Qiddiya and Globant Partner to Create a Next-Generation Entertainment Hub

She called him a few hours later, pleading to give her son another chance. When Clark told her no, things got heated before he ended the call.

“I said, ‘Look, you know, this is between us and your son. He’s the employee,’” says Clark, who is chief operating officer of a Fairbanks, Alaska-based staffing firm.

Gen Zers make up nearly one-fifth of the adult workforce, and bosses and recruiters say it often feels like the nervous parents who hovered over them through childhood and college are right alongside them. What began as the occasional parent ride-along to a job interview coming out of the Covid era is now full-on career “co-piloting,” said Jasmine Escalera, head career coach at résumé templates service Zety.

More parents are calling up hiring managers, applying for jobs on their adult child’s behalf, and even showing up—or lurking just off-screen—on Zoom calls to help navigate difficult conversations or go over benefits packages.

“The first time it happened, I was appalled,” says Clark, who has fielded calls from parents asking why their child didn’t get a job. “Since then it’s become more of a here-we-go-again reaction.”

Human resource professionals have expressed outrage on social media.

“Parents should not be calling employers to check on their application status or ask questions on behalf of their child,” says Lynne Alba, a director of talent acquisition and physician recruitment at a large health system on Long Island, who vented about the phenomenon in a Tik Tok video she reposted on LinkedIn.

At a recent job fair, a mother approached Alba with her daughter’s résumé, explaining that she wanted to work as a nurse. “While I appreciated that she was trying to help, I intentionally shifted my attention to her daughter. No matter what Mom said, I wanted to hear directly from the candidate,” says Alba.

Some parents who step in say it’s a challenging job market for young people, and that they would only intervene in extreme circumstances—social anxiety, a toxic boss, unfair treatment. There’s also a gray area of intervention that some see as an extension of the parental advice and networking help that’s been happening for generations.

Rick Wainschel last year published a post on LinkedIn asking his network to help his daughter, a recent college graduate, find a corporate entry-level position.

Wainschel, a vice president at an automotive marketing technology company, says he doesn’t think his outreach qualifies as helicoptering. “Well, maybe a little,” he said, before quickly adding he was being half tongue-in-cheek. “It was really merely just to help her get a network established. I just think the work world is a challenging place.”

Wainschel’s post, which was OK’d by his daughter on the condition he didn’t embarrass her, didn’t lead to a job but did result in productive conversations, he said. She found a job with a credit union on her own shortly after.

Recruiters and other HR types say aggressive parental involvement signals a lack of independence and raises fears that mom and dad will be checking in regularly if their kid gets hired.

What’s more, they say, such interference rarely, if ever, works.

The phenomenon is becoming so commonplace it made the agenda of human resources organization SHRM’s national conference in June. When James Harrell asked a room of 250 professionals if they ever had a parent calling on behalf of a young employee or coming to an interview, more than half raised their hands.

“The first time it happened to me, I got high up on my soapbox and I shook my fist,” Harrell says. “The 15th time I said, ‘OK, well, I gotta figure out how to do something differently.’”

Harrell helped run an apprenticeship program for high-school students while he was the human capital management chief for the San Antonio Independent School District. To run interference, the district introduced a “signing day” when parents could come and ask questions.

After a Gen Z employee at Nation’s Best Holdings, a chain of hardware and home goods stores, didn’t get an “exceeds expectations” designation on his performance review last year, HR chief Amber Little got a call asking why.

It was one of a number of calls from parents her office has picked up recently about issues ranging from negative feedback to understanding which health insurance plan to choose. Little has even noticed parents are now calling in sick for their adult kids.

“Instead of coaching them, they do it for them,” Little says. When it happens, she adds, “we encourage them to tell their child to come talk to us and we will walk them through it.”

A Zety survey of more than 1,000 Gen Zers found 20% had a parent attend a job interview with them.

“You get a sense it’s all hands on deck for some families,” says Keith Wolf, managing partner of recruiting firm Murray Resources in Houston. His office has received emails from parents seeking jobs for their children, and Wolf says he’s always wondered if the kids even knew.

Paul “PB” Branson, who graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in May, bristles at the thought. The 22-year-old says while he understands their anxiety, parents shouldn’t be joining their children’s job interviews or contacting employees on their behalf.

“That trend,” he says, “has really hurt my generation by creating this kind of stereotype that we need our hands held.”

One thing he hasn’t added: any other employees.

