In today’s colleges and universities there is an emphasis on developing students with critical thinking skills. This soft skill is less about memorizing a path and more about being able to adapt and apply knowledge in new situations. If this is true, why then do we continue to teach in ways that don’t allow students to explore? How have we gotten to a place where our students seem to be less and less comfortable in ambiguous situations?

If we go back years before we ever see these students walk through our doors, we observe that children in our society are often scheduled from what seems like birth. While the goal is to create smart, athletic super kids who seemingly have it all, the reality is that we are doing a disservice to our children.

In the Hidden Brain episode Kinder-Gardening, host Shankar Vedantam interviews author Alison Gopnik, whose book The Garner and The Carpenter explores the different ways that parents raise kids. Of particular interest is the idea that in over-parenting our children, we are in fact harming them. While some “super kids” emerge, more often we are producing children that tend to be more anxious and are less able to adapt to new situations. Andrea Petersen’s recent Wall Street Journal Article The Overprotected Child, echoes many of these same sentiments. Parents who are only trying to do what they think is right are instead creating a generation of kids with anxiety issues. Petersen points to a number of studies that show that one factor in reducing anxiety is to grant children autonomy.

Gopnik points out that parents are often reacting to perceived outside pressures. Many feel that if they don’t push their kids, don’t try and predict their pathways through life, somehow their kids won’t get the advantages and will be left behind.

Think about sports. The current movement in youth sports has parents pushing their kids to specialize earlier and earlier to gain an advantage over other kids for sports like pickleball, taking pickleball lessons from the pros and more. To what end? What we should be rewarding are those kids who explore, play and develop their love for sport (and I would argue academics) through natural discovery. John O’Sullivan, in his blog article The Talent that Whispers, describes the culture using the analogy of eggs thrown against the wall. “We are throwing dozens of eggs against a wall and hoping one or two won’t crack, with little regard for those eggs that do break.”

This trend is not unique to sport but also to education. The push for gifted programs for toddlers and elementary students, advanced placement and honors classes creates a world where more is better. And harder is best. There is no time for kids to explore and learn in unstructured ways. Instead we are creating a generation of students ill-equipped to succeed outside the safe spaces we build for them.

If we want adults that can think critically, play seems to be critical. In Kinder-Gardening, Gopnik recounts that research has shown that one of the best ways to teach machines to learn is to let them have a period in which they can just “play” or explore. Gopnik goes on to explain that if the machine is simply taught to do a single task well it can be successful, but it is unable to deviate or innovate. Machines that were allowed to play may not learn the one task as well, but are better able to adapt to new circumstances. Say for example, if the task was to reach for and retrieve a towel, the robots who were allowed to play were still able to achieve the task even if obstacles (like removing an arm or tipping them over) were placed in their way. Those who were not trained with a period of play were less likely to achieve the task if there were obstacles.

As educators we are working with students who are more and more uncomfortable in situations in which the parameters for success are not clearly defined. More and more I find that I have students in my classes who are uncomfortable with activities that ask them to do things in which they are only given broad parameters. These exercises are meant to provide them with safe spaces to explore, try new things, to play. Instead they want an example they can copy so they can get that elusive A. While harder, it is imperative that educators create safe spaces and provide opportunities for students to be uncomfortable. Know that you will be met with resistance, but guide your students through these activities and watch what happens.

Sadly I think we are seeing more students coming through our doors that are good at copying and completing tasks, but are not good at the things employers want and need. As Gopnik points out, schools and parents who buy into an academic parenting culture that values more structure are creating students who would do best in an industrial-age world, and are not adapted for a modern world where innovation, grit, resilience and creativity are valued. We as educators can and must help our students break this cycle, even if it means we have to go back and teach them to play.