It's no secret that today's parents (including this one) push their kids to acheive from the get-go. What used to be a relative honeymoon, ages 0-5, are nowadays too often interrupted by serious activies such as taking Chinese and/or piano lessons. What lies behind this is a well-intended desire to see our children get off to a great start, acquiring critical skills and a work/study discipline that will, we hope, help them out well into the future. The benefits (parental ego gratification notwithstanding) are short-lived say several recent studies. That initial boost in IQ that put a child in the top of his or her class go away within just a few years as those kids who were given more time to play not only catch up but, often, exceed their more accomplished peers. And why? According to the experts, it's because they've been given more time to play! Play has been lauded in public yet rarely practiced in private. While calculating net present value matters so, too, does the ability to dream up/create the product/service that enables the revenue. This is why so many companies have to outsource "creativity" to third-party vendors like ad agencies and innovation consultancies. Heck, even NYU's Graduate Creative Writing Program students were shocked when one of its professors (Jonathan Safran Foer) pushed them to "experiment, to be playful" by engaging in such non-traditional activities as karaoke. Bottom line for those in charge of children young and old: go out and play. Making time for fun allows the creative juices to flow and that will help you as much, if not more, than all those serious activities which, in time, you'll make time for anyway. Imagine just how proud you'll feel to have a socially well-adjusted youngster who can paint and drawn and sing and dance and also speak Mandarin and play Bach's Goldberg Variations? How do you keep play in your and/or your child's life?