I work with canines. Not to compare them to children but the dogs that I care for who are the healthiest and happiest are the ones who are given opportunities to socialize and play freely and engage with nature on a regular basis. They are confident, curious, independent and have good, strong relationships. They also make better choices, especially in stressful situations. If it works for them, it must also work for children?
We are pack animals and require connection and collaboration to grow and thrive.
Obviously proper rest and nutrition are key contributors as well but let’s start with kicking the kids back outside to explore and play. You won’t regret it! (Except maybe the dirt that gets tracked in the house 😉)
If what is reported by Dr. Haidt and others is true, kicking your kids back outside to explore and play without adult supervision is likely to result in a visit from Child Protective Services. Before we kick the kids back outside to play, we first need to change the culture that believes that is a dangerous enterprise.
My siblings got picked up by police in a small town because they were playing at a park unsupervised while my mother took another sibling to drivers ed. They were 8, 10 and 12. I was babysitting for other families at 12. Not far from where I live now a man had neighbors call Child Protective Services while he was home because his 9 year old was playing in the yard independently. It’s truly insane but definitely not about personal reputation. Our neighbors’ thoughts become actions which become police reports or welfare visits. Even if you come out “fine” those reports and visits will still be on your record suggesting you are potentially a problem.
I’m just wondering what kind of people are making these reports? Do they know the kids or parents? Have they ever even introduced themselves or do they just go straight to filing a report? Are they actually concerned about the welfare of the child or are they looking for opportunities to virtue signal?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks in this camp! They are busy-bodies, and it’s my general experience that there is a lot of virtue signaling going on.
Well, that's a leap. Where in the comment did I say such a thing? The facts as reported is that parents who have let their child play outside or walk alone without supervision have been threatened by visits from CPS and, I believe, in some cases had their children removed for a time. This, I believed, happened to Lenore Skenazy and there are plenty of articles documenting that CPS has interfered and even taken custody of children because they were "without supervision." By your spelling of "neighbours" I suspect you are not living in the US. This is what happens in the US, maybe not in your country. It's not about "changing the culture" because we are concerned about what the neighbors think, it's about getting the neighbors and the community to understand that kids need to play free of supervision.
I was just pointing out how sad it is that we have to be concerned about what the neighbours think for fear they will report you. This is insanity to me.
I had my own house key, walked myself and my little brother to school every day by the time I was 11 years old. I babysat multiple children in my neighbourhood by myself at that age and made fairly good money doing it. I am not a parent unfortunately but it blows my mind that my healthy and independent childhood is now considered abuse today.
I knew all my neighbours as a child, even the ones who didn’t have kids. I was outside playing in the streets every single day. I offered to mow lawns and pull weeds every summer. Every house on my block knew who we were, knew who our parents were and knew which kids we played with and which kids we didn’t play with. I used to walk to the store and/or the nearest playground by myself or with kids from my street. As long as we were home by dinner time.
I was also perfectly capable of doing my own laundry, packing my lunches and making my own dinner at that age. Is this considered child abuse today?
I agree with mm. The attitude in the US in many parts of the US seems to be that children who aren’t constantly supervised are in serious danger of abduction or death (despite this definitely not being accurate!). Without changing the requirement from CPS that children be constantly supervised, how are parents supposed to feel they can give their children more freedom? My state’s version of CPS has consistently ignored court orders to stop charging parents who leave their children unsupervised for short periods in safe circumstances with child neglect. I’m not willing to risk losing custody of my kids.
❤️Ape is a verb. "To ape someone" is to mimic them. See Piaget in RIGHTEOUS MIND❤️. Is anyone researching stages of play? Research Role Play as an advanced subset of Play, and research Role Reversal as an advanced subset of role play. Drama Therapy role reversals seem to be a "watered down version" of the more intense Psychodrama. Ask Dr "Magic Button" Burns how many clients have burst into tears after hearing one word:"Reverse"...?😁😁😁❤️😂😲
I made a wild claim to him:"the most powerful word in Psychotherapy is "Reverse." His next six podcasts were about Role Reversal. Monthly for decades he's challenged his CME workshops to do an anger role reversal exercise: THEY ALL FAILED...? see pp210 "Feeling Good Together."❤️
If a group of playless kids asked me WTF is Gray about... I'd show them page 210:"Ace this then you can spend the rest of your life KICKING QUACK ASS!"... and I'd show them how to sue the government on TV to do it:
❤️I mentored an 18 year old who feared speaking in a speech class. Fear became love. As Mayor of Delano CA he loves to speak at government meetings. So much that he ran for US Congress.😲😂🎉❤️😁 Subscribe for details
I grew up with horses and it helped me immensely with classroom management. I always felt guilty thinking 'jeez. I know this because of a horse' buuut, what you said is true!
