Dana Rene Bowler / Star staff Parker Johnson, 8, plays soccer with his dad, Chris, as mom Heidi and siblings Anders, 5, and Laniee, 3, romp at San Buenaventura State Beach in Ventura. The family makes a daily habit of going to the beach instead of watching TV.

Ten-year-old Milai Swan of Oxnard knows exactly how he likes to spend his free time.

"Usually I'll go surfing or play video games or something very nerdy like playing on the computer," Milai said.

His parents, Tamar and Matthew Swan, are fine with ocean surfing but believe computer surfing, video games and TV time need to be balanced with unstructured playtime.

"I think they need to use their imaginations," Tamar said of Milai and his siblings, Deacon, 7, and Erskine, 4. "I think my older son is losing sight of his creativity the more he watches TV or sits in front of the computer. He also gets grumpier."

So, every Sunday after church, the screens in the house go dark and it's time for free play. The kids can ocean surf, ride bikes, build Lego empires with the neighbor kids or dream up new games, as long as it's real, unprocessed, unplugged playtime.

Many experts believe parents like the Swans are on the right track, especially in a culture where productivity, not play, is valued.

"The Judeo-Christian tragic view of life doesn't include play as something central and significant," said Dr. Stuart Brown, a Carmel psychiatrist who studies the effects of play deprivation on humans.

Other experts, such as Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology, education and research professor at the University of Michigan, are less concerned about kids whose schedules are laden with lessons, sports and homework. Her data show they are in the minority.

"The bigger problem is that 50 percent of American kids don't get those nice things," Eccles said. "Fifty percent of American kids are spending their time doing nothing to create an interest in anything."

Eccles conducted research in the mid-1980s and again in 2002 and found the amount of playtime for kids hadn't changed much in that time. Kids, she said, have about eight hours of discretionary time each day.

By surveying more than 3,000 kids ages 7 to 18, Eccles and her team learned that poorer kids had lots of free time to hang out and perhaps would have been better off with scheduled recreation. "It's really affecting the poor kids; kids in rural areas who don't have good access to transportation are not getting these enrichment opportunities and it's a crime," Eccles said.

She said there is not enough evidence to deduce that structured recreation — like ballet, karate lessons or soccer — is not just as enriching for kids as free, unstructured play.

Play is play, she said, even on a screen. "I'm not sure the computer isn't play," she said.

Eccles' research showed that only 3 percent to 6 percent of kids have more than 20 hours a week of scheduled recreation. Those kids tend to be white and in a higher socio-economic bracket, she said.

But Tufts University child psychologist David Elkind is among those who believe there is a difference in quality between playtime and structured activities. Elkind has written 11 books on child development, including "The Power of Play," which was released this year.

In the book, Elkind says that depriving children of unstructured playtime robs them of the chance to engage in fantasy, creativity and imagination — tools required for higher-level thinking in such disciplines as math, science, engineering, writing and art.

"I now appreciate that silencing children's play is as harmful as hurrying them to grow up too fast, too soon," Elkind wrote.

Striking a balance

Elkind believes TV and computers too often win the competition for kids' discretionary time. Elkind is not anti-technology, but he believes it is important to strike a balance between human and machine time.

"We live in an electronic age," he said. "It's silly to deny that reality and try to go back to a world that doesn't exist. Computers are an important part of our world. It's also important to get outside, socialize with friends."

Free play, Brown believes, may be nature's training arena for successful human relationships. "If you look at the biological design of the human in depth, you really find that human beings' nervous systems and brains are designed for a lifetime of play," he said. Brain scans, he said, show that the human brain responds differently to real-life objects or people versus identical images on a screen.

Brown conducts his research through an institute he founded in 1996 that eventually became the National Institute for Play, a Carmel-based nonprofit dedicated to gathering empirical evidence about the developmental aspects of play.

Upcoming generations will need superior social skills and "out-of-the-box" thinking to shepherd the world through its travails. Free play helps sculpt these characteristics, he said. He believes play is not a luxury but a necessity.

"We feel it is on par with sleep as a fundamental part of being a primate," Brown said.

Eccles and Brown may have differing points of view on what constitutes free play, but both agree that all kids could do with less television. Eccles' research shows kids watch about 20 hours a week.

Parents are getting the message, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released last week. According to a Census poll called the Survey of Income and Program Participation, about 68 percent of 3- to 5-year-olds had limits on TV viewing in 2004, up from 54 percent in 1994. The survey showed 71 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds had their TV time restricted, too, compared to 60 percent 10 years earlier.

