This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
A plane goes down somewhere in the Pacific.
The survivors, stranded on a deserted island, are a group of schoolboys.
At first, they celebrate their newfound escape from adult supervision playing on the beach.
Then they organize.
They elect one of the boys, Ralph, as their chief.
Ralph and several others get a fire going.
But soon the boys begin resisting Ralph's efforts to lead them.
The boys assigned to watch over the fire get distracted, and the fire goes out.
They become paranoid and stoke each other's fears of a beast they're convinced is stalking the island.
They split into warring factions and begin attacking one another.
Three of them die.
This is the story told in the 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies.
It was written by an English school teacher named William Golding, and it reflected his harsh view of humans in general and children in particular.
The novel ends when a British naval officer lands on the island and finds the children in a ragged, feral state.
The novel entered the cultural consciousness as a warning.
Without rules, systems and adult supervision, children left alone would descend into chaos.
As with many generalizations, there is some truth to this.
A multitude of studies suggest kids thrive when they have stability.
Chaotic and unpredictable environments can bring out the worst in us.
But today we explore whether many societies have taken William Golding's warning too much to heart.
If some supervision of children is a good thing, lots of parents, teachers and school administrators seem to think more is always better.
When more is less and less is more, this week on Hidden Brain.
When you're first learning to swim, it's not a good idea to be pushed into very deep water.
You could drown.
But it's also not a very good idea to simply waddle around in the shallow.
You'll never learn to swim.
If you're a parent or a teacher, you're constantly asking yourself how to balance risk and safety for the kids in your care.
Tip too far in one direction and you can put children in danger.
Go too far in the other and you deprive kids of the joy and power of exploration.
At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies how the balance between exploration and safety has changed for many children and the effects this has on their minds.
Peter Gray, welcome to Hidden Gray.
I'm very happy to be here.
Peter, you were once at a pop-up event where the organizers provided kids with various materials, including twigs and tree branches, old boards hammers, nails.
Paint me a picture of the scene and tell me what happened.
Yeah, so there were two young children, maybe around six years old, very happily taking a couple of some of the very narrow boards and laying them out on the grass.
And walking along them like they were walking on a tightrope and pretending that this was a very narrow bridge and there were crocodiles on either side.
And it was a very imaginative game.
They were clearly having a lot of fun.
And the dad I assume it was the dad at least of one of the two came over and said that's not what you're supposed to do with the boards.
We're supposed to be building something with the boards.
See, there's hammer and nails here.
And then he proceeded to take the boards and to start showing the children how to pound with hammer and nails.
And what I observed is the children suddenly changed from really very happy and playful to quite bored, as they watched their father show them how to pound nails into boards.
There was another time Peter, when a sixth grade teacher told you about a game that her students had invented during the COVID pandemic.
What was this game?
She was feeling very bad for her sixth graders.
They're still children, really.
You know, they're 11 and 12 years old at most.
And they're indoors all the school day.
They don't have any recess at all.
So She thought well, wouldn't it be nice if I at least gave them half an hour to play before school starts?
Some of them arrived early anyway.
And it turns out they arrived eagerly early when she provided that play opportunity.
So she let them play in the ways that they wanted to play.
And one of the games that they played.
This was after.
COVID was called something like Infection, or maybe it was called COVID, something like that.
And Some of the children were infection and if they touch somebody you became infected and might die.
And others were called vaccine, and they could prevent you from dying by coming and touching you.
It was quite an imaginative game.
I have no idea how they developed, but the teacher said they were clearly having a lot of fun with that.
But then...
One of the school administrators observed that and she said no, we can't have games like that going on.
We can't have people pretending to die.
I've heard of many stories where recesses have been very much curtailed and limited because of rules about what you can and cannot do in play.
Peter noticed something similar in his own life.
When his son was little, both of them took part in something called a pinewood derby.
Yeah, so this was designed to promote bonding between fathers and their sons.
And the boys were about eight years old at this time.
And the way it works is each father-son pair is given a kit that includes a piece of very soft pinewood about seven inches long and wheels that can be attached to it.
And the idea is to carve the wood into something that looks like a race car and to attach the wheels.
And then everybody brings them back to the next meeting of the group and you race them down a slope.
My interpretation of this was this was an opportunity for children to do something a little bit risky using a knife to carve the soft wood.
And for fathers to help out.
And that's the way we did it.
And I was very proud of it.
He was proud of it.
He painted it up himself.
And I showed him how to attach the wheels on.
And he did that.
So I played a role kind of showing him how to do things.
But then when we showed up, all the other cars were beautifully crafted.