Is anyone "stopping to appreciate" that the body heals the body(the exception was COVID that Anti Vaxxers couldn't handle) but the Mind doesn't heal the Mind(exceptions: when 60% of anxious people and or 50% of depressed people are cured by placebo)?
❤️Point: Our body's self healing SPOILS US(implies that we have to do *NOTHING*..."freeplay" is *NOT NOTHING*)
❤️Point: the HUGE placebo effect SPOILS us: causes us to "pay for COSTLY FALSE CURES"(innocuous placebos can mutate into a insidious placebo)
❤️Is there research on Skateboard Parks (🏂unsupervised government built facilities where kids challenge each other AND THE ESTABLISHMENT... the Establishment would force them to wear protection)? 🤔
❤️I'd bet that the organic calmness and cooperation❤️ I observe is enhanced by the "self inflicted Exposure Therapy" ...
...of constantly facing their fear of being injured and healing from injuries while skating without protection?
❤️What ever happened to "Blood Brothers"(two boys press their fresh wounds together and take a solemn loyalty vow... THAT WAS UNSUPERVISED 😁😲)? ❤️What about "Body Cams" for repeatedly bullied kids? Their classmates that come forward to establish a Kid's Tribunal might be the "Next Nader's Raiders?"
and lash out with inappropriate, ineffective aggression;
2:02
they don't learn to respond
2:03
to the social signals of the other animal.
Is anyone researching humans 0%-10% accuracy at reading (children, etc) emotions(teachers can't, parents can't, counselors can't... until they use a scientific metric)? Imagine a Mom is angry and (per State Dependent Learning) can read anger 100x better than fear. But her baby isn't angry, her baby is afraid. Mom's that projected Mom's current state onto baby's cries(incorrectly) responded while the other Moms' babies died. ...?
I agree based upon working with animals, that childhood play is vital to a successful adult life. But/and, my teenage kids aren't succumbing to the anxiety we see around us, and I think part of the reason is because there are certain times of the year when they have to help me out--feeding an orphan, cleaning a cage. I talked a few years ago to those in the boomer generation and they had fond memories of the chores they did on farms. Besides play, I hypothesise that the other thing kids need might not be unconditional love but to be needed, and to see the results of their efforts.
Colorado recently passed a “Free-Range Parenting Law.”
“... Colorado is the first blue state to pass the legislation. That's great, because at Let Grow, the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, we have always maintained that childhood independence is a bipartisan issue. Many Republicans appreciate our work to promote can-do kids and keep the government out of everyday family decisions, and many Democrats appreciate the same exact thing.
The new law narrows the definition of neglect, making it clear that a child is not neglected simply because a parent lets them engage in normal childhood activities, like playing outside without adult supervision or staying home alone for a bit.”
That is great news and an example of what needs to happen in all states if parents are to allow their children out to play without the fear of CPS or a meddling neighbor.
You really can’t wait for the government to give you permission. If you have children and live somewhere they really aren’t allowed outside alone, you should move.
The truth is that the parents of our children's friends and the community at large - almost everywhere - is imbued with the fear that letting children play without supervision is dangerous. My children are grown, but when I raised them in the 90's, this mindset was already well established. I let my kids play without supervision anyway. Unfortunately, the parents of my kids' friends-to a one- wouldn't let their children come over to play if they weren't supervised and I got a few tsk tsk along the way. The cultural mindset needs to change and unless you are going to move the kids to them thar hills, we are stuck with this milk carton fear in the community.
This is a cultural choice though. We live in a small town in New England about an hour from Boston (not really them thar hills) where children run free. They go to the playground by themselves, are welcome at the library alone, walk home from school, ride their bikes to the nearby swamp to fish. I guess I don't know how to *return* a community to this kind of culture, and I know that not everyone can change their lives like we did to give their children freedom, but I want people to know that it is out there. Vote with your feet if you can.
