How Much Recess Should Kids Get?

Kate Rix

Ask a group of kids about their favorite part of the school day and many will talk about something that happened at recess. Maybe they finally made it across the monkey bars. Maybe somebody kicked the foursquare ball over the fence. Maybe a fruit tree in a neighboring yard started to drop plums on the playground.

Any one of these things is a marker of a good recess, not just according to kids, but also to adults who study the benefits of play. Whether they’re inventing a new game or sitting under a tree, kids need a break – or several of them – during the school day. And not just so they can blow off steam.

Schools may be held accountable for how well kids do at reading and math, but experts say that recess plays an essential but often overlooked role in children’s physical, emotional and intellectual development. While physical education focuses on teaching and practicing specific skills, recess is not instructional. Research shows that kids need this supervised free time to move and socialize in order to process their emotions and what they’re learning in class.

“The way our brains work, you can’t go hours at a time and retain and store information in working memory,” says William Massey, an associate professor of kinesiology at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “You need time away to process it.”

Why Kids Need Recess

There’s no debate that physical activity is good for kids, particularly as a powerful weapon against childhood obesity, which has more than tripled since the 1970s. The average child sits for 8.5 hours a day. Combine that with high-calorie foods, and weight gain in inevitable, researchers say. But studies show that at least 20 minutes of recess daily, along with 150 minutes of physical education a week, make a measurable difference in children’s weight.

Beyond the physical benefits, recess is important for kids emotionally and cognitively. Active movement works the brain’s prefrontal cortex, building connections between the creative and analytic sides of the brain. Activity that involves arms and legs – running, climbing, crawling – builds new neural connections, which in turn help kids regulate their emotions and process what they have learned in class.

Equally important is the benefit of an unstructured, but supervised, break. Catherine Ramstetter, co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations for recess, says that these breaks should be times when children can choose between sedentary, physical, creative or social options.

“We don’t question that adults need to take breaks,” says Ramstetter. “What we expect of little children, especially the youngest ones, is heartbreaking.”

Studies show that after recess children are more attentive in class, perform better cognitively and have fewer behavioral problems. One study of fourth graders in Fort Worth, Texas, found that children who had just come back to school after the COVID-19 lockdown and had 45 minutes of daily recess had significantly less of the stress hormone cortisol after a three-month period than students who had 30 minutes of recess.

How Much Is Enough?

Ideally, children should get four 15-minute recesses every day, says Debbie Rhea, a professor of kinesiology at Texas Christian University in Forth Worth and director of the LiiNK Project, which advocates for outdoor play in schools.

The American Academy of Pediatrics confirms this recommendation, for both younger children and adolescents. While recess is usually only part of the school day for elementary school kids, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently expanded its recommendation to encourage recess for all students, including those in middle and high school.

But when it comes to allocating those precious school-day minutes, recess has rarely been a priority. Starting in the early 2000s, many schools cut back or even eliminated recess in favor of more instructional time. Since 2001, average weekly recess time has declined by 60 minutes. Only nine states require schools to offer a daily recess, and most districts don’t have a formal recess policy.

And it’s still common practice for teachers to take away recess as a punishment, something experts say should never happen.

“We wouldn’t have kids sit out of math or reading because they were being bad,” says Massey. “Often the kids who lose recess are the kids who need it the most. They need time to regulate.”

How to Make Recess Better

In addition to simply providing enough time for recess, schools should teach social skills that will make recess more successful, Rhea says.

The LiiNK Project consults with school districts to train teachers and administrators in how to incorporate a character development curriculum into the way recess is offered. Fifteen minutes a day of classroom instruction around empathy and respect, Rhea says, can transform recess from chaos into a meaningful learning opportunity.

“Out on the playground, kids solve their problems better. The character curriculum has helped with that,” says Rhea. “Kids learn from each other, but when an adult gets in there, the adult changes the environment.”

Especially after missing in-person school during COVID-19, children need more opportunities to practice sharing, taking turns and resolving conflicts, says Massey. Preparing for recess, he says, is an opportunity to talk about how to make smooth transitions in the day – often a fraught time in classrooms.

“We don’t do anything else without norms,” says Massey, “but we do that with recess and then wonder why things aren’t going well.”

This approach changes the role of the adults on the playground, who should be less like police and more like facilitators of play, Rhea says. For instance, it’s important for teachers and yard-duty staff to allow children to take reasonable risks with their bodies.

Letting kids run fast will help them develop coordination. Running up the slide may not be as unsafe as it looks. And even falling, Rhea says, is something kids need to practice to avoid getting badly hurt. It’s also OK for kids to get bored.

“Adults have a hard time watching kids do nothing,” Rhea says. But “when kids get bored, they have to be creative and think of something to do.”