They were just so smooth, perfectly painted.
And my son and I, we just...
Almost left.
His looked like it was made by an eight-year-old, right?
Yeah, and I'm assuming the car probably didn't run as smoothly as some of the other cars that had the superior craftsmanship.
It did not run as smoothly as the others.
And I think the others refrained from laughing at us, but we were embarrassed.
So there's a common pattern to all of these stories, Peter.
A number of years ago, you began taking notice of what adults are doing when they interact with kids.
What did you notice?
In many ways, adults have taken over children's lives.
I think in some sense with good intentions.
There's a lot of promotion of the idea that parents should be very much involved with their children's lives, that parents are expected almost these days, much more so than in the past, to kind of be teachers to their children, as well as comforters and nurturers, and so on.
And I think the cost of that has been that it takes away from children's own initiative, from children's own opportunities to figure things out for themselves and learn how to solve problems.
You write that children perceive adults as potential enforcers of safety, solvers of conflicts and audiences for whining.
And this perception invites the children to act unsafely, to squabble and to whine.
Expand on that.
Tell me what you mean.
In my experience, children actually take responsibility when there's no adults around.
That's part of the advantage of there being no adults around.
They have to take responsibility.
If there's no adults there to tell you what to do, you've got to kind of say well, is this safe or not safe?
Is this a reasonable thing to do or not?
And children are pretty good at that.
But when there's adults around, at least in this day and age, they kind of assume the adults are responsible for deciding if it's safe or not.
The adults are responsible.
If somebody is teasing you, instead of for you to figure out, what am I going to do about this person?
Who's teasing me?
You go and tell the adult.
So even just the mere presence of adults influences the way children play.
When kids are left to themselves, they don't automatically become rule breakers.
That's the way it may seem from a grown-up perspective.
But really, Peter says, when kids play by themselves, they learn to become rule inventors.
Peter learned this at a family gathering, when a couple of 10-year-old girls invited him to join their game of Scrabble.
I kind of assumed, well, this is an opportunity for me to sort of teach them about Scrabble.
I'm pretty good at Scrabble, and I'm sure they're novices.
And I sat down to play Scrabble with them and started to explain the rules.
But they had played the game before and went right into a game that was modeled after Scrabble, but it had their own rules.
So, Instead of having to play an actual word, they could play any kind of a nonsense word, as long as it sounded like a word.
And the longer and sillier it sounded, the better.
They had no interest in keeping score.
They were just having a great time playing nonsense words.
And then they would once in a while challenge the other person, what's the meaning of this?
And then the other one would pretend to look it up in the dictionary and cite a very funny meaning.
That failed fit a little bit with the way it sounded and i just sat back after a little bit of protesting hey, this is scrabble, let's really play scrabble.
I just finally sat back and i realized hey, these girls are really playing.
My way of playing scrabble is a little bit more like work than like play.
I understand your son Scott, gave you something of a window into the effects that adults can have on children.
He was not a fan of elementary school, and perhaps that's putting it mildly.
Putting it mildly is correct.
He hated school right from the beginning and he complained all the way from kindergarten through fourth grade.
He would come home and be angry.
He would say, you know...
They're acting like I'm a puppet and I'm supposed to just do what they're telling me to do, and I have no say in it.
And of course, that's the way school works.
And I would say to him, well, just do what they tell you to do.
You know, it's not that hard.
Just do it.
You know, all kids in some ways have conflicts with parents and teachers.
And so, you know, kids are unhappy at school.
They're distracted.
They're bored.
They talk to their friends instead of studying or paying attention in class.
And, you know, they run into their run ins with teachers.
I mean, this is a routine part of childhood for almost all kids.
What was he doing that was different?
Was it actually?
Was it just that garden variety kind of rebellion, or was it something more than that?
Yeah, I mean, his rebellion was very different from the typical naughty boy who's maybe shooting spitballs and so on.
His rebellion was almost like a planned rebellion.
It was – so, just for example, when the teacher would teach him a specific way of doing arithmetic problems and how you're supposed to show your work he would deliberately – find a different way to do it.
And then the teachers complained to us about that.
And I asked him, so why do you do it a different way?
And he said, it's because it's the only way I can make it fun.
And when they were teaching about punctuation and capital letters and how to put them into sentences, he actually declared I'm going to write now like EE.
Cummings, the poet, and put punctuation and capitals wherever I please.
So that was him.
Ultimately, it led to a meeting in the principal's office in which his teacher, the principal assistant principal school psychologist, another psychologist called from outside.