The 40-year-old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching, and then often running, new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Broca’s emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers and grant refunds when issues arise.

Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun-drenched Sausalito, Calif., living room. “I think compromises make lukewarm results,” he said.

Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.

An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.

In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground, said Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe’s chief economist. “Now, AI can be a built-in business partner,” he said.

AI’s ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. But the technology’s ability to also handle key tasks in tech, like coding, make that field a particular hot spot.

Analyzing Census Bureau data, Bank of America Institute economist Taylor Bowley found that among all industries, new business applications in the information sector have seen the biggest percentage increase—nearly 45%—over the past year. At the same time, the rate of information-sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry.

This Census dataset doesn’t track solo-operated businesses. But the numbers broadly show—in tech and beyond—that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that’s a strong sign that solo operators are on the upswing.

“The bar for getting started has never been lower,” said Julian Weisser, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator—which offers founders seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake—attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May.

Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers’ accounts while paying to access Anthropic’s Claude to run his clients’ requests—that AI company, as well as others, charges based on usage. He has since switched to free open-source AI models from China.

Broca said he has raised $30 million from investors and, at the same time, has saved millions in salary since he hasn’t needed a team of software engineers.

Another risk: If it’s easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI-assisted business, copying them can be easy, too. This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnston, who runs an AI-assisted business alone in Orlando, Fla.

“Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now,” said Johnston, 40, who used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit, with no employees, and is continuing to grow.

What one-person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility, too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go-it-alone entrepreneurs show how the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities.

“If everyone’s hiring less, but you get four times more firms, what does that do to head count?” said Rembrand Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co-authored a recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees.

Koning also believes a soft hiring environment that’s left some people mired in long job searches has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses.

Some founders cite different motives. “It’s a perfect storm of post-pandemic burnout and a re-evaluation of one’s priorities, and also booming AI and a sense of what’s possible,” said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Breinigsville, Pa.

Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had worked at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social-media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing. “It was like my chief of staff, a second in command,” he said.

The business ultimately petered out within months, though, and Ahmad is now back to a full-time corporate role with a utility company.

For Claire Vo, 41, AI helped her turn a passing impulse into a business. She was working full-time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late 2023 to help code an app that would help her manage documentation and design for new products, with customers ranging from financial services to healthcare firms.

“I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT,” said Vo, who lives in San Francisco.

She put the app online for $1 a month, and within weeks people downloaded it thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Vo’s company—which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer—now has 100,000 users and is on track to make seven figures in profit this year. AI handles the company’s marketing, sales and customer support.

While AI is a shortcut, Vo said her network and credibility in the industry were key. “I think people over-index on how easy AI is and under-index on how much I did to get to this point,” she said.

In March, the company suffered defeats in landmark court cases in California and New Mexico that accused it of giving priority to growth over the safety of its underage users. Thousands more lawsuits by individuals, school districts and more than 40 state attorneys general are pending in state and federal courts. Together, they could put the company on the hook for many billions of dollars in damages and weaken the federal protections that have historically shielded it from liability for harmful content on its platform.

Meta is currently in the midst of a trial over claims by the attorney general of Tennessee, one of dozens of states that have said the company misled its users about the safety of its platform. In August, Meta will go to trial in federal court in Oakland over claims from four attorneys general. In that litigation, the states have asked for damages of up to $1.4 trillion—a sum nearly equivalent to Meta’s $1.5 trillion market capitalization. Another trial in that consolidated set of cases is slated for February.

Recent cases have brought mixed results. In May, Meta settled with a Kentucky school district ahead of a trial planned in Los Angeles. It notched a win this month after the teenage plaintiff in another case dropped his suit without receiving any payment from Meta, after settling with co-defendants YouTube, Snap and TikTok. Meta said it would continue to fight “baseless” lawsuits, noting the plaintiff had created his account only six months before filing the suit.

The lawsuits, which argue that social-media services are designed in ways that cause mental-health problems in young people, are finally getting in front of juries after working their way through courts for years and overcoming attempts by the companies to have them dismissed.

While the personal-injury lawsuits seek only monetary damages, the state and school district cases go further, asking courts to order Meta to alter some of the features and dynamics that have made its products sticky enough to attract 3.5 billion users. With user growth across its family of apps already slowing to a standstill in the first quarter, adverse changes could be punishing to Meta’s core business.

