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Boston Globe

Grow up. Go down the waterslide.

Advertisement Maybe it was Disney vacation magic or the mind-scrambling heat or the special feeling of swampy anarchy that Florida itself can engender, but everyone there was giving the waterslide a go — kids, teens, moms, dads, grandmas. My husband and I went down with and without our children. One thoroughly tattooed man hit the pool with a splash rivaling any fireworks display we saw that week. No one was self-conscious; everyone was having a blast. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Back home, we returned to our public pool in Needham, which has, if not Disney-caliber slides, a pair of pretty good ones. I watched from a hot deck chair as my kids and their friends went happily down. After a while I thought, That could be me. Wait. Why isn't that me? Advertisement In four summers at Needham's town pool, I have seen just a handful of adults use the waterslide — almost all fathers with the ostensible excuse of encouraging their reluctant kids. I had never, not once, seen a grown woman go down. In the Disney afterglow, this seemed insane. Waterslides, as we've established, are fun. My fellow parents and I, sitting in the sun or standing watchfully in the rib-deep waters of the shallow end, certainly didn't have anything more exciting going on. Still, it seemed like a bold, even improper choice. It wasn't only in my head, either — there are at least four separate I wondered why. There's the anxiety around being perceived as silly, I suppose. For many of us, especially of a certain age, there's terror at the prospect of attracting any attention while wearing a bathing suit. For parents, it might be force of habit. Having kids involves a lot of vicarious fun — cheering at soccer and softball; making small talk while your progeny go nuts at a trampoline park. But kids or no, growing older involves a thousand tiny instances of holding back: getting a little less bold, a little more self-conscious. When we do have fun, it tends to have a productive endpoint. Find an exercise you enjoy. Play a word game to stave off cognitive decline. Don't forget to nurture your friendships, lest you die alone. But there's value in pointless fun, too. Biologically, we crave play in the same way we crave Advertisement For decades, an array of research has shown play to be a crucial piece of childhood development. For adults, spending time in what psychologists call a 'play state' — focusing on an activity like playing basketball, rubbing a puppy's belly, or, I don't know, going down a waterslide — has been linked to everything from staving off depression and improving cognition to Back at the pool, I couldn't think of a more direct (or steep!) path to the play state than the one looming in front of me. Fun — a bracing, distilled, 30-second shot of it — was just sitting right there, but none of us adults were taking it. Assuming no back issues, I'm here to encourage you to take it. Based on the number of parents I've seen risking life and limb to go sledding in the winter, you probably want to. I did. Twice. It wasn't as easy as all my grandstanding here may suggest. It was psychologically daunting — perching on a veritable pedestal surrounded by children, listening to safety instructions from a bored teenage lifeguard who has never been barraged by Instagram ads for 'tummy control' one-pieces. (Can a tummy truly be controlled?) Being a trailblazer is not for the weak. And yet, the sheer joy of it — the drop in my stomach, the cave-like echo in the tunnel, the cold, disorienting splash — put me in a great mood for the rest of the weekend. And there's something to be said for those cognitive benefits. After, I had to figure out dinner, and for the first time, it occurred to me that I could get pizza delivered to the pool. Advertisement