Bring Rec Back to the REC
When I was younger East Hampton felt so alive. Local businesses made up the majority of Main Street and Newtown Lane, and for someone in their preteenage years, there was plenty to do in every season. As I got older, however, more and more of what made this place feel like home disappeared.
One of the biggest losses was the RECenter, built by our community as a promise to young people that they did in fact matter. My friends and I would go to the REC after school to do our homework, hang out, and play.
The first floor was made up of a small gym in the front and a computer lab in the back. The middle floor housed a big-screen television with a PlayStation 2, a Ping-Pong table, foosball, a basketball shooting game, and board games. Up top there was a juice bar and food area that never really got off the ground, but hey, it could have been great. In addition to the hangout space there were basketball courts and a swimming pool.
It was at the REC that I got my first taste of independence. While there were programs offered to kids, its biggest asset was that the building provided a space for free play.
Youth development experts like Peter Gray, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of psychology at Boston College, have long stressed the importance of free play. Free play is self-directed and an end in itself. It is through this very specific kind of recreation that kids learn about what interests them. It also helps develop their abilities to make decisions and manage emotions.
I was 12 when the Town of East Hampton signed its first contract with the Y.M.C.A. Initially the change in stewardship wasn’t apparent, but over the years differences became noticeable. The first was the expansion of the gym area in front, but that was only the beginning. Now all three floors of the REC are inundated with exercise equipment. There is no more space for kids, only programs organized and run for them by adults.
I’ve said it before, but East Hampton is a microcosm of the rest of the country. Indeed, free play has been on the decline since the 1950s, giving way to adult-organized activities. This trend has led to an increase in developmental and mental disorders, as well as increased suicides among young people.
“Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing,” Professor Gray wrote in “The Play Deficit,” a 2013 essay in the digital magazine Aeon. “It’s not just that we’re seeing disorders that we overlooked before . . . the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.”
When the East End New Leaders first got together to discuss a strategy, we agreed that the foundation of any community is the youth. East Hampton’s young people are in dire need. Heroin has made a resurgence at the high school, and we’ve recently become a suicide cluster area. The bowling alley is now gone, so there is no place for kids to free-play in the wintertime.
That is why we’ve taken up this cause of bringing more kid space to the Y.M.C.A. It is our hope that the people of this town will recognize the problem and join with us in our efforts to solve it. We can revive the community, which has been shrinking over the years, and this is step one.
Walker Bragman lives in East Hampton.