Before developmental psychologist Susan Engel began research on her 2026 book, American Kindergarten: Dispatches from the First Year of School, it had been years since she’d spent time in a public school kindergarten. Over a two-year period, observing 29 public school kindergarten programs around the country, she noted many changes. Far fewer classrooms had play centers. All classes emphasized reading instruction. And recess wasn’t necessarily a priority.
Some kindergarten programs were so tightly structured, with so much quietness, that the kids “seemed to just explode on the playground” when it was time for recess, Engel said.
“I don’t think kids get enough recess. They would get more out of the more structured activities they do if they had more time at recess,” Engel said. “They need to move their bodies. We know from the research that, at that age, they are still using their bodies as a means of thinking.”
And in many cases, recess allowed students to interact verbally with each other in a way they may not get to do during class, she observed.
Short recesses for even the youngest students are a common phenomenon in districts across the country. Recess tends to be especially short in low-income districts that face greater academic pressures to improve standardized test scores—despite strong evidence showing that playing at recess can improve concentration, classroom behavior, and ultimately academic performance.
“We keep increasing instructional time. You would think we would learn that all the things we put into place that target so forcefully the reading and math, when we’re getting no return on investment from our targeting, isn’t working,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University. “How many kids have to fail on [standardized] tests for people to recognize that maybe we’re not doing something right?”
In some states, advocacy from parents and educators is helping to move the needle in favor of more, and more consistent, recess.
Say Yes to Recess, for instance, is a movement started in 2024 by three parent advocates frustrated with what they feel is insufficient unstructured play during the school day. The group has grown to at least 24 chapters that advocate for school days with a minimum of 60 minutes of unstructured, screen-free time that cannot be denied as punishment.
The downward slide of recess over the years
These and other advocacy efforts aim to reverse a trend that has seen recess dwindle over the years. It’s one that Karyn A. Allee, an associate professor of early education at Mercer University in Savannah, Ga., has studied over the past few decades.
“Regular recess started shifting hard once the accountability movement took hold in the late ‘90s,” Allee said.
During the 2001-02 school year, elementary students spent an average of 36.8 minutes per day on playgrounds. By 2025, the average amount of daily recess fell to 20-30 minutes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The EdWeek Research Center in the fall of 2025 polled a nationally representative sample of 464 K-12 teachers about recess. Of the elementary teachers surveyed, 55% said their students had one recess daily, 26% reported twice-a-day recess, and 12% noted more than two recesses per day. The majority of respondents said recess lasted between 15 and 20 minutes.
That trend motivated Brandi Vesco, founder of the Washoe Parent Coalition in Nevada and chapter leader of Say Yes to Recess Nevada, to become a parent advocate.
“My barely 7-year old was in 2nd grade and started coming home and saying, ‘Mommy, I had to go to study hall today.’ It turns out that’s what they call it when you don’t finish something fast enough in class. And so you miss your second recess, which at this particular school, was 15 minutes,” Vesco said.
Inequities in recess
The public school Vesco’s daughter attended didn’t offer physical education, making recess “the only chance for these kids to run around,” she said.
Other nearby schools with active—and more affluent—parents’ associations were able to raise money for physical education. Hers was not. The schools, just a few minutes from each other, offered very different experiences for children, Vesco said.
Emma Pascarella can relate. A Massachusetts mother of two who taught 1st grade for 20 years before returning to school to get her doctorate in education, Pascarella taught both in resource-rich independent schools and less-resourced public schools. In the former, she said, kids often had 45 minutes of recess and then an additional 15 minutes of recess later in the day, plus daily physical education.
“In some of the public schools, there was 20 minutes of recess on the schedule, but that depends on transition times,” she said. “Are kids lined up properly? Are they quiet in the halls? If not, you can see that recess time go down to like, 10 minutes, 6 minutes.”
In low-performing schools where she worked, Pascarella noted that strict time allotments for instructional blocks tended to create obstacles to increasing recess time.
It was, “How are we going to arrange our schedule? So we have 90 minutes of literacy, and we have 90 minutes of math. And recess is going to be on the top of the chopping block,” said Pascarella, who now leads the Massachusetts chapter of Say Yes to Recess.
The data support Pascarella’s observation that students in high-poverty schools tend to get short-changed when it comes to recess.
In a 2023 study that analyzed 2021–22 school year data from a sample of high-poverty elementary schools across California, researchers Hannah Thompson and Rebeca London found that just over half (56%) of schools surveyed provided more than 20 minutes of recess daily—the minimum amount recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics in its May 2026 revised policy statement, The Crucial Role of Recess.
Sixteen percent of schools provided 20 minutes per day. Twenty-seven percent allotted between 10 and 19 minutes per day of recess for their elementary-age students.
Some states guarantee children time to play
Despite inequities and inconsistencies in recess, change is happening in some states.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, recently signed into law a bill that doubled the amount of required recess time for students in full-day kindergarten through 5th grade, from 20 to 40 minutes, effective starting this academic year.
Tennessee in 2025 passed into law a bipartisan bill that expanded daily recess from 15 minutes to 40 minutes for elementary students. Say Yes to Recess, founded in Tennessee and a strong supporter of the bill, counted this as the group’s first big win.
“Educators can give kids all the academic skills in the world, but if they don’t have that social stability and that emotional stability, then they won’t have a place to land,” Pascarella said. “Recess provides an amazing opportunity for these things to come together.”