Meta has expressed willingness to work with the states and schools to continue to make its products safe while calling the estimate of more than $1 trillion in damages absurd. “A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” the company said in a filing.

Even if that number ends up shrinking, the collective financial impact of the cases could be significant. The company warned investors that a loss in the New Mexico case alone could yield $3.7 billion in damages once the second phase of the trial has concluded.

The timing is far from ideal for Meta, which, after long dominating the market for social-networking services, is racing to retrofit its business to a world in which AI is rapidly becoming the focus of competition. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said success in this new age is “not a given.”

Meta is planning up to $145 billion in capital spending this year, largely to buy chips and build out its data centers, and earlier this year it laid off 8,000 employees, in part to fund its AI plans. Analysts are expecting the company to report its first quarter of negative free cash flow when it announces its second-quarter earnings Wednesday.

“It comes down to, How can they handle this? How are they prepared to handle this?” said Brian Mulberry, who manages a portfolio at Zacks Investment Management that includes Meta stock. “I do think it’s a real risk for sure.”

Tech analyst Josh Beck, of Raymond James, is taking a wait-and-see approach before deciding what to make of the trials.

“I think it’s something that’s out there. It’s coming up a little bit more,” he said. “But we need to see a little more direction before people become concerned.”

A Meta spokeswoman said in a statement that the company would continue to defend itself vigorously while focusing on providing “safe, age-appropriate experiences parents tell us they want for their teens.”

“Every case is different, and the outcome of one doesn’t dictate the outcome of another,” the spokeswoman said.

Social-media companies have long been insulated from many legal threats because a federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, shields them from liability for others’ content on their platforms. Judges around the country, however, are letting many cases go to trial on a theory that says their products are designed intentionally to addict people, sidestepping arguments that rely on claims of harmful content.

Meta has consistently denied wrongdoing in response to lawsuits alleging user harm and in court has pointed to new safety features for teenagers’ accounts and other product changes it has already made as evidence that it is giving priority to safety over growth. It is heavily promoting teen accounts, building stricter supervision controls, putting limits on late-night notifications and installing compulsory break reminders.

Meta has said the litigation is trying to fix a sprawling societal issue with a patchwork of court rulings that, if successful, wouldn’t stop young people from using other types of social media. It has said it would rather address social-media content and design-related issues with federal legislation that applies to the whole industry versus hashing these cases out one-by-one in court. The company plans to appeal the verdicts in Los Angeles and New Mexico.

But the tech giant has shown signs of willingness to compromise. In June, it settled one of the cases slated for trial in federal court, and it raised the prospect of altering some of its platform features as part of the second phase of the trial in New Mexico, where a judge is weighing further damages requested by the state.

Meta’s chief privacy and compliance officer, Michel Protti, testified that the company would be willing to consider changes requested by the state, including making all users under 18 private by default and requiring parent consent to be public and to block notifications during school hours by default, with some exceptions. Meta called many of the requests technically unfeasible, and Protti testified that some had “high potential to grind all our global product development to a halt.”

For Meta, the damages awarded to plaintiffs to date—$6 million to the 20-year-old woman in Los Angeles (split between Meta and YouTube) and $375 million to the state of New Mexico—are a small drop in the bucket for a company that brings in more than $200 billion a year. But it is the precedent the verdicts set that might become an issue.

“You wouldn’t want to keep losing these cases in a row. They make a ton of money, but they could be looking at billions in liability,” said data-privacy lawyer Phil Yannella, who isn’t involved in the lawsuits. “No company is going to ignore that.”

The boy, referred to as R.K.C. in court documents, had previously settled his personal injury lawsuit out of court with TikTok, Snap, and Alphabet’s YouTube. The terms of those settlements weren’t disclosed.

Meta was the only remaining defendant in the trial that was slated to begin Monday. The company said he dropped his case “without receiving any payment.”

“The claims never held up, and this outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits,” a Meta spokeswoman said in a statement.

The company previously argued in court documents that R.K.C. used Facebook and Instagram for less than 10 minutes a day on average and had created the accounts only six months before filing the lawsuit.

Lawyers for the plaintiff said in a statement, “R.K.C. came into this process wanting to hold social media companies accountable and push for changes to protect young people like himself. He did that. In light of the overall successful result of the litigation and his concerns about enduring a grueling weekslong trial, he has elected to withdraw his claims against Meta.”