> With every decade children have become less free to play, roam, and explore alone or with other children away from adults, less free to occupy public spaces without an adult guard, and less free to have a part-time job where they can demonstrate their capacity for responsible self-control.
We complain about kids (and especially teenagers) behaving like animals, but never stop to reflect on the near-ubiquitous custom of keeping them in cages.
Our school cafeterias require students to be silent after eating because they get too loud and won't calm down. But maybe if they were allowed to speak more often to their peers, they wouldn't get so out of hand when they did.
Wow, that’s insane. There’s absolutely no justification for silencing children during a break period, and it’s disturbing that anyone would require that.
It's terrible and I've seen it at multiple campuses and in more than one district! The last middle school where I worked they played movies at lunch in efforts to subdue the masses. It's not good.
My kids were at a school for awhile that had mostly silence the entire lunch period ( with classical music playing), and then they were allowed to talk for a short period - but only if it wasn’t too loud. Completely ridiculous!
My school district changed it's policies a few years back to prevent silent lunches, as well as taking away recess as punishment. What worked for us was emailing our board our concerns, as well as then asking who recomends wellness policies and contacting them.
I wonder if unsupervised play requires a broadly shared moral order? I suspect it might.
If everyone in your society essentially sees the world the same way, leaving your children to explore is relatively safe. This sort of cultural homogeneity is attainable in lots of ways: very small towns, countercultural groups, churches, even gang-banger neighborhoods probably exhibit some of this.
Whether it's a hippie commune or a homeschool group, I suspect children are granted more freedom precisely because each parent has confidence other parents are training their children in roughly the same values.
However, if your group is of heterogeneous culture and philosophy, it makes the parents (and associated children) more difficult to predict and therefore more dangerous. The fact is, a parent who sees the world radically differently than you truly can be dangerous. In an extreme case, perhaps he thinks killing people in defense of his faith is acceptable. Perhaps he thinks sexual contact with children is acceptable. In less dramatic fashion, perhaps she lets her kids have an unfiltered smartphone. Or perhaps she's on a crusade to queer childhood? These aren't abstract fears; they're quite real. Communities that lack shared cultural values also tend to lack trust. And parents are wise to be careful in such settings.
So, perhaps the decline in unstructured play is merely reflective of the decline in shared American values and associated trust across the board.
I think the word ‘broadly’ is key here. Children need to come up against risk and resolve conflict. If they were just among like minded folk, would there be ample opportunity to do that?
Part of the problems of the world (I am in the UK) in my opinion is the (often willing) segregation of communities.
That said, as you suggest, children need a safe space in which to sharpen skills because some places would be just too out of sync with our own values.
8 year olds are perfectly capable of creating child-level conflicts entirely on their own. It's the intrusion of adult level conflicts, and the associated inability to predict how other parents and children will react, that gives parents pause.
Homogenous societies are more trusting. This is a well established (but very uncomfortably acknowledged) sociological fact.
I believe the age of the children is key. At 8, I agree but at some point they have to come out of whatever playpen we impose and navigate wider society. I imagine it is better done incrementally rather than as one great shock.
The question is, what makes a society homogenous? I used to be a Christian, until I discovered that other Christians did not share my values at all.
I heard a talk once by John Gatto in which he observed that the various religious groups who originally came to America did not so much come here believing in religious freedom (not within their own communities), but rather the freedom to not be interfered with by outside groups. But being secure within their own communities, they found it to their advantage to trade with neighboring communities who had different ideas about salvation. They decided that they had shared interests, and became willing to "live and let live", an attitude that gradually extended even toward members of their own community.
I certainly agree that to establish mutual trust and cooperation, a society has to have something that they believe in, something that makes them feel "we're all in this together". But for awhile in the U.S. at least I thought we had that, on a level that was above anything tribal. We've lost it. I do not know how to account for that, as on the surface at least it seems it seems due to White People reacting to the Browning of America. Yet it was White People, a great many of them, who embraced the civil rights movement in the 60's.
An alternative explanation, implicit in Peter Gray's work, is that play deprivation and agency deprivation in children has led to a great increase in moral stupidity and its counterpart, tribalism.
I suspect it's far more basic. Patrick Deneen expounds on this a great deal in Why Liberalism Failed. His latest Regime Change isn't as good, I think, but contains many of the same points. For that matter, Brad Gregory in the Unintended Reformation traces our philosophical divergence back to Luther and even Scotus. It's difficult to conceive of a philosophy as radically individualistic as the Lockean Enlightenment in the absence of a faith as radically individualistic as Protestantism.
