Alas, another debate about parenting styles. Thank goodness. I was just thinking the other day that there wasn’t enough conflict between parenting styles — a real lack of honest debate between parents and the influence of their wise ways upon their children.

So, the new drama pits the parents who love to get down on all fours and play farm animals with their children for hours at a time, making sure that every dull moment is met with a stimulating craft making session, exploring of trains and planes and cooking meals becomes a lesson in chemistry vs. the parent who constantly rebuffs little whines with, “If you’re bored, I have a dirty room that needs cleaning.”

Now the Experts are weighing in. First, the play hating expert:

“Adults think it is silly to play with children” in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, “but adults aren’t part of the picture.” Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans — abetted, he says, by psychologists — are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.

Lancy is concerned that specialists behind the movement — psychologists, social workers, preschool teachers — are too aggressively promoting this intense, interventionist parenting style to low-income parents, and that they are are too quick to claim that adult-child play is crucial for human development. He doesn’t quite rule out that some interventions may improve literacy — though the data are murkier than the psychologists admit, he insists. But the programs, with their premise (as he sees it) that a whole class of people is simply parenting badly, leave their advocates “open to charges of racism or cultural imperialism.”

The play promoting expert says:

“I’m not clear what’s bothering this guy,” he says, referring to Lancy. “We are not talking about the parents playing all day long with the children. We’re just saying that children need to play, and particular kinds of play — imaginative play that has a storytelling element to it — are very useful” in our culture.

I think I fall into this camp:

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, both at Princeton, have found that parents routinely claim that playing with their kids is among their favorite activities, but when you ask them to record their state of mind, hour by hour, they rate time spent with their children as being about as much fun as housework.

Which type of play parent are you?

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