Difficulty with social skills

The unstructured playtime that some believe is disappearing from the landscape of American childhood is going to cost us all in the long run, said Olga Jarrett, assistant professor of early childhood education at Georgia State University College of Education in Atlanta.

"I'm concerned that kids are having more and more difficulty with social interactions," Jarrett said. "I work with teachers in inner-city schools. For many of them, their big concern is that kids aren't treating each other well. Fights break out because one kid brushes up against the other."

Social give and take is learned through play, she said. Kids learn to take turns, pick leaders and agree on game rules, among other elements crucial to social growth.

Eric Parsons / Star staff Seven-year-old Deacon Swan tosses a Frisbee to a nearby friend as his brother Milai, 10, coasts down their Oxnard street on a scooter. Such unstructured playtime is important to a child's development, psychologists say.

"Probably the ability to get along with other people is even more important than knowledge for kids in terms of future success," Jarrett said.

Heidi and Chris Johnson of Ventura believe time spent "unplugged" from the computer or television is time for their three kids to plug into relationships with one another.

The Johnsons have no cable television, just the three stations the antenna allows them. Every night when Chris gets home from work, the family treks over to the beach, which is close to their home.

"As they get older, we want them to remember that their family is who they should gravitate toward," Heidi said. "They should nurture those relationships before they go looking for relationships outside."

Passivity breeds boredom

A few summers ago, before her daughter Erskine was born, Tamar Swan, the Oxnard mom, opted to teach her two sons a life lesson.

"We decided to just let them get bored. No games, no TV. Just go outside and figure it out," Tamar said.

After some grumbling, the boys eventually commandeered an empty lot.

"It was cool. They started building a little fort. They made this whole playhouse," Tamar said. "They made mud puddles and played with army men and had pirate adventures."

Boredom, Brown said, can't thrive in children who have plenty of playtime.

"If a kid has been sort of weaned on passivity and has had toys that are programmed for him and tell him what to do and aren't self-generated, when they're let out to engage in free play, they're bored," Brown said.

Jarrett discovered the same sort of results when, a few years ago, she helped conduct a small pilot study in conjunction with the Maryland-based Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit organization devoted to research and public education on healthy childhood development.

For the study, Jarrett assigned her doctoral students to talk to 15 kindergarten teachers in the Atlanta area to see what differences the teachers observed in their students during a trend when recess was being reduced or eliminated to allow for more instructional time.

Virtually all of the teachers said kindergartners with reduced recess tended not to know what to do with themselves when they did have free play. They seemed to be waiting for someone to instruct them.

"I think what we were really struck with was, even with this small sample, how consistent the teachers were with their concerns," Jarrett said.

Play in schools

Jarrett is a crusader for recess in her state of Georgia. In 2004, she tried to get a bill passed there requiring schools to provide children with at least one 15-minute break a day. It failed, but another bill was amended to require schools to come up with some sort of recess policy.

"I don't think play is considered important in terms of the educational system," Jarrett said. "It seems to be how much information you can pour into kids rather than the problem-solving and social-skill development they learn when they are organizing their own play."

Dana Rene Bowler / Star staff Heidi Johnson, looking at shells with daughter Laniee, says, "As they get older, we want them to remember that their family is who they should gravitate toward."

More pressure on schools to meet academic standards such as those set forth by the 2001 No Child Left Behind bill is a big reason why recess is getting whittled away in many California schools, according to David Kopperud, who works in the California Department of Education's Counseling, Student Support and Service Training Office in Sacramento.

"We don't have the exact numbers, but it does look like a lot of schools are using more instructional time to teach students the standards that we are testing for," Kopperud said. "There is a lot of concern about making the yearly progress required by the No Child Left Behind Act and that does lead to less recess."

Pushing the other way, with support from the national PTA, the Cartoon Network has created an award-winning national movement called Rescuing Recess and, Sept. 24-28, observed National Recess Week.

The state of California leaves recess policies to local districts, so recess time varies across Ventura County. For example, Moorpark Unified School District's elementary schools have three daily recess periods, but its director of elementary education, Juanita Suarez, said there have been changes.

"Whereas in the past they had 40 minutes, now they may have 20," Suarez said.

Brown recommends kids spend a full 20 percent of their waking hours in free play.

"What I'd really like to see," he said, "is play-based education so that the artificial separation between work and play gets dissolved and as much of life as is practical and possible gets lived in a state of playfulness."

— Debbie Cafazzo of the Tacoma News Tribune contributed to this report.