The theological division of the various sects of Protestantism that founded America masked a philosophically homogenous undercurrent. They disagreed about baptism, salvation, the Eucharist, legalism, works vs faith... but they agreed on individualism. They agreed that faith and salvation were based on an interior change of the heart of the individual. These groups only look radically different until you compare them with something that truly is radically different (Confucianism for example) and you realize how much core philosophy they had in common.
This homogeneity held for a long time, but the seeds of its demise had already been planted by Locke (that's Deneen's thesis.) Once you ignore religious differences ("live and let live" as you say) in name of economic liberation (ala Locke) and especially once you privatize morality completely and declare that the only "harm" is a legitimate reason to regulate behavior (ala Mill)... cultural divergence is pretty much inevitable.
Cultural divergence may then be inevitable, but also has little more meaning than a preference for different clothing.
I was raised as a Lutheran, but I can tell you that in our congregation 80% were there for singing hymns, and for whatever salutory effect exposing their children to Sunday School might have; in fact most had little use for sermons and attended only at Christmas and Easter. They probably had only the vaguest idea who Luther was, or how Protestantism differed from Catholicism. I think that most did not take the idea of hell very seriously, and would not have been inclined to think that Taoists (or Jews) were going there, for not accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
I see all this as enabling community, not disabling it. In fact I think of it as similar to what JRRT, who was personally Roman Catholic, purposefully did when writing LOTR: he left any specific references to Christian dogma out of it, while very much leaving the best of Christian sensibilities in. And indeed, Jesus himself demonstrated the true qualities of a spiritual leader in the "Let him cast the first stone" incident; he gets people to identify with each other, to empathize with each other. (Even if that was added by a 12th century scribe, its now part of the accepted myth.)
I see your point about Protestants of various sects sharing an outlook that would make them sympathetic to Lockean individualism. But it is my understanding that the Catholics who had settled in Maryland achieved a similar degree of conviviality with their Protestant neighbors, to a greater degree than those who remained in England.
Do you see a classical education as aiming at understanding what is good for a society? Because if so, it makes a very rough start, with Plato advocating censorship and Aristotle defending slavery. And not sure Kant would be considered classical or modern, but I'd be inclined to categorize him as "not helpful".
Actually LOTR is a perfect example of how much Christians agree on philosophy even though we disagree on theology.
"Cultural divergence may then be inevitable, but also has little more meaning than a preference for different clothing."
This defense of multiculturalism usually takes the form of, "I love a diverse community because there's lots of choices for dinner." I doubt the same suburban wine-moms who embrace Arabic fusion cuisine and Indian sari dresses would be thrilled about burkas being sold in Macys though. (Or perhaps they would, steeped as they are in the Millian idea that that society has no business regulating behavior unless it's harmful.) I find burkas incompatible with Western civilization and would use law (as the French do) to render them unavailable. Since I reject Mill's premise, I have no problem placing "the common good" above the personal autonomy of someone who might want to wear a burka.
Classical education also begins by rejecting the modern idea that "good" and "true" and "beautiful" are entirely subjective. That's the largest hurdle for most modern people. Let's take architecture as an example. Either you teach the Golden Ratio as a key to timeless beauty, or you teach students to design whatever they think is beautiful -- doing that gave us brutalism. Same for art and humanities and literature; either there are timeless works that speak to the human condition or there aren't. When it comes to defining "good", what's shocking is the similarity of opinions over the centuries. Social systems that work are based on personal virtue, and thinkers as diverse as Buddha, Aristotle, and Ibn Khaldun have all figured this out. That's where Classical education starts. Different schools and societies would built it differently from there, but it starts with defining "good" objectively and being willing to teach it.
John Holt once suggested that, for those parents who are unable to provide an alternative to school, the parents can simply tell their children: how you want to deal with the school is up to you. Don't hurt anyone and don't break any actual laws, but choosing in what ways to participate in what is expected of you (or not) is up to you.
This suggests the interesting possibility of treating the school itself as a source of conflict, in response to which one may develop resilience, as well as skills that will be useful later, as you can probably look forward to people trying to intimidate or manipulate you for the rest of your life.
Of course a young person may have difficulty separating what adults in authority think and feel about them from who they are. But some young people are able to do that, and its an interesting question how they manage that.