His mom and me were all there to tell him in no uncertain terms that he had to follow the rules of the school.
And he, nine years old, looked at us big adults and he said, go to hell.
As a dad, Peter knew something had to change.
But as a researcher, he started to ask himself is it possible?
The problem was not with kids like Scott, but with adults like himself.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
When it comes to rearing happy and healthy children.
When should we lend a helping hand And when should we step away and let kids figure out things for themselves?
At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies what adults today do and what they ought to do to maximize the well-being of children.
He says.
An important question parents, teachers and school administrators should ask themselves when it comes to rules and structure is how much is too much?
Peter, you decided to start your research by delving into what anthropologists have found about child-rearing practices throughout human history.
What was the typical pattern before modern times?
Yes.
So I began to get interested in how children historically, have acquired the culture that they're growing up in learning from others what you need to know to succeed in that culture eventually, as an adult.
And I'm an evolutionary psychologist, so I look at human nature from the perspective of Darwinian evolution.
If you look at human nature from that perspective, you automatically become interested in hunter-gatherers, because we were all hunter-gatherers during 99 or so of our biological evolution.
As you undoubtedly know, there have been hunter-gatherers in isolated parts of the world who, at least into the middle to even late 20th century, were still living in a rather pristine hunter-gatherer way of life.
There were anthropologists who had trekked out into those areas to make contact with them and study them.
I began to read what I could of such work and ultimately, along with a graduate student, surveyed a group of anthropologists who had studied various different groups of hunter-gatherers in different parts of the world to find out from them what are children's lives like in the culture that they observe.
What's the relationship between adults and children?
And what I found in every case seven different cultures on three different continents was that the children were free to play and explore pretty much all day long.
They might be asked to do little chores, but no such thing as school.
The adults might say, don't eat these mushrooms, they're poisonous.
They would point out things that are dangerous.
But the assumption was that children would learn by observing, by exploring, by playing, And when I asked the anthropologists, well, what did the children play at?
They talked about play that seemed to be, in essentially every case, modeled after the activities that were important to the culture in which they were growing up.
So in a culture where the men hunt big game, the little boys, and middle-sized boys too, were playing at hunting big game.
In a culture where They used dugout canoes.
The kids were playing with dugout canoes and so on and so forth.
They played at the games and music and art of the culture.
And not because anybody was requiring them to do so, but because it just seemed apparently natural for them to do that.
What the anthropologists pointed out is they would play at these things and eventually they were actually doing these things.
The play would merge into adult-like activity.
So there was no real difference between what you're doing when you're playing and what you're doing when you are an adult, actually doing this thing that you were playing at before.
So this was very interesting to me.
And, of course, the children would have been hanging out with a range of other children, probably of different ages.
Presumably they would be learning not just from children who are exactly their own age, but from children who are a little older.
And those children might have learned things from children who are a little older than them.
That's a very important observation that...
These are all band cultures, so they're relatively small.
Even if you wanted to just hang out with kids your own age, there wouldn't be enough.
So you're always playing with kids who are both older and younger than yourself.
So a typical play group might be kids from age four to 12 or age eight to 16, all playing together.
But when children are playing across age, The younger children are always learning from the older children.
They're being boosted up to higher levels of activity.
And the older children are in very important ways learning from younger children.
They're learning how to be leaders.
They're learning how to be caretakers.
They're learning, in some sense, how to be teachers, as they're explaining to the younger children how to do whatever it is that they're doing.
So your research suggests that when adults leave children alone to play and learn and socialize in their own way, kids become more likely to develop a range of skills.
Like what, Peter?
I could really run through all of the basic skills that children have to develop in any culture in order to succeed.
These are social skills.
These are the skills of knowing how to initiate an activity and direct that activity, problem-solving skills.
Children practice these skills when they're playing and when they're playing with other children.
When adults are around, adults step in and solve the problems for the children.
The adults tell them how to play and the children therefore, are not learning how to take initiative, not learning how to create problems, rules for themselves, not learning how to negotiate with other children to solve problems if there's always an adult there doing it for them.
And in some ways, I suppose, all of this points back to the central thing that children need to learn, which is to learn to be independent.
Perhaps we're taking that away from them.
That's well put because, again from an evolutionary perspective, Why do we even have this long period of childhood?
What is the purpose of the juvenile period, as we would say, in all mammals?
It is to develop the skills that allow you to become increasingly independent.
But the only way you can develop those skills is by being allowed increasing amounts of independence as you are growing older from year to year.
That used to occur in our culture.
That was certainly true when I was a child many, many decades ago.
And it was even true when my son was a child fewer decades ago.
