This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Rumspringa means, roughly, running around, and it names a specific window in Amish life that Devil's Playground spends its whole runtime inside. Around age sixteen, an Amish teenager is released from the community's ordinary expectations. Cars, television, drugs, non-Amish clothing, the internet, none of it is officially sanctioned, but none of it triggers church discipline either, because the teenager has not yet made the one decision that would put them under the church's authority in the first place: baptism.
That single fact reorders everything the film shows. A young person shown drinking, using drugs or dating outside the community is not shown breaking Amish rules, because those rules have not yet been formally accepted. Lucy Walker's camera follows several teenagers in LaGrange County, Indiana, including Velda Bontrager, Faron Yoder and Gerald Yutzy, through exactly this ungoverned interval, watching them sample a world their families never chose to leave, while a deadline none of them can defer indefinitely sits at the end of it.
The practice exists, as the film's subjects and the wider scholarship on Amish life both make clear, precisely because Amish communities want baptism to be a real choice rather than an inherited default. A life joined without ever having seen an alternative is not, in the community's own reasoning, a life truly chosen. Rumspringa is the price of making that choice mean something, and Devil's Playground was made to watch a handful of young people pay it, unresolved, on camera.