As a young person I personally did not really succeed at that; but feeling very clearly that the school did not have my best interests at heart, I simply opted out, ignoring what was going on in class and doing my own reading instead. I had very poor grades and very high achievement test scores.
I appreciate that comment and it is certainly something to reflect upon. As a mother of a child of high school age, it is an interesting take and approach to dealing with school. My own son struggles with classroom learning and we may have to home ed at some point ourselves. Should this occur I would definitely take a child/interest led approach as he is extremely motivated when learning on his own terms.
Since this thread concerns play deprivation, I might add that as an adult I have found humor to be a great resource - a way to engage a playful attitude. Its generally more comfortable to respond to perceiving that things are not as they could or should be by feeling "that's absurd!" rather than with outrage.
I probably do talk too much though.
At any rate, I can frequently be found amusing myself on Peter Gray's Play Makes Us Human substack.
We home educate, Mark, and have friends who are essentially unschoolers, which the the word for the process you are describing.
Holt's Why Children Fail is a great book, but in some ways I think he was so disillusioned by his experience of the dysfunction and incompetence and pointless structure of urban public schooling that he went all the way to the other extreme, no structure at all. There is a different path from both the uber-managed and unmanaged systems though, which is Classical education. This involves conscious choice on the part of the educator about what is good and true and beautiful, and then creating a structure that intentionally exposes children to these things at all ages, with the goal that some of that rubs off on them. This can be done either at home or in the classroom setting. Even though I'm a homeschooler, in many ways a classroom setting works better for this kind of education.
That said, the 17 year old unschooler I know has lots of diverse interests, is able to carry on a conversation on a variety of topics, and can add up the bill at the grocery store. This may seem like a low bar, but for most people, these sorts of basic skills are vastly more important than trigonometry or advanced literary analysis.
I sometimes wonder whether what we call "dropping out" isn't in some cases simply a realization on the part of the kid that formal academic structure isn't for him. You know who does this balancing act of academic structure really well? The Germans.
I have been thinking some lately about the students who do well in the traditional compulsory setting - what makes them "opt in"? I have been thinking about this because they are the ones who go on to be academics and intellectuals, who see no problem with coercive schooling; the Alison Gopniks of the world (see The Gardener and the Carpenter), and perhaps even Jonathan Haidt.
I am guessing that in their case the school was telling them to do what they wanted to do anyway; and while that may be vaguely annoying sometimes, its really no big deal. Besides, having succeeded there, they may conclude that it was really for their own good (Alice Miller wrote a book titled that about that being the path to Nazism by the way, and not metaphorically). I think they may pay an unconscious price though in believing that the students who fail at school and become society's losers (having been prevented from discovering what else they might have been good at instead, and the "10,000 hours" needed to get good at anything (Malcolm Gladwell), deserved it. After all, they should have just done what they were told, and worked harder.
But back to that question: what makes people "opt in"? I think its an important question, because really the only kind of learning there can be is self-chosen learning. It may be in response to a " learn this or else" situation, but still the decision is made either to go ahead and learn it to avoid the "or else", or to adopt one of the strategies that Holt described to avoid the "or else" without actually learning anything (the "I'm stupid" gambit, among others). Or in the case of someone who suggests that "this will be good for you, and its really important that you learn it", they may decide, OK I trust this person in other matters, I'm going to trust them on this one". The psychiatrist Milton Erickson was famous for exercising this kind of authority (charisma really), issuing directives to his clients that were designed to create important learning experiences for them, rather than merely hashing things out verbally.
Thank you for letting us know, Prof Gray rocks! I think your work on smartphones might not be so far from his conclusions, if you look at it like this: his argument is that the sandlot is better than little league, ie it seems like baseball to us, but the kind that kids come up with themselves is way, way better for their minds and souls than the kind with coaches telling them what to do. Well, with smartphones and social media, all those algorithms are carefully programmed by adults, so even though there's the illusion of independence, it seems like the kid is in charge of his social media experience, it's really a bunch of advertisers/silicon valley executives/programmers/etc. Like little league, it's a simulacrum of independence, not the real thing -- it's all about being programmed! Prof Gray is all about kids playing freely - free of adults, including the ones that program their minds via social media. So I think it dovetails nicely, if any of that was comprehensible : )
I read somewhere that kids of different ages playing together ( on their own) is very valuable- they learn negotiating skills & resiliency. There is no perfect childhood, but we did encourage our boys (22& 24) to play with older neighbor kids- kick the can & such. They were often frustrated as the younger kids, but I do think it helped them with social skills & independence.
