Is It a Problem When a Child Plays Alone?

Playing alone is play, and for plenty of children it is the best kind they get all day. The useful question is not whether a child plays alone. It is why.

A parent watching from the kitchen window sees a child by themselves and worries. A teacher writes “prefers to play alone” on a report card and the worry gets a label. Before acting on it, it helps to know where the idea that solo play is a problem came from, and what it actually got right.

Where the worry comes from

In 1932 the researcher Mildred Parten published observations of nursery school children at the University of Minnesota and sorted what she saw into categories: unoccupied behavior, solitary play, onlooker behavior, parallel play, associative play and cooperative play. In her observations, younger children spent more of their time playing alone or side by side, and older children spent more of it playing together.

Those categories are still taught, and somewhere along the way they turned into a ladder: solitary at the bottom, cooperative at the top, every child expected to climb and never come back down. Parten described what children of different ages tended to do. She did not show that a five year old or a nine year old building alone has slipped backward. An adult who spends Saturday alone in the garage is not regressing either.

Three children who all look alone

Researchers who study social withdrawal, including Kenneth Rubin and his colleagues, separate children who play alone by the reason behind it, because different reasons point to different outcomes. Their 2009 review in the Annual Review of Psychology lays out the distinctions. In plain terms they look like this:

• The absorbed builder. Busy with blocks, drawings or a long pretend story. Joins others when invited and is happy either way. The research calls this unsociability, a preference rather than a fear, and in young children it has generally been found to be relatively benign.
• The child at the edge. Stands near a group, watches, does not join. Researchers call this reticent behavior, and it tends to go with shyness: the child wants in and something stops them. This is the one worth noticing.
• The child who is shut out. Tries to join and is turned away, again and again. That is not a play style at all. It is exclusion, and an adult at school needs to know about it.

Ten minutes of quiet watching usually tells you which child you have. Look at the face and the feet: absorbed and turned toward the work, or glancing at the group and edging closer.

Alone is not the problem. Wanting in and not getting in is.

What helps the child at the edge

Pushing a hesitant child into a crowd rarely works. Lowering the cost of the first step usually does.

• One friend, not a group. Two children make a game. Six make a circle that has to be broken into.
• Home ground. Familiar toys and a familiar room take one unknown out of the moment.
• Arrive early. A child who is there first becomes part of the group as it forms, instead of knocking on one that already exists.
• Something to bring. A ball, a bucket of chalk, a new card game: a reason for other children to come over.
• Stay close, then step back. Start the game, then let it carry on without you. The piece on how a grown-up should play with a child covers how to hand it over.

Leave the absorbed builder alone

Signing a contented solo player up for more group activities to make them more social trades away the long, uninterrupted stretches of focus that solo play does best. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in its 2018 report The Power of Play, describes play as intrinsically motivated and actively engaging. A child alone for an hour with a pile of cardboard and tape meets that description completely. Protect the hour.

Where this advice falls short

“Let them be” is the right default and the wrong answer in four situations.

• When alone means a screen. Hours on a device choosing what comes next are a different question, taken up in do video games count as play.
• When it is new. A child who used to seek out friends and now does not has changed, and a change is information. The CDC’s developmental milestone checklists advise talking to a child’s doctor if a child loses skills they once had.
• When a young child never notices other children. The CDC’s milestones list noticing other children and joining them to play by age three. The AAP recommends autism screening at the 18 and 24 month well-child visits, and a parent who is worried at any age can ask a pediatrician for an evaluation.
• When it looks like distress. Withdrawal that comes with sadness, fear or trouble sleeping is not a play question. The piece on when letting kids play is not enough covers that ground.

The short answer

A child playing alone is usually just playing. Watch for the edge, not the alone: the child who wants in and cannot get there is the one who needs help, and the help is small. That is part of Let's Get Kids Playing Again: making room for every kind of play, including the quiet kind.

This is not medical advice. A pediatrician is the person to ask about your own child.