Go Touch Grass. No, Really.

If you've spent any time online in the last few years, you've seen it: "Go touch grass." In internet slang its telling someone to log off and go outside, usually after they'd said something deeply unhinged in a comment section. But as advice goes? It's actually pretty solid, especially in the summer months.

It's not just the weather, it's the pace as backpacks disappear and alarm clocks go quiet. Kids who spent nine months moving from one structured hour to the next suddenly have long, unscheduled afternoons with nothing required of them. They play differently, perhaps a bit slower than usual. That slowing down isn't laziness. It's the thing we've been waiting for all year.

Developmental researchers call it "unstructured play," and they've spent decades making the case for it. Children need time that isn't organized for them — time where they choose what to do, how long to do it, and what it means. That kind of play is where imagination lives. It's also where identity gets worked out: who am I, who do I want to be, who do I see myself becoming?

A doll is a particularly good instrument for that kind of inquiry. When a child picks a doll that looks like her, she's not just choosing a toy. She's practicing recognition — this world includes me. When a child picks a doll that looks different from him, he's practicing something equally important: curiosity, empathy, the expansion of what he considers familiar. Both choices matter. Both are doing real developmental work.

What summer does is give children the time to have those moments without a schedule pulling them away. A Tuesday afternoon in July can hold a whole hour of doll play — stories told and retold, characters renamed, scenarios built and dismantled. That hour looks like nothing from the outside. From the inside, it's significant.

A girl enjoying coloring time with her new doll from Dollhouse Day at the Hibernia in San Francisco, 2024.

Parents often tell me they feel guilty about unstructured time, and I understand the impulse. We've been sold the idea that good parenting looks like constant enrichment. But the research consistently points in the other direction: children need boredom. They need open time. They need to experience the mild discomfort of not knowing what to do next — because working through that discomfort is how they develop creativity, self-direction, and resilience.

This is where "touch grass" stops being a punchline and starts being a philosophy. Summertime is one of the few stretches in the year when kids can have genuinely uninterrupted moments — not a 20-minute recess, not a screen break between homework and dinner, but a whole afternoon where nothing is coming next. Those stretches are rarer than we think. And they're where some of the most important play happens.

It doesn't have to be outside, and it doesn't have to be grass. It just has to be free. You don't have to engineer a perfect summer. You don't have to plan the right activity or buy the right toy. You just have to leave some afternoons open and see what your child reaches for. Often, they'll reach for something that tells you exactly where they are right now — what they're curious about, what they're working out, who they're becoming. Summer gives children more of those moments. Touch grass. Let them linger. That's reason enough to protect it.

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The Dollhouse Project brings inclusive play experiences to families across the Bay Area. Find our upcoming events at dollhouseday.com.