Unstructured play gives kids the space they need to tinker and

Hear the words of Darell Hammond, a builder of playgrounds and a voice for the young, who declared: “Unstructured play gives kids the space they need to tinker and take risks – both vital for the budding entrepreneur.” This saying is not only about children at play, but about the very foundations of creativity, courage, and invention. For Hammond saw that the seeds of entrepreneurship are not planted in rigid drills or strict instructions, but in the freedom to explore, to test, to fail, and to rise again. In the laughter and chaos of unstructured play, the future of innovation is quietly being born.

For what is play, if not the earliest form of experimentation? When a child builds castles of sand, topples them, and builds again, he learns resilience. When a girl invents games with no rules but her own, she learns imagination and leadership. To tinker is to handle the world with curiosity; to take risks is to face uncertainty with courage. These qualities are the very breath of the entrepreneur, who must create where there is nothing, and who must dare where there is danger. Hammond reminds us that the path to innovation begins not in the boardroom, but in the playground.

History bears witness to this truth. Consider the young Thomas Edison, who as a boy filled his family’s cellar with experiments—strange contraptions, chemical mixtures, and makeshift laboratories. His “play” often caused chaos, yet it taught him the art of persistence, the courage to fail, and the thrill of discovery. That same spirit later gave the world the phonograph, the lightbulb, and countless inventions. Edison's genius was not born in classrooms of strict order, but in the fertile soil of unstructured exploration. Without the freedom to tinker, his flame might have been snuffed out before it grew to light the world.

And what of the Wright brothers? As children in Dayton, Ohio, they played with kites and simple flying toys, crafting and recrafting them with their own hands. It was not formal lessons in aerodynamics that first stirred them, but play. That same playful spirit guided them into manhood, when they built their first flying machines in bicycle shops. Their willingness to risk failure, born from the unstructured freedom of childhood experimentation, carried them into the skies and changed the destiny of mankind.

Thus Hammond’s wisdom speaks with urgency: do not smother children with only rules and rigid paths. Give them space to discover who they are, to shape their own games, to climb, to fall, to test their limits. For in these moments they are not wasting time—they are training their minds and spirits for the future battles of life. Every scraped knee becomes a lesson in resilience, every broken toy a lesson in rebuilding, every new game a lesson in leadership.

The lesson, O listener, is this: if we desire a future filled with innovators, creators, and leaders, we must protect the sacred realm of play. Let children dream without boundaries. Let them invent without fear. Do not rush them always toward order, but let them dwell sometimes in freedom, where their imagination may stretch its wings. From that freedom will rise men and women unafraid to face the unknown, unafraid to tinker, unafraid to risk.

And for yourself, take this counsel: never lose the child’s gift of unstructured play. Though you are grown, make room in your days for curiosity, for daring experiments, for attempts that may fail but teach. For the entrepreneur is, in truth, the child who never stopped playing—who carried that spirit into the marketplace, into invention, into life itself.

So let Hammond’s words echo across the generations: play is not frivolous, it is foundational. Guard it in the young, revive it in yourself, and you will find that in freedom, in tinkering, in risk, lies the path not only to success, but to the fullest flowering of the human spirit.