Parents: Keep Out!

25:26What do you mean by this term, Peter? Let me refer to a research study that was done some time ago. These researchers recorded children's voices while they were playing with other children.

25:39Peter Gray:These were young children, about probably five or six years old, and then also recorded them when they were in class talking with their teacher and also recorded them when they were just sitting around having lunch. When they were playing, the language was far more sophisticated, far more real, far more authentic than in any other situation. Because when you're playing with other kids, you're constantly negotiating. You know, maybe picture a group of young children playing that they're going to the king's ball. And, you know, who's going to marry the prince? And so then there's a discussion about that or who gets to wear this beautiful set of necklaces that you find in the dress up corner of the kindergarten room.

26:29Peter Gray:So who and so there's constant they spend more time negotiating and discussing what they're doing than actually playing it out, which is a good thing because that's how you think of what they're learning when they do that. They're learning this incredibly important skill of being able to use words, language, to decide mutually what they're doing as a group. How are we going to play this game?

26:58You say that when kids interact with adults, they don't get the same kind of authentic feedback that they get when they are interacting with other children. Can you give me some examples of what you mean by this?

27:10Peter Gray:Well, you know, sometimes it's just ridiculous. You'll hear a parent or an adult say to a child, so, Billy, what color is that? Oh, my gosh, you know, this is so patronizing, you know. It's as if the purpose of the discussion is always kind of pedantic to try to teach the child something rather than an actual authentic back-and-forth discussion. And I suppose also there is some pressure that parents and teachers feel to give positive feedback. So when, you know, the four-year-old comes back with a scribble on a page, there is some pressure to say this is a masterpiece. Yes, unlike kids. I'll give you what I think is a nice example of this.

27:55Peter Gray:So in one of the situations where I was observing age mixed play and how seven and eight year old children playing card games with children who are somewhat older. And I was observing how the older children would keep the younger children on task. And they would say things like, hey, stupid, you know, pay attention. You know, this is not what a typical parent today would say. But the kids, I think, actually, the little kids, I think, appreciated that because this is genuine coming from an older kid. This kid is not trying to patronize you in some way. You also say that in the course of playing, children come to understand that rules, in fact, are invented things.

28:40They are things that have been invented by other people and that they can be modified and changed. And it's harder to do that if you believe that rules are sacrosanct and handed down to you by an all-powerful adult.

28:52Peter Gray:One way to think about this is the difference between, let's say, Little League Baseball, a pickup game of baseball, the way we used to play it when I was a kid. You know, there'd be a bunch of kids who would show up in the vacant lot and there was never 18 players. We had to kind of figure out how we're going to make up the sides. We had to create ground rules. Anything, you know, hit in the direction of those windows over there, that's an automatic out and so on. Have to pitch soft to little Timmy. We'd make up all the rules so there'd be fun for everybody and fair for everybody. This is just the way kids always play.

29:25Peter Gray:Little League, you play by the official rules of baseball. You don't vary them. You just do it. And there's adults there making sure you follow those rules. You say that one reason adults are less inclined to give children the freedom they used to have is that adults are increasingly concerned about their children's safety. When did this fear arise, Peter, and how does it affect the lives of children? So when I was a kid many decades ago, the regular song of parents was, get out of the house. Get out of the house. I don't want you around. So kids were outdoors. And they'd find one another. And they'd play with one another.

30:12This was not just the 1950s and 1960s America. This is the way hunter-gatherer children played, as I described before. This is generally the way children throughout the world have played. And so this is a new thing, in some sense, in the history of the world, where we are not allowing children independent activity away from adults. We've got adults around them all the time. But talk a little bit about sort of the concern for safety and sort of the concern that many parents have, that if they were to give kids the kind of freedom that they had before, that bad things could happen to them?

30:50Peter Gray:Yeah, so if you ask parents why they're not allowing their children outside, you'll get a variety of answers. Some of them are quite legitimate. One of them is, well, there's nobody else outside, and so my child goes outside to play and there's nobody to play with. or, you know, I've heard of this case recently in our neighborhood where somebody let their child out to play with other children and somebody called the police and then protective services arrived. So the culture has changed such that you are considered to be a negligent parent if you allow your child outside without observing that child.