The trial was one of several planned in Los Angeles state court, as more than 3,000 consolidated cases make similar claims against the social-media company. In March, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harm to a young woman who testified that her constant use of the platforms led to severe psychological damage. Snap and TikTok also settled that case ahead of trial. A separate jury in New Mexico ruled against Meta as well, for a fine of $375 million. A state court judge there is weighing further damages against the company that could mean it’s forced to potentially pay more and change the way it operates.

Separately, thousands of lawsuits are also consolidated in federal court, where school districts, attorneys general, and individuals make similar claims about the products’ harm to young people. Meta and the other companies settled with a Kentucky school district, averting a trial slated for June.

The first federal trial in the Northern District of California against Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok is scheduled to begin Aug. 18. The trial will center on claims filed by attorneys general in California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. A total of 29 states are involved in the broader litigation consolidated in the Northern District of California, along with thousands more from school districts and individuals.

“I gradually started to worry about what I was eating, how many calories were in it, if it was going to stop me from losing more weight,” said the 23-year-old nanny, who is studying to be a nurse in London. “I think that’s when I was starting to develop anorexia.”

GLP-1s have been hailed as miracle drugs, their rise leading to critical breakthroughs in America’s fight against obesity. Roughly 13 million Americans are now on them, according to research from JPMorgan published in February. The drugs mimic naturally occurring hormones to suppress appetite and cravings and make people feel full. For those who’ve struggled with restrictive eating and anorexia, that can be a tantalizing proposition—and a dangerous one.

Anorexia kills a higher percentage of patients than any other eating disorder, and it is the second most deadly mental illness after opioid addiction, according to data compiled by the nonprofit National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.

“I recovered from anorexia myself many years ago, and had this been on the market, I think I certainly would have tried to access it,” said Jennifer Rollin, therapist and founder of the Eating Disorder Center, which is based in Rockville, Md., and provides therapy for patients in seven states.

“Seeing all of the celebrities on the red carpet and so many friends and family members, kind of, bragging about weight loss—that has been a huge trigger for many of the clients I work with,” she said.

Rollin’s business has helped treat people with eating disorders who’ve obtained GLP-1 medications to suppress their appetites, as well as those who were triggered into disordered eating while taking the drugs for approved conditions.

The popularity of Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, approved for use in 2017 to treat Type 2 diabetes, helped usher in a new wave of GLP-1 drugs that are helping people address chronic weight issues and related problems like sleep apnea and adverse cardiovascular events. Researchers are probing for other applications.

Some doctors say the drugs have as much potential to hurt people with certain eating disorders as to help people with others. The drugs have been used off-label to help with conditions like binge eating and bulimia, which are notoriously difficult to treat.

Jamie Thayer, 48, was prescribed Wegovy for weight loss. “It was like a miracle at first,” she said.

She weighed 240 pounds when she started taking the drug in March 2023, and she rapidly started to shed pounds. She also experienced very low energy, hair loss, severe dizziness, fainting spells from low blood sugar and brain fog. Her son, who had recovered from anorexia, shared his concern with her that Thanksgiving.

“I was really proud of my weight loss at that point,” said Thayer, a Title IX coordinator in Frederick, Md. “I thought I was doing a really good thing.”

When her insurance stopped covering brand-name GLP-1s, she started buying a compounded powder version from China and reconstituting it at home. Meanwhile, her eating became more disordered, governed by strict rules.

“I wouldn’t eat Monday or Tuesday, then on Wednesday I could get a pastry,” she said. “My shot would start to wear off around Saturday, so I usually got some calories on Saturday and Sunday.”

In July 2024, after losing 100 pounds, she checked into a residential treatment center in Connecticut, where she was diagnosed with atypical anorexia and, soon after, re-feeding syndrome, which endangers malnourished people who take on food too fast. She said it saved her life.

Sam DeCaro, director of clinical outreach and education at the Renfrew Center, described a common misconception: that undereating is fine for people who are not considered underweight. In fact, it can be a sign of atypical anorexia, where someone has all the hallmarks of anorexia but is not underweight by body-mass index standards.

“Their undernourishment is causing them all these medical issues, heart issues,” DeCaro said. “It affects every system in the body.”

The rise of telehealth has made it easier than ever for people to obtain pharmaceuticals. Taylor, the nanny in London, said she submitted a doctored photograph of herself that made her look heavier to obtain her prescription. Jessica Scheer, CEO of National Eating Disorders Association, said the organization has heard that some providers don’t screen for a history of disordered eating before prescribing GLP-1s.

