September 18th

By Mutt Mulligan

Less structured activities = better goal setting in kids, study says

Parents naturally want their children to be good at setting and attaining their goals. According to a new study, conducted by University of Colorado researchers, less-structured activities – such as playing outdoors – can help your kids be better at this than structured activities, like piano lessons.

Unstructured activities like playing outdoors can help your children be better at setting and achieving goals.

The study specifically examined the “executive functioning” of 6-7 year-old kids. Executive functioning connects past experience with present action (e.g. putting on a coat before going outside if it’s cold, without having to be told to do so). Ultimately, executive functioning enables people to better plan, organize and manage their time. Childhood executive functioning can be an indicator of health, wealth and can even whether a person will be incarcerated during his or her lifetime.

During the study period parents reported information about their children’s schedules and categorized their activities as “structured” or “less-structured.” The children’s executive functioning was assessed using, according to the study summary, “a well-established verbal fluency task, in which children generate members of a category and can decide on their own when to switch from one subcategory to another.”

The researchers discovered that the more time children spent in less-structured activities, the better their self-directed executive functioning. Structured activities, on the other hand, had the opposite effect.