31:30Peter Gray:Now, why did the culture change? And I think that the biggest change occurred in the 1980s. There were a couple of cases of young boys, in both cases they were six years old. One of these instances occurred actually in 1979 and the other in 1981, who were taken by a stranger on the street and ultimately murdered. This is, of course, a very rare event. And because it's rare, it made headlines. It was in the news all the time. and it led to programs trying to protect, make sure that this doesn't happen again. And among those programs was to put pictures on milk cartons of missing children. And the assumption was that when you were eating your breakfast cereal and looking at this milk carton, that these missing children were people, little kids who had been snatched away by some stranger on the street.

32:27Peter Gray:And the whole concept of stranger danger was developed. And once a person has this image in their head, it's hard to get it out of your head. So it leads to a belief that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. The truth of the matter is the world is not more dangerous today than it was decades ago. You know, it's also the case that families are having fewer children today. This is not just in the United States. It's in many countries around the world. And I'm not necessarily suggesting that parents who have many kids love their children any less than parents who have few kids. But it is certainly the case that I think parents direct more attention to their kids now, in part because families are smaller.

33:12And that's driven by demographic and economic changes that are probably well beyond the control of any individual.

33:19Peter Gray:I think that is definitely a contributing factor. When you have more kids, you're more likely to want some of them out of the house, if not all of them out of the house, right? And houses have gotten bigger, too. When you've got a small house and a bunch of kids, you don't want them all hanging around the house.

33:38You say that another reason adults have intruded in their children's lives is that increasingly many adults feel the need to prepare children for a very competitive world. Talk about this idea, Peter. Yes, I think we have become, over time, increasingly concerned about our children's competitiveness.

34:03Peter Gray:We in the United States are a competitive culture to begin with. And the other thing that's happened, I think, really ever since about 1980, there's been continuous growth in the gap between the rich and the poor in this country. And there's actually research indicating that when the gap between rich and poor is great, parents become increasingly anxious about their children's future. especially as the job market changes in ways that most parents don't necessarily understand and are kind of unpredictable and there's a lot of pressure on kids and creates a more competitive schooling environment than was present before.

34:54You say that there are serious consequences of depriving children of unstructured and unsupervised play. What are the effects of excessive adult supervision on the social, emotional, and intellectual development of children?

35:08Peter Gray:Over the same decades that we have been gradually decreasing children's opportunities to play independently of adults, We have seen a continuous rise in anxiety and depression and tragically even suicide among school-aged kids. So, of course, that correlation doesn't by itself prove a cause-and-effect relationship, but that's the first step for believing. Well, maybe the fact that children are not playing and exploring and doing things independently, maybe that's why they are so anxious, so depressed, so unhappy, so lacking in the resilience that we wish they would have. Now, there's both theoretical reasons and empirical reasons for believing that there is this cause-effect relationship.

36:12Peter Gray:Can you tell me a little bit about that? What is the evidence? So, let me begin with just the theoretical part. Play makes children happy. We shouldn't have to prove that, right? I mean, play is what makes children happy. It's also the case in other kinds of independent activities. Children feel good. They feel proud when they can do things by themselves. You know, it gives you a sense of confidence and so on. So you take that away from children and right off they're going to be less happy. And a famous play researcher, Brian Sutton Smith, who died a few years ago, and he used to say the opposite of play is depression.

36:55Peter Gray:and I think in a sense he's right that if you take away play from people they're going to be depressed but in addition to that what research shows is that when children are playing and doing other things independently they are acquiring the skills and the sense of agency the sense of what psychologists call an internal locus of control that leads them to recognize that they can solve problems. They can deal with the bumps in the road of life. You're dealing with that when you're playing. You know, somebody's bullying you a little bit and instead of a parent or an adult solving the problem, you figure out how to solve that problem.

37:36Peter Gray:Or you get hurt and you figure out what to do about it. Or you get lost and you find your way home. All of these are the kinds of experiences that children throughout history have always experienced. And it's how they learn, I can deal with problems. I don't have to be afraid of the world because I can solve these problems. But if we're not allowing children to do that, they don't develop this internal sense of control. That sets you up to be anxious. And if it goes too far, it sets you up to be depressed, a sense of hopelessness about the world. So those are the theoretical reasons. The empirical reasons come from a whole range of other kinds of studies that show that those children who do have more opportunity for independent play are doing better psychologically than those who have less.