The makers of popular GLP-1 drugs have condemned the use of their medications for cosmetic weight loss. The medications don’t warn against using the drugs if you have a history of eating disorders. As with all prescriptions, it is up to care providers to determine whether a medication is right for a particular patient.

“We support our medicines being prescribed to patients who meet the indicated criteria and only promote the FDA-approved indications of our medicines for appropriate patients,” a Novo Nordisk spokesperson said in a statement.

“Patient safety is Lilly’s top priority,” an Eli Lilly spokesperson said in a statement. “As part of our routine safety review process for obesity management and Type 2 diabetes medications, we are working closely with regulators regarding potential safety topics, and we will continue to review data, including any data regarding eating disorders.”

Taylor, who began injecting in October 2024, was hospitalized in May 2025, soon after returning from a vacation. She’d gone about two weeks without eating, and her weight had dropped from 147 pounds to 103.

“I had to slowly re-feed myself and also get all my electrolytes and everything replenished,” she said. She didn’t tell the hospital about her GLP-1 use. “I wanted to carry on losing weight.”

When Mounjaro became harder to get, she sought out the medication through a friend of a friend. This January, she stopped the injections and began going to eating disorder treatment several times a week.

“I still struggle massively, and my weight has continued to go down,” she said. She currently weighs 88 pounds and plans to seek inpatient treatment, as soon as a room becomes available.

And yet, on a baking afternoon in front of a hostile crowd, a vastly superior Spain couldn’t find a way to punish them. Even when Argentina was reduced to 10 men, the wave of Spanish jerseys kept crashing into the same resolute defense. Nerves crept in, and as the match entered extra time, Spain began to fear that this final would go down as un robo, a robbery.

Instead, it will be retold as something far more epic than that. This was the day when Spain downed Argentina 1-0 and won the World Cup for the second time.

“Even against 10 men at the end we had to suffer,” Spain coach Luis De La Fuente said. “But, we like to suffer, and I’ll say it again, we were prepared for everything.”

Sixteen years after first lifting the trophy in South Africa, La Roja demonstrated without a doubt that no country commands the world’s most popular sport quite like Spain. With an approach so complete, so technically sound that its players look permanently untroubled, they have shown the world how it looks when cool competence is elevated to high art.

It’s no coincidence that Spain is now a simultaneous Olympic, European, and world champion, or that it currently holds both the men’s and women’s World Cups. This is a nation that has worked out how to develop soccer players as plentifully as it grows oranges and lemons.

When the breakthrough finally came, it arrived with Spain’s 20th shot of the match. After 104 games, the largest World Cup in history had required an extra half-hour to decide its champion and now, in the 16th minute of extra time, Ferran Torres was the man to enter the history books. After a high ball to the back post, headed down by Nico Williams, the 26-year-old Torres lashed it home.

This was the one effort that Argentina goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez, who set a World Cup final record for saves, couldn’t keep out.

But if Spain’s tactics revolved around control, patience, and invention, Argentina’s approach to Sunday focused more squarely on intimidation. And with a permissive referee running the show, Argentina took every inch of latitude—at least until Enzo Fernandez was ejected in second-half stoppage time for a second yellow card.

Over 120 minutes, the defending champions produced just one shot on target but committed 25 fouls. And Messi found himself with precious little to work with—in the first 15 minutes, he had touched the ball just once on the opening kickoff.

Back in 2010, the Netherlands had tried a similar tack against Spain in a World Cup final. Faced with a peak version of the pretty-passing, high-possession, tiki-taka style, the Dutch realized that they simply couldn’t out-soccer La Roja. Their response was to make the match as physical as possible and hope for the best. That time, Spain found a winner in the 26th minute of extra time.

On Sunday, the decisive moment arrived slightly earlier, as the center of the soccer universe migrated to an NFL bowl in a New Jersey parking lot. All at once, it contained President Trump, the King of Spain, and half the royalty of American entertainment.

Mostly, though, the stands heaved with fans from Argentina. Just as they did in Qatar—and more recently in Atlanta and Dallas and Kansas City—supporters in sky blue and white swarmed the stadium, outnumbering Spain fans by at least three-to-one. This is a country where adoration of the national team is so fervent that many fans build their financial planning around the World Cup, taking out loans to buy tickets every four years. It’s also the country with the most psychologists per capita in the world. These facts are perhaps not unrelated.

