.

An important question, however, remains to be answered:

Will educators, and perhaps more crucially, parents, widely embrace this free-play philosophy?

It could be a tough sell.

Many preschools are probably already leaning toward a more play-friendly approach, and there are undoubtedly legions of parents that instinctively subscribe to the idea that very young children need more time and leeway to stretch their developmental muscles.

Even so, it could prove difficult to resist the pressure that’s been heaped on students and educators for more than a decade to show quick, measurable gains in test scores. That pressure has moved down the education food chain to preschools, to the point that some parents believe their 3-year-olds need Mandarin lessons to have any chance at admittance to a highly ranked college 15 years later.

Dislodging that kind of reasoning won’t be easy, despite mounting feedback that starting children on a rigid academic track at ever younger ages isn’t working out as well as some might have expected. It will be interesting to see if this recent spate of contrarian thinking marks a turning point in the way we approach early childhood education.

PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.