38:26Do you think there are any positive speeder to the increased involvement of adults in children's lives? You could point to some positive changes. There are fewer teenage traffic accidents because fewer teenagers are driving. There's actually less sex among teenagers than in the past. So historically, in many ways, we might regard it as a good thing. There are fewer sexually transmitted diseases among young people. There's fewer unwanted pregnancies and so on than in the past. So some people point to those things as positive developments that have occurred from the fact that there's much more adult involvement in children's lives.

39:11When we come back, how to balance the imperatives of exploration and safety. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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41:22This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Peter Gray is a psychologist at Boston College. He's the author of Free to Learn, why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Peter, you've laid out some of the problems that arise from our present-day approach to parenting and education. You say that we can get a glimpse of what a healthier culture of childhood would look like by turning to the past. What was your own childhood like, Peter?

41:54Peter Gray:I was a kid in the 1950s, which was a time there were a lot of kids. We moved a lot, but I found I made friends very quickly because all I had to do was to go outdoors and I would find other kids. And certainly by the time I started school, I was walking to school by myself, as was everybody else. When Peter turned five, his family moved from Minneapolis to a small town in southern Minnesota. Job number one for little Peter? Find new friends. I remember my mother saying, well, why don't you just go door to door, knock on the doors, and ask if there are any children there your age? So I did that all by myself, went door to door.

42:41And it turns out that right across the street, the mom came to the door and I said, do you have any children who are about my age? And she said, yes, yes, I've got a daughter, Ruby Lou. And so Ruby Lou came to the door and we went out to play and Ruby Lou very quickly became my best friend. Tell me a little bit about her. What would you do together? so Ruby Lou was a little bit older than me she started school before I did but it's partly just the difference in when her birthday was and she was kind of bolder than I was I was kind of a shy kid in some ways a little bit of fried of heights and so on but she was a great tree climber she showed me how to climb the trees and I would she would challenge me to climb higher and higher in the trees.

43:31I think the story that I remember best is that she had a bicycle. I, at that point, did not have a bicycle. And I was really eager to learn how to ride a bicycle. So she said, well, I'll teach you how to ride a bicycle. So it turns out the street between our houses was on a small slope. And so she said, well, the easiest way to learn how to ride a bicycle is start at the top of the slope and give yourself a push. And then you just start pedaling and go as far as you can go and see if you can go a little farther every time. And what wonderful instructions for how to ride a bicycle. And so I did that.

44:12And her bike was a girl's bike, which made it easier to learn because I didn't have to swing my leg up over that bar. And so she taught me how to ride a bicycle. Then once I could ride a bicycle, I convinced my parents to buy me a secondhand bike.

44:29Peter Gray:She and I would take bicycle trips all around town. And my mother said, it's fine for me. I could, by myself, I had to stay within the town limits on the bike. But with Ruby Lou, it would be okay to go wherever we wanted because she assumed Ruby Lou was wiser and a little older and smarter than I was. I think she was. And we could go places together.

44:57I understand you played a lot of sports, but these were not like the adult organized sports teams that we have today. Yeah.

45:05Peter Gray:So the kids were all into baseball there and we would just get together whenever we could on the vacant lot, whatever kids were around and we'd create our own baseball games. And so each team had to sort of choose their own player to who would kind of be the coach who would decide, you know, who's going to play what positions and so on and so forth. And for some reason, even though I was one of the youngest players, the players chose me on my team to be the coach. So that meant that I was the one who had to remind people when the games were, I had to decide who was going to pitch. Everybody wanted to pitch.

45:46Peter Gray:So I had to figure out some rotating way to please everybody. I mean, the biggest challenge, of course, you have in a situation like this is you want everybody to stay on the team. You want to keep everybody happy. And it was kind of a very much an adult-like responsibility to manage this team when I was, I suppose I would have been about eight years old at that time. But there were no adults. Adults never came to these games. The only adult involved was probably a teenager who would be an umpire there, who would call balls and strikes and fair and foul. And that's what made it different from our pickup games.

46:27I mean, it would be hard to imagine an eight or nine-year-old in charge of a little league baseball team today. That's right. This is a change in our expectations. It's not a change in what people are capable of biologically, but it's in other cultures, in Hustler-Gather cultures, you would not be surprised by something like this, that an eight-year-old could take that kind of responsibility.

46:53Now, clearly it was a different time, a different era, but you have some suggestions on how we might bring back an element of playfulness into children's lives in our present day. And you say that parents can ask a simple question to their children that could get the ball rolling. What is this question, Peter?