I have so many great memories of playing kick the can and flashlight tag in our neighborhood. Playing with the different ages is so important too, I was a younger one also, but learned how to stand my own and run faster etc so I could keep up.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! We are trying so hard to parent counter-culturally right now. I have four kids, from kindergarten to late teens. No phones for our kids until 15 years old.
We welcome other kids to play at our house with the younger ones, but I try to let parents know that I will not be checking in on them every 10 minutes. I will not be directing their play. I will not be arranging cooking or crafts, and I will not be sending them pictures of their play escapades. OK, I don’t say all of that… 😂
Many families and friends think we are “irresponsible” in the way that we do things because we don’t hover, and only our oldest teen has a phone, so I can’t check up on the rest of them constantly. Seems to me that our kids who are quite motivated and engaged in things like youth group, civil air patrol, scouts, various school, sports, part – time jobs, reading and the like are doing just fine.
Do video games and games played on smartphones NOT count as play? Because if they do count, I would offer that kids today play more than I did as a child of the '60s and '70s.
The article is quiet concerning screen-based games as play. Why? Is there a quality of that kind of play that is unfulfilling? If so, why is this not unpacked and compared against more fulfilling types of play? Perhaps we need a definition of what actually constitutes play for kids and what doesn't.
For instance, is it only group play that counts? Play that involves movement and running around? Would playing a board game count as play?
Not sure what to make of this article in light of this. Can we get further insights that address the issue of video games and what constitutes fuilfilling play for children and teens?
It seems important to me that video games are designed (usually by adults) and typically prompt the player to pursue pre-determined paths for structured rewards (and / or in avoidance of punishments). It’s a kind of play, but it’s not free play.
That may be the case for many games, but I would say that a large percentage of video games and computer games do not follow that paradigm and are more open/free than not.
Video games are just another tool for the self-proclaimed overlords to collect your data so they can control and manipulate you. The game is literally capturing how the player problem solves and handles conflict while destroying mental health through instant gratification. I would never let my child play video games. Period.
Yes. It was exactly what I was thinking about when I was reading the article.
In a past children were preparing exactly for a challenges of the past when they were playing.
Nowadays when they play e.g. Minecraft don't they establish new skills for a new environment of the 21st century (autonomy, competence and relatedness)?
PS My commentary doesn't mean I lower an importance of the real-world interactions in children (and adults though).
I’m no expert, just a parent and grandparent. The immediate response to your question that came to mind is that play is a necessary part of helping the young (both humans and other mammals) learn to navigate the REAL world with their peers. Simulations, while maybe valuable in developing decision-making skills, can never be the sole substitute for real life play.
I would agree that video games can't constitute the entirely of play, just as playing nothing but wiffleball in the backyard can't either.
But that distinction isn't being made in the article. If we consider video games play, then kids today are getting plenty of play. VARIETY of play is a different issue.
As for limitations of video games, the sheer breadth of them available offers a plethora of touch points for cognitive and neurological growth, certainly more than a child would receive who lacks access to them. Again, it's a question as to why the article doesn't talk about this.
The article states that play is considered free play when no adult is directing it. My impression as a parent is that video games become problematic because they over stimulate the child's brain but the body isn't expelling any energy. Which creates a strung out and frustrated kid. Also, it's not always the video game, it's what the video game is replacing.
Unfortunately, that does not explicitly state whether video games are considered play or not. However, by the defining terms of play Gray provides, the answer would be yes, video games are play.
And if that is so, then I reject the conclusion that kids don't get enough play, because kids today play a heck of a lot of video games.
Leonard Sax wrote a good book on this topic several years back, Boys Adrift. He was very concerned about the effect of video games on boys in particular.
This is one of his quotes from the book. He makes a real case for why video games are generally destructive for kids, and boys even moreso. You have to look at his book references to get specific research articles.
“The destructive effects of video games are not on boys' cognitive abilities or their reaction times, but on there motivation and their connectedness with the real world.”
This. So many really bright boys apply their intelligence to things like building Turing machines in Minecraft or working out how to beat Mario games without jumping. These things are cool, but ultimately useless. There is a big opportunity cost for society here...
