Before our kids learn the alphabet, they learn something far more important: how to navigate the world.
They learn how to wait. How to ask. How to share space and ideas. How to recover from disappointment. How to be brave, silly, tender, and bold—often all before lunchtime.
The question is: Where do they learn it?
For the past year, I watched my child learn these lessons in the sand and in red room, and in the middle of a thousand small squabbles over turn-taking and imaginary worlds. Not in a workbook. Not from a teacher lecturing from the front of a classroom. But in the middle of play.
And I’ve come to believe: play is the most underrated engine of learning we have.
Why Play Is Real Learning
When a child plays, they’re not "just having fun." They’re solving problems, telling stories, building confidence, testing boundaries, and making sense of the world.
When my daughter pretends to run a bakery, she’s practicing math (how many cupcakes?), communication (what’s your order?), and emotional regulation (when the cookies sell out and her friend melts down).
When she builds a tower that falls and decides to try again, she’s learning something that will matter much more in life than early reading scores: resilience.
Yet in many parts of the country—and in many well-meaning households—this kind of deep, open-ended play is shrinking. It’s being edged out by enrichment classes, academic pressure, and screen time. We are racing to prepare kids for a future we can’t predict, while forgetting that the most reliable foundation for any future is a sense of wonder, confidence, and connection.
The School That Let My Kids Be Kids
My oldest went first. Now my younger daughter, Uma’s just finished her first year.
She attends Laurel Hill Nursery School, a cooperative preschool in San Francisco where play is not a break from learning—it is the learning.
After three years of watching my kids grow up at this little school overlooking the beauty of SF, I’ve come to believe something I didn’t fully understand when I started: the most important lessons in childhood don’t come from instruction—they come from play.
This year, her and her friends met firefighters and flamenco dancers, read chapter books under the trees, rode tricycles in costume, planted vegetables, washed babies and countless rivers. They navigated real friendships and real feelings. And they reminded us—every day—that learning isn't something you download. It's something you live.
As a parent, I attended workshops on everything from nervous system regulation to learning helpful positive discipline strategies—tools that helped me meet these challenging early years. I also discovered what it really means to be “kindergarten-ready,” and spoiler: it’s not about academic drills. It’s about emotional flexibility, body awareness, and the ability to navigate a room full of peers with curiosity and care.
A Call to All of Us
Whether or not your child is in preschool—or whether or not they’ll ever attend a co-op—this truth remains:
If we want to raise whole, healthy humans, we have to protect their right to play.
We have to slow down long enough to notice the way they examine a worm or retell a story. We have to make room for boredom, so creativity can slip in. We have to stop measuring childhood by milestones alone—and start measuring it by joy, wonder, and connection.
The world will get faster. Expectations will get louder. But for now—for a little while longer—we have a chance to give our kids what they truly need.
Space to play.
In my opinion, the best thing about the cooperative nursery school program in San Francisco, (part of SF Community College) is that it is a “parent education” program. The nursery school is the lab for the Tuesday evening parent classes. By participating as a parent “teacher” on your weekly workdays, you find a community of other parents. Definitely saved my sanity.