But today we are not allowing children to do the things that they should be doing, that they're capable of doing, for a variety of reasons.
But the end result is that children are more or less supervised directed monitored, corrected all the time.
You say that when children spend a lot of time in the company of adults, they're less likely to participate in what you call authentic communication.
And they're more likely to do this when they're in the company of other children.
What 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.
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, 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 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?
You 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?
Well, 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.
This is so patronizing.
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 that parents and teachers feel to give positive feedback.
So when 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.
In one of the situations where I was observing age mix 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, pay attention.
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.
They 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.
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.
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.
This 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.
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.
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, 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, you know, 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 and that's driven by, you know, demographic and economic changes that are probably well beyond the control of any individual.
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.
You 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.
We 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.
You 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?
Over the same decades that we have been gradually decreasing children's opportunities to play independently of adults, we have seen a continuous increase 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 is 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.
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.
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.
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.
Or you get hurt and you figure out what to do about it.
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.
Do you think there are any positives Peter, 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.
When we come back, how to balance the imperatives of exploration and safety.
You're listening to Hidden Brains, I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This 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?
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.
And 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 afraid of heights and so on.
But she was a great tree climber.
She showed me how to climb the trees and she would challenge me to climb higher and higher in the trees.
I 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.
What wonderful instructions for how to ride a bicycle.
And so I did that, and 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.
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.
I understand you played a lot of sports, but these were not like the adult organized sports teams that we have today.
Yeah, 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, who would kind of be the coach who would decide 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.
So I had to figure out some rotating way to pitch.
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 probably was 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.
I 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-gatherer cultures.
You would not be surprised by something like this, that an eight-year-old could take that kind of responsibility.
Now, 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?
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, 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 agreement.
Well, okay, you can do this.
And it may not be exactly what the child's asking for, but something that the parent thinks is okay.
So 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 and an acknowledgement that what the child wants to do is actually important.
You say 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 okay, All right, every Saturday we're all going to send our kids out and keep your devices inside.
We'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.
And 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 time.
Age mixed play, usually in elementary schools, all the grades combined.
So it's age five 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.
They 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.
Can 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 it?
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.
They 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.
But a big storm came up, and they ended up shipwrecked on an uninhabited island.
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.
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.
When 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.
This 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 Sonscott rebelled against conventional school when he was a boy.
Eventually, it became clear that Scott needed something different from school.
Finally, 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, 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 it 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, 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.
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 gonna happen if I allow them to go all the way through high school here?
So I had 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.
This 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.
And 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 say we have no basis for ranking.
You know so-and-so is the best fishermen, but you know.
So they know they have to be able to do well on the SAT tests.
If there are SAT tests, 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 on paper they hadn't satisfied what the colleges say you have to do to go there.
But 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, Let's say the professor talked about meiosis.
Well, I looked it up.
They're used to self-direct, 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.
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 is a great desire among parents to help their children succeed.
Here'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.
So 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?
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.
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 asked 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 standards.
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.
Hmm.
You've made a point, Peter, about something that you call fuel injector parenting.
What is fuel injector parenting?
Because I think it relates to the question that Anne was just asking.
Yes.
So I would say 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 was a researcher who was 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.
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.
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 to winning with quotation marks around is not to beat other people.
The root is to collaborate with other people, cooperate with other people.
And that's what children learn and practice in free play.
When 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.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
We often have a romantic idea of childhood.
Countless movies and books show kids running free in the great outdoors, swimming in local watering holes and embarking on adventures and misadventures with friends.
But 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 of children's independent play or letting them be independent enough to go off and play on their own?
And 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's the 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 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?
Uh, the parent sees this and the parent begins to be.
We've observed this.
My colleague, lenore skanezi, who really developed this technique, has sat and watched how the expression on parents' faces change.
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.
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 a question from listener Courtney, who wanted to hear your thoughts on the role of technology in discussions of children's wellbeing and how they engage in play.
This 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.
How 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.
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 when I was a kid, instead of saying you can't play outdoors, parents said there's some dangers about playing outdoors.
Look both ways when you cross the street.
If somebody stops to ask you to get in their car, don't do it if it's a stranger.
I believe in the same approach regarding the internet.
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.
These 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.
I 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 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.
What do you think, Peter?
Does Molly have a point?
She definitely has a point.
As we have become a society of cars, as we've become a society where people don't walk any place, 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.
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.
My 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.
The important thing is how much time the child has with other children.
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.
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.
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, etc.
And 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.
And 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.
And 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 with this.
Peter 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.
Hidden 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.