Free range parenting is where it’s at. Kids are happier and it makes a parent’s job so much easier not worrying that you need to be monitoring the little goblins all day.
Yes..though we are literally free range- on 70 acres 15 miles outside of town and we worry that our kids don't get enough opportunities to play with other kids, bike to get a drink etc. They are definitely the happiest when we RV and can zoom around on their bikes, meeting new kids, etc.
That's the trick. My friends who would prefer to raise freer kids are stuck with the problem that the *other* kids aren't allowed out. So it can be lonely.
I've heard about how frustrating that can be, when every other kid is at back to back sports practices and you said no. I certainly feel lucky that we don't deal with that.
There's a critical piece missing from this analysis. Free to roam sounds great in theory but differences in family values and access to technology is the major impediment. Most kids in the neighborhood carry "online" with them at all times while in the "real world". I don't need my kid climbing trees with the neighbor kid who's got a phone so they can look at porn from the treetops. I suppose I can "supervise their free play" but the supervision would seem to defeat the purpose. On the other hand, try convincing all the parents in the organized neighborhood play group to ban tech from the group. It's much harder than it seems.
Perhaps I’ve just been fortunate to find other families with similar concerns and values in our neighborhood, but at least for our family, it’s been reasonably easy to connect with other folks within walking distance in our suburb who also limit access to technology and want their children to play. If you’re striking out with people you know personally, perhaps reach out (using social media!) for families in your neighborhood with similar concerns?
Playing a video game provides autonomy and competency, but, depending on the type of game, can lack opportunity for relatedness. If you have ever put on a pretend theatrical show with your friends or gone on an adventure in a real place, you will understand that video games are very different from in-person play in the real world. In my opinion, they don’t prepare children for dealing with as many of the real situations they are going to encounter as they grow as does actually playing in the world with other flesh and blood children with whom they can physically interact.
My mother was born in 1936. She tells countless stories of playing with her friends in inner-city Detroit. Those kids played in ways kids today wouldn’t even imagine. They had fun, they explored, they learned how to deal with all sorts of people and situations, and they did it in the real world in which they were going to have to live and survive as adults. Their play prepared them for their futures. They play arranged for my young relatives doesn’t seem as if it is giving them much true life experience. They play organized sports in which problems of all sorts are solved by the coaches. My mom, and also myself, played unorganized sports where conflicts were solved by the children. Kids should have opportunities to play both, in my ideal world.
I agree with Dr. Gray that not allowing children to play unsupervised is doing them harm. I saw the difference in my young relatives when the schools stopped offering recess: it was abrupt and negative. I don’t know how the powers that be can think removing free play from children’s lives can be beneficial. Our children are dying. Even if it’s still just a correlation between lack of free play and the deteriorating mental health of our children, allowing them to play on their own as they themselves feel they need to do is an easy treatment to try.
Me and my buddies regularly left school grounds in the fourth grade during recess. We hung out in an abandoned shack on the nearby farm in rural north Louisiana. Obviously, this isn’t the answer, but it sticks with me 50 years later as a great adventure. When I tell kids about it now, they are amazed.
I was fortunate enough to send all three of my kids to a Waldorf school. In fact, we moved out of state so that they could go to a really good one, and I could be the Administrator (like a principal) there. We also jettisoned our television, which was truly the best thing (other than loving our kids as fully as possible) we ever did as parents. I write about that here: https://marypoindextermclaughlin.substack.com/p/best-thing-we-ever-did-as-parents
Waldorf has its flaws, but the education is BASED on childhood play, which is essential. And for those who ask, "aren't video games play?" I would say. yes, that's a type of play, but not the kind that calms the nervous system and nourishes the imagination.
In my experience, it's the interaction with real, live elements (earth, water, trees, sky, etc.) and human beings that is inherently healing/calming. I have zero data to back that up, btw. I'm making observations from witnessing my own children and the children at the Waldorf school, vs. those who spent much of their childhoods in front of video games.
Thank you for introducing me to Peter Gray's substack! This is a topic that I find so important and one that I try to support in my area as an educator. Kids need more free play to develop critical shared imagination skills which are a building block for positive social skills. Schools need to get back to supporting more free play along with getting computers out of the hands of kids all day at school!
Absolutely! I remember a few years ago reading an article about the disappearance of kitchens in kindergarten classrooms. It's not a zero sum situation, we can play and learn.
I’m 100% all about free play. What I don’t see