47:12Peter Gray:What is something that you really would like to do, that you feel you could do, but you'd like to do on your own? And initiate that conversation, see what the child says. And maybe the child will say, well, you know, I'd like to be able to ride my bicycle all by myself to my friend's house. Or maybe the child will say, I'd actually like to cook dinner. But now the child is asked and the parent is having this discussion. And the idea would be to reach some kind of a kind of a agreement. Well, OK, you can do this. And it may not be exactly what the child's asking for, but something that the parent thinks is OK.

47:53So that kind of breaks into this cycle where you sort of change the discussion. It's not now just about safety. It's now about balancing safety with an acknowledged value in independent activity

48:08Peter Gray:and an acknowledgement that what the child wants to do is actually important.

48:21you see that parents can also work with other like-minded adults to make space and time for lightly supervised play how would this work this has actually occurred in some neighborhoods i wish it occurred more where some parent or maybe more than one parent have decided, you know, we really would like our children to have more opportunities to play without us intervening. We remember our own experiences as children and what we benefited from play. We need to provide this for our children. How can we do it? And so one strategy is to get together with the neighbors who have kids and you say, all right, every Saturday, we're all going to send our kids out and keep your devices inside.

49:14We're going to send you out, but they're all going out. If some of the parents are concerned about safety, we'll have one adult out there just for safety. In my opinion, ideally that adult is a grandparent because I find that grandparents tend to be a little less likely to intervene than parents are. But the understanding would be that that adult is there like a lifeguard on an ocean beach, only there in case there's some kind of real danger, but not to tell the children how to play or to solve minor problems. And so there are a few neighborhoods who have done that, including some that have actually got the city to close off the streets, if it's a busy street, during that period of time when it's playtime.

49:57And once the kids are playing together and they get to know one another, then they may find other ways to play during other times as well, other than just the formally chosen one. Peter says schools can also play a role in promoting play. He has been working with schools around the country to create play clubs. And what play club is, is an hour of free age-mixed play, usually in elementary schools, all the grades combined. So it's age 5 through 11, roughly, all combined, all playing together. Usually it is before school, but sometimes after school. And so this takes a little bit of effort on the part of the school.

50:40They have to have somebody there to manage it. And the teachers who monitor Play Club are advised, taught really, not to solve little quarrels, not to tell the children how to play better, not to worry if somebody looks unhappy. The whole purpose of play is for children to learn how to solve their own problems. For the schools that have adopted this, this has been very successful. So, Peter, you say that much of this boils down to a question of trust, to the willingness that adults have to trust their children, that left to their own devices, they're going to spend their time in positive and productive ways.

51:21Can you talk about this idea that at its core, there's an emotional element here that if parents actually trusted their kids to do the smart thing and to do the right thing, they might be less interested in engaging or intervening constantly in their children's lives? Really what we're talking about here is to what degree do you as a parent feel that you need to control your child? And to what degree do you feel you can trust your child to do what is good for the child themselves without you controlling?

51:56Peter Gray:so really ultimately what I mean by a trustful parent is one who trusts the child's developmental processes and allows those developmental processes to occur which really means allowing the child to play to explore ask questions of adults when they want to ask those questions and all of that to do the things that children by nature want to do In your work, you recount a remarkable story that is a kind of real-life version of the novel Lord of the Flies. The story was unearthed by a Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman. Tell me that story. There was a real case in the 1960s of a group of schoolboys, about the same age as the fictitious children in Lord of the Flies, living on a Pacific island.

52:53They ranged in age from 13 to 16. And they had decided they were tired of school. They were at a boarding school. And they called it borrowing. But they basically stole a fishing boat. And they weren't really very good sailors. So they went off into the ocean aimed at another island that they wanted to get to.

53:13Peter Gray:But a big storm came up. And they ended up shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. And nobody found them for 15 months. Unlike in Lord of the Flies, these kids took care of themselves. They did not war with one another. They recognized, you know, our lives are in danger here. They figured out how to find food. They figured out what's edible, what's not edible. They actually planted a garden. They created a garden in case they were there for a long time. They always had one child on watch for passing ships to try to flag them. one of the boys broke a leg and the kids figured out how to set the leg to protect it and it actually healed up.

53:59Peter Gray:They took care of one another in a remarkable way. They survived and so this is a story that's the exact opposite of the fiction Lord of the Flies.

