Our study was inspired by previous research suggesting that spending more time in less-structured activities, like social group outings, free play, media and screen time, etc., is associated with children’s ability to engage their executive function (self-regulation) skills. Given this finding, we wondered, does less-structured time at home really benefit children’s executive function? If so, why? We had several ideas:

• Maybe spending time in less-structured activities provides children with opportunities to freely and independently pursue their own interests and obtain knowledge relevant to learning how to use their executive function skills.

• Or maybe less-structured time provides children with opportunities to learn from others (friends, parents, teachers, etc.). 

• A third possibility is that maybe spending time in less-structured activities gives children the opportunity to practice using control in playful contexts, which then makes it easier for them to use control in contexts with less support.

To test these theories, we designed a study to learn about the activities children are doing at home during the COVID–19 pandemic and how this might be related to their executive function (self-regulation) skills.

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Between May and July of 2020, 93 parents and their 3- to 5-year-olds participated in our study.

Results showed that children engaged in a variety of activities while at home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, children spent the most amount of time (close to 2 hours per day) playing with toys. This was followed by physical ‘rough and tumble’ games and watching TV (each averaging around 1 hour and 15 mins per day). Children spent a lot of time per day, on average, in less-structured (red bars below) and physical activities (blue bars below). Children spent less time, on the other hand, in structured activities, like math, writing, and music lessons (green bars below). 

We next looked at how children were spending their time in relation to their performance on our measure of executive function skills, where children were asked to sort pictures by different sets of rules (sort by shape vs. sort by color). As we had predicted, children who spent more of their time engaged in less-structured activities correctly switched more on our executive function sorting task than those who spent more of their time in structured, physical, or passive activities.

But why might this be? We argue this may be, in part, due to parental involvement.  

Parents in this study reported that they were most engaged with their child during less-structured activities and least engaged with their child during structured and passive activities. Even more, parents were more involved, on average, in activities that tended to be related to their child’s performance on the sorting task.

These findings suggest that spending time engaged in less-structured activities provides children with opportunities to observe and imitate their caregivers engaged in their own goal-directed behavior around the home. This, in turn, may teach children about what is valued and normal in their culture, society, and home environment and how they can use their own control in complex, purposeful ways. 

So, all-in-all, this work provides a new angle on findings that less-structured time may be important for developing executive function. The activities children engage in, whether at school, at the park, or at home, matter for their executive function development, and parents and other caregivers play a unique and important role in their development. Rather than providing opportunities to strengthen executive function broadly through specific practice, we argue that less-structured time provides opportunities for acquiring knowledge that serves children well in using executive function in culturally-normative ways.

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Source:

Stucke, N. J., Stoet, G., & Doebel, S. (2022). What are the kids doing? Exploring young children's activities at home and relations with externally cued executive function and child temperament. Developmental Science, 25(5), e13226. For a free download of the full text, please visit Developmental Science. Also check out our video abstract of this work!