Source
G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904) — earliest strong match: 'men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely'
Editorial Note
This popular epigram is routinely credited to Benjamin Franklin, but it appears nowhere in his documented writings — not in Poor Richard's Almanack, the Autobiography, or the collected Papers — and its cadence belongs firmly to the 20th century, not to Franklin, who died in 1790. The saying in fact evolved from later authors: the earliest strong match traces to G. Stanley Hall's 1904 psychology treatise Adolescence, with a still-earlier germ of the idea in Karl Groos's 1896 The Play of Animals, and it was circulating in print (for example, a 1925 child-welfare journal) generations after Franklin's era. The frequent modern credit to George Bernard Shaw is likewise unfounded — that attribution surfaced only around 1983, more than three decades after Shaw's death — as is the occasional tag to Herbert Spencer. Because a documented origin outside Franklin exists and the phrasing postdates him by well over a century, the Franklin credit is a later accretion attaching a catchy line to a famous name. We therefore class it misattributed.