54:18The vast majority of children are never going to have to survive on a deserted island. But they are going to have to figure out, metaphorically speaking, how to navigate perilous and unpredictable seas. Giving them the space and autonomy to do so makes intuitive sense. But putting these ideas into practice in the world we live in today isn't always straightforward.

54:44When we come back, your questions answered. We revisit listener-driven questions about Peter Gray's research from parents, teachers, and others. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

55:03Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily. On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain. Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to 20 years before noticing symptoms. Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and ask for a cognitive assessment. Visit brainhealthmatters.com for more information and resources.

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56:10This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the first part of today's episode, we revisited a 2024 conversation about childhood and the importance of unstructured play with psychologist Peter Gray. In this next part of the episode, we're going to bring you an installment of Your Questions Answered that we released after the episode first aired. It features listeners' questions about childhood and how they can put some of Peter Gray's ideas into practice. We heard earlier about how Peter's son Scott rebelled against conventional school when he was a boy. Eventually, it became clear that Scott needed something different from school.

56:50Finally, it kind of reached a crisis point near the end of fourth grade, where his mother, me, various adults from the school, including the school principal and some psychologists, all met with him about you have to follow the rules. He'd been very deliberately rebelling in ways that obviously the school,

57:13Peter Gray:the teacher couldn't really tolerate. But it was all a message to us that he was really unhappy in school. He needed something different. And this was his way of telling us that. So ultimately, the result of that was that we found a very alternative school, a school that it's a place where there are all sorts of opportunities for learning, but no coercion about it. The name of the school, for people who are interested, it's the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts. It's still in existence. It's actually been in existence for over 50 years. It's a school that is based on the principle that children learn best when they direct their own learning, when they make their own decisions about what they want to learn.

58:01Peter Gray:It's a democratic school. It's run by the school meeting where everybody has a vote. students and staff members. The students are there from four on through late teenage years. The children are not segregated by age. Part of the philosophy of the school is that younger children learn naturally from older children, and older children learn how to be caring and leaders by interacting with younger children. So this is a school he went to, and he went all the way through what elsewhere would be called high school. It changed my career because as a concerned parent, I, like many listeners here, might wonder, well, boy, what's going to happen if I allow them to go all the way through high school here?

58:53Peter Gray:So I've been doing a very different kind of research at Boston College. I'd been doing brain research with rodents. But I decided, you know, I need to find out what happens with the graduates of this school. The school had already been around long enough that there were graduates, and so I did a study of the graduates and found they're doing very well. And that kind of changed the direction of my career. Would there be instructors or teachers at the school in the formal sense? So it's interesting, the staff members at the school, and by the way, my son is now a staff member there. So the staff members at the school don't call themselves teachers.

59:39And the reason they don't is they believe that they don't do any more teaching than anybody else does. They believe that learning comes from conversations, from all sorts of experiences. So they don't call themselves teachers, but there are times when they teach, and those times are when they are asked to. The most common teaching occurs when there's a group of kids at a certain time of year who are planning to go on to college, to higher education. And, you know, they have no records. There's no grades. There's no, the school refuses to rank people. They'd have to say, we have no basis for ranking.

1:00:24You know, so-and-so is the best fisherman, but, you know, so they know they have to be able to do well on the SAT tests, if there are SAT tests. So they will start deliberately preparing for that, and they may ask for help. So that would be one instance, actually the most common instance, where you see something that actually looks like school going on. So in your study where you evaluated the students who were graduates from the school, what did you find, Peter? Yes, so what I found was that a very high percentage went on to college. And they didn't seem to have any difficulty getting in. Even though they, on paper, they hadn't satisfied what the colleges say you have to do to go there.

1:01:15but they got in, they wrote wonderful essays. They tend to be really good interviewers because they're not afraid of adults. If they're going to college, they have a good reason to go and they're able to articulate that. And I think all of that helped a lot. We also, for those who went on to college, I asked them, so how was it? And some of them said, yeah, you know, if I took a biology course, I'd never taken a biology course before. I'd never read a biology textbook. And of course, all the other students had. But, you know, I wasn't really that much behind. You know, I easily caught up. If somebody used a term, you know, let's say the professor talked about meiosis.

1:01:57Well, I looked it up. They're used to self-direction. They're used to taking responsibility. If there's a term they don't know, they look it up. If there's something that they really don't understand they're not afraid to ask for the professor for a little bit more explanation outside of class. So I think what they told me is that the advantage they had, which they felt was more than compensated for any disadvantage, was that they had learned to take responsibility for themselves and their own learning. One of the difficulties that many parents encounter when they try to create more opportunities for unstructured play is societal pressure, particularly in countries like the United States, where there's a great desire among parents to help their children succeed.

