But perhaps that something should just be playing. The child psychologist Jean Piaget famously argued in 1936 that spontaneous, imaginative play leads to cognitive development. Kids, the theory goes, need to spend time playing super heroes, cooking pretend meals in pretend kitchens, or just inventing whatever comes to mind. I would add that, in addition to time and imagination, kids also need parents who don’t feel guilty about letting them play with wherever that combination of elements may take them simply because it might not look educational.

My family isn’t a Minecraft household, mostly because I don’t want to have fights with my 9-year-old about how often he can play the game. It helps that he didn’t seem all that into it the few times he did play it. My younger child, at 6 years old, is just learning what Minecraft is; she’s watched a few videos of it on YouTube while at friends’ houses, but so far hasn’t asked if she can play herself. This might be because right now both kids are really into iMovie.

My son discovered the video-editing program while watching me assemble family movies one day and then asked if he could take over. What I’d begun as a few clips hastily thrown together so I could get it done in a weekend grew, thanks to my son’s infinite patience and endless attention span, into carefully edited mock newscasts. Then, one Saturday, miserable weather forced my family and me to stay inside all day. The kids mysteriously disappeared downstairs for a few hours and then emerged in the afternoon, asking if my husband and I would like to see their nine-part TV series, which they’d written, acted in, and edited together. It even came with a blooper reel. The series, of course, lacked some essential elements— a compelling plot that varied in interesting ways over the course of the series, for one—but what most impressed me was that all my kids needed to make this happen was a lazy Saturday with no plans.

Who cares whether iMovie is educational? The biggest takeaway was that my kids were proud that they’d created something with no adult involvement—something that was entirely their own. And they would have likely been just as proud creating something in Minecraft, or out of popsicle sticks or Legos. Did they learn anything that will help them get better test scores or improve their chances of getting into college? I hope not. I hope they spent that day doing something that was fun without being destructive. I hope that what they remember is being able to just hang out and be kids without worrying about whether they were going to get into a good college. And I hope that when they look back at their childhoods they think: Now, that was a fun Saturday afternoon.

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