While promoting a broad range of healthy essentials for children, the Alliance works intensively on certain critical issues. Among these are the loss of creative play and hands-on activities in children’s lives and excessive amounts of time spent in front of screens instead of in face-to-face engagement with other children, caring adults, or the natural world. We also work against the commercialization of childhood, the overuse of high-stakes testing on children, and increasing levels of childhood obesity.
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• Restoring Play: Child-initiated imaginative play is losing out to academic training and programmed activities in young children's lives, in part because many adults are unaware of the direct links between children's play and their healthy emotional, social, and intellectual development. The Alliance has issued statements and calls to action on the education of young children, calling on educators and policymakers to pay more attention to this issue. We also sponsor research on the current state of child-initiated play in early education and on ways that educators can encourage and restore play. We are now preparing to launch a national campaign to raise public consciousness about the importance of play and its current endangered status.
  
• Computers and Childhood: Millions of dollars are being spent to bring computers and the Internet to America's elementary school classrooms, yet there is little, if any, significant research showing academic gain from computer usage. Furthermore, the funds and time needed for purchasing and maintaining computers drains resources from proven school essentials such as smaller classroom sizes, arts and music programs, and physical education. Is more time staring at a screen what today's children need?