1:02:52Here's a message we received from listener Anne. As a parent of three children, my youngest is nine. I have a strong sense that parents are actually exhausted and don't even want the responsibility of constantly micromanaging their children's lives. However, there are really strong societal forces that tell us that if we don't engineer our kids' lives, for example, if we don't sign them up for the right summer camps or expose them to the right sports and activities, that they'll somehow lose out. And it's hard not to feel that this is somewhat true because when you hear about college applications and what makes someone a good applicant to get into a top school, it's usually that they have had these really stimulating opportunities or have excelled at something, a sport or an academic subject.

1:03:41So I guess my question for Peter is, do you have any insights or evidence that kind of counters this idea that parents have to micromanage their kids' lives in order for them to be really successful?

1:03:54Peter Gray:What do you think, Peter? You know, I'm really glad you asked that question. This is, I think, in some sense, gets at the crux of the problem, the social problem. The pressure that parents feel to be sure that their children are achieving by the current standards of achievement, this is burning kids out, it's exhausting kids. Let me give you a little research study that was done some years ago by the American Psychological Association, they surveyed people in America, including teenagers that year, about how stressed they had been and why they were stressed. And teenagers in high school turned out to be the most stressed out people in America, more stressed out than adults.

1:04:43Peter Gray:And here's the key, when they were asked what the source of their stress was. 83 % said school pressure. So we have really frightened kids about this. And I would argue needlessly so. The evidence that you're not going to succeed if you don't do all these supposed things, the evidence is strongly against that. I actually wrote an article on this and what I described there is two longitudinal studies very well-controlled studies by a statistician and an economist they really ask the question even in terms of your ultimate earnings by age 40 does it matter what college you go to if you control for other factors now of course it's well known that if you just look at Harvard graduates compared to say this local state university, the Harvard graduates are making more money, they're at more high status jobs, but they're also coming from people who make more money and whose parents have more high status.

1:05:59Peter Gray:They have all kinds of privileges. So these researchers said, what if we control for that? What if we use statistical means to create the equivalent of identical twins in terms of their background, and we compare those who went to the elite college and those who went to the less elite college, which might be a state university, it might be a small liberal arts college that isn't on the map of one of the great, and what they found in both of these studies is that it made no difference. So I think that would help. I think that parents who recognize that, some of that pressure gets taken off. You've made a point, Peter, about something that you call fuel injector parenting.

1:06:51What is fuel injector parenting? Because I think it relates to the question that Anne was just asking.

1:06:57Peter Gray:Yes. So I would say that the prototype of fuel injector parenting is the kind of parenting which is to really subject your child to competitions quite deliberately to kind of require excellent achievement and so on and so forth. There is a researcher who is interested in why are some parents spending huge amounts of money and lots of time to put their children into competitive activities and then to put a lot of effort into making sure that those children do very well in those competitive activities and so what this researcher did was to look at families she took three different categories of activities one of them was competitive chess, one was competitive dance, and one was soccer.

1:07:52Peter Gray:And what she found was the parents put the kids into these. When she asked them, why are you putting them? They believe we live in a very competitive society. They didn't expect their child to become a professional chess player or dancer or professional, but they believed that these experiences were teaching their children the virtues of being competitive, the virtues of winning, the virtues of trying to win, the virtues of sticking it out, even if you don't like it. You know, I know a lot of successful people, as it turns out. The really successful people that I know are not particularly competitive.

1:08:39Peter Gray:They're successful because they know how to cooperate. So this view that it is true we're a competitive society, but the route to winning with quotation marks around is not to beat other people. The route is to collaborate with other people, cooperate with other people. And that's what children learn and practice in free play.

1:09:09When we come back, Peter answers more listener questions about how to balance children's play with their safety. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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1:11:23But in many places, for many families and many children, this vision of unstructured, unfettered childhood feels like a distant dream. At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies these questions. He's here to answer your questions about his research. So Peter, I think many parents recognize the importance of play in childhood, but they still find it tricky to encourage that in their children because the children themselves might be afraid to go out and explore. Here's a question we received from listener Sam. What suggestions, tips, tricks, ideas do you have to help parents overcome their fear of children's independent play or letting them be independent enough to go off and play on their own?