“The fans are absolutely crazy, different to other countries,” Argentina’s Martinez said before the game. “Seeing them celebrate at 2 a.m. in the cold Argentine weather means a lot.”

But there would be no repeat of those scenes on Sunday night as it lost a World Cup final for the fourth time in its history. Instead, Argentina could only look on as Messi’s World Cup career came to a close with his second defeat in three finals, 12 years after losing his first against Germany.

Only now, the country that defined Messi’s club career over two decades at FC Barcelona, was the one doling out the punishment.

“Of course we want our kids to be good at math and reading, but what kind of people will they grow up to be? That’s determined at recess,” said Truman, explaining the benefits for children’s social development.

Mothers and fathers nationwide are alarmed by dwindling recess time and calling upon school administrators to restore it. In New Hampshire and Michigan, parents have had success increasing recess in some schools and are pushing for state laws mandating it. In New York, some parents say a bill backed by the statewide teachers union requiring up to 30 minutes of daily, unstructured recess time in elementary school doesn’t go far enough.

In Michigan, Shanel Talbert said she got involved in the fight for recess when her daughter’s elementary school reduced it last year. While her daughter wasn’t struggling academically, Talbert could see that she was burned out from her seven-hour school day.

Talbert and other parents launched a petition, calling for at least 60 minutes of recess, that has garnered over 1,300 signatures. They are working with a state legislator on a bill that would require 40 minutes of recess in elementary school, which Talbert said they thought was more likely to pass.

Morning and afternoon recesses were common in U.S. elementary schools during the post-World War II decades. But as pressure mounted on schools to improve test performance in the 2000s, many reduced or eliminated recess in favor of more instructional time in subjects such as reading and math. States often prescribe minimum instructional hours, and recess generally doesn’t count.

Chicago Public Schools was among the first big-city school districts to restore daily recess in 2012, after many of its elementary schools did away with it. But the effort was slow to catch on broadly.

Pediatricians have been sounding the alarm, saying recess has both mental and physical benefits. In May, the American Academy of Pediatrics expanded its endorsement of recess beyond elementary schools to include middle and high schools. Research suggests that at least 20 minutes a day with multiple breaks is best, the AAP says.

Catherine Ramstetter, co-author of that recommendation, said recess helps children remember information and learn better. It also allows young children to develop interpersonal skills.

Ramstetter upholds the Finnish model in which students typically get 15 minutes of recess multiple times a day. “The importance of recess as time to connect with one another cannot be understated,” she said. “Adults ideally are not intervening in the play but close by so they can intervene when necessary.”

In Oklahoma, legislators recently pushed for more recess time as part of an effort to improve learning and test results that has also included banning cellphones during school and emphasizing phonics, according to Republican state Sen. Ally Seifried.

Seifried drafted a law that passed in April requiring 40 minutes of daily recess in kindergarten through fifth grade, up from 20 minutes. “Parents who had little boys definitely recognized the importance of this,” she said.

Krissy West, a school physical therapist and mother from New Hampshire, started advocating for more recess last year, after seeing her daughter Daisy get overwhelmed, sometimes resulting in tantrums after school.

“She would say that [her] whole body is just ready to run,” said West. As a coping mechanism later on, her daughter, now 10 years old, would ask the teacher for permission to take bathroom breaks, time she would then use to take a walk through the hallways.

A bill West championed, which would have required 45 to 60 minutes of recess for K-6 students, was defeated on New Hampshire’s House floor earlier this year amid concerns it would violate existing teacher contracts by requiring extra staff.

The “Say Yes to Recess” initiative calls for at least 60 minutes of screen-free time daily when children get to pick their activities, and that it isn’t withheld as punishment. The hourlong recommendation is based on research from Texas Christian University on the optimal time needed for children to reduce stress and anxiety, improve test scores and fight obesity.

West and other parents have helped push for change locally at Valley View Community School in Farmington, N.H. This past academic year, the elementary school added a 25-minute recess block starting from 7:30 a.m., when parents can drop their children off. The start of classes was moved 10 minutes later to help accommodate it.

West said recess first thing in the day isn’t ideal and noted part of it became optional in practice because some children wouldn’t arrive until later. But she is encouraged that the school is trying to find solutions.

The school’s principal, Mark Dangora, said adding more downtime is still a work in progress. He is trying to bring daily recess time to a total of 50-55 minutes. Losing a bit of class time, so far, hasn’t affected learning, he said.

“Children need play,” said Dangora.