1:12:12And what age do you think it's appropriate for kids to really start to explore independent play, you know, riding their bike to a friend's house or going to the park a block away to play on their own? So I'm curious. I'd love to hear more. So I think this question is partly to do with safety. What do you think, Peter? Yes, well, of course, the view of what age children are able to be independent has changed remarkably in modern times compared to the past. By the time I was five, I could go on my own anywhere in town, and that was pretty much true for other kids at that time in our history. objectively the world wasn't much different from today crime rate was about the same as today and so on and so forth so it's primarily a difference in attitude a difference in belief here here's the

1:13:08Peter Gray:way i have often addressed the question to individual parents about how do i gain more trust in my child allow a little bit more freedom to my child i suggest the following sit down with your child and have a conversation and start the conversation with something like this. So it's valuable as part of growing up to assume more responsibility for oneself, to be able to do things independently without always having an adult there watching you every minute. Of course, I'm concerned about your safety and I'm sure you are too. but let's have a talk about what you think you would really like to do that's maybe just a little bit scary for you that you would like to do and and you would like my permission for you to do it let's have that conversation maybe you're talking to a 10 year old daughter and the daughter says you know what i would really like to do is i would like to ride my bicycle all by myself to my friend's house and so maybe the parent has never allowed the daughter to go out of the parent's sight on her bicycle so now maybe the parent feels that i'm not ready to let you do that and then maybe there's kind of a discussion a negotiation and the daughter says well how about if i just ride around the block by myself and you can sit out on the stoop and watch me go around the corner and come back around the corner so the parent says okay i'll do that and so the child does that and the child comes back beaming i did that all by myself and i live to tell the tale you know this the parent sees this and the parent begins to beam we've observed this my colleague lenore Skenazy, who really developed this technique, has sat and watched how the expression on parents' faces change.

1:15:10Peter Gray:The parent is happy the child did this, and the parent is happy the child is happy. What breaks into this cycle of overprotection, the parent sees the child did this, now the parent is a little bit more ready to allow the child to do what she wanted to do in the first place, to go all by herself to her friend's house. And now there's a better balance between the concern for safety and also the realization that this is a real growing experience. And the parent begins to feel proud, not just for protecting the child, but for the fact that the parent is allowing the child to grow up. We received a question from listener Courtney, who wanted to hear your thoughts on the role of technology in discussions of children's well-being and how they engage in play.

1:16:01This is a question for Peter Gray. He put forth the idea that the rise in childhood anxiety may be attributable to the decrease in play. How does he square that idea with the one put forth in the new book, The Anxious Generation, that phones and technology are to blame for the rise in childhood and adolescent anxiety. Do those two things go together? Is one stronger than the other? What does he think about phones and childhood and adolescent access to technology? So, Peter, we recently had the NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the show, and he makes the case in this book, The Anxious Generation, that the rise of social media, the ubiquity of virtual apps and the time that people, especially young people, spend on these apps is partly or perhaps even centrally responsible for the rise in anxiety among young people.

1:17:13How does that square with the way you think about it? Yes, it's almost a knee-jerk reaction we have. If there's some problem that we see among kids, well, that means there's something else we have to take away from them. You know, we took away their freedom to go out and play outdoors. Now people want to take away their freedom to play on the internet, to communicate on the internet, and so on and so forth. I recognize there are dangers, just like there's dangers about playing outdoors. But, you know, when I was a kid, instead of saying you can't play outdoors, parents said, you know, there's some dangers about playing outdoors.

1:17:51Look both ways when you cross the street. If somebody stops to ask you to get in their car, don't do it, you know, if it's a stranger. I believe in the same approach regarding the internet, you know. I think it's quite appropriate for parents to say you're not allowed to take your phone to bed with you. You need sleep. I think it's perfectly appropriate for a family to say at dinner time we're all going to put our phones away so we can be here with each other. I think it's quite appropriate to teach children never put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want a possible future employer to see.

1:18:34These are all very valuable lessons and we need to be teaching kids these things. We need to be modeling these things ourselves. That I really believe. But to take bones away from children is equivalent to taking away everything else we've taken away from them. It belittles them. It once again is saying we don't trust you. So that's my general response to that question. So cultural expectations are not the only obstacle to creating more opportunities for kids to become more independent. Listener Molly sent us an email and she writes, I thought the episode did a wonderful job highlighting many of the reasons why young people need unsupervised and unstructured time to play and many of the barriers.

1:19:23I was struck, however, by one challenge that didn't come up at all in the conversation, the role of our infrastructure in supporting or challenging freedom for kids. I grew up in New York City and had the run of my neighborhood and eventually the whole city from a pretty young age, thanks to walkable streets, closed parks, and of course the subway. But I now live in Denver, and my fear for my kids' safety is less about stranger danger and more about the very real possibility of them getting hit by a car. If you want kids to have more freedom and independence, we need the built environment that supports that goal as well.

1:19:55What do you think, Peter? Does Molly have a point?

1:19:58Peter Gray:She definitely has a point. As we have become a society of cars, as we've become a society where people don't walk anyplace, where kids are not allowed out, we are building for cars and we are not building for pedestrians. I think this is something that every city planning commission, every town planning commission ought to start taking this into account. Unfortunately, because there aren't kids playing outdoors, because there aren't parents pushing for this, because they want their kids to play outdoors, planning committees are not taking that into account. I think this is the kind of thing that should be a parent's crusade.

1:20:38Peter Gray:You know, let's put pressure on our town to build more sidewalks. Let's make overpasses over those big streets so that kids can walk across the street to get to the park. We're just not, we're not as a community taking children into account anymore. We've become a very child unfriendly world in that way. Listener Julia had an interesting question about how much time is needed for children to experience the benefits of unstructured play. Hi there. I am a director at a camp where we work with students who come out for outdoor science camp. It tends to be two nights and about two and a half days that we're working with these students, and they're between the fourth and the sixth grade most of the time.

1:21:26My question is, is it possible to encourage this kind of independence and self-reliance in a short time period? Or is this something that requires time in order to develop that amount of trust and responsibility amongst a group? So in other words, if an adult has a relatively short window of time where they are interacting with a child, is it possible to give the child the latitude for unstructured play? Or is this something that typically develops only when you have extended amounts of time with the child? So the important thing for play is not the amount of time the adult has with the child.

1:22:11The important thing is how much time the child has with other children.

1:22:15Peter Gray:And play is between children. When an adult is involved, the play is not true play because at least not if the adult is telling them what to do or deciding on the rules and controlling them. So there should be more time in camp, at school recesses, during lunch hour, we need more time for real play. I've watched recesses in the Boston elementary schools that are just 15 minutes long. That's not enough time for children to really get something going. You need more time than that. At least half an hour, right, to get something going. And ideally, the same children would be playing together over time, over days, so they get to know one another, learn one another's ways of playing.

1:23:01Peter Gray:This is what we need to bring back. I mean, in some ways, I think the paradox that you're getting at in this conversation, Peter, and in our earlier conversation as well, is that you're really suggesting that parents sort of diminish the role that they are playing in their children's lives. And I think that's potentially difficult for all manner of different reasons. Parents love their children. There are societal pressures for parents to get involved in their children's lives. There are huge pressures for children to do certain things and certain activities to get into the right colleges, et cetera.

1:23:33And really what you're saying is that the overall picture that you're painting is that we would be better off if children were raising themselves a lot more than if parents were raising their children. That's exactly right. One thing I would recommend to parents is the book by Alison Gopnik called The Gardener and the Carpenter. Gopnik is one of the leading developmental psychologists in the country who studied cognitive development among children, problem-solving development, and written about the amazing thing children could do. But this book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, is oriented towards parents.

1:24:13And she describes there two contrasting styles of parenting. The gardener approach, which is the approach, obviously, that she favors, is so you plant the seed, you provide the fertilizer, you provide the fertile ground, and you let it grow. The carpenter style is you try to shape this product into some image that you have in mind. And she points out that ultimately the carpenter style always fails. You can't shape your child into just what you want. Your child has characteristics that are your child's characteristics and you have to let your child grow. Only your child can know what your child really loves to do.

1:25:02And you have to help your child find what the child really loves to do rather than force your child to do what you would love to do. You can't live your life over again in your child. So I think that book would be very helpful to a lot of parents who might be struggling

1:25:19Peter Gray:with this.

1:25:27Peter Gray is a psychologist at Boston College. He is the author of Free to Learn, why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Peter, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

1:25:48Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoyed today's episode or found it to be thought-provoking, please share it with a parent, a teacher, or a friend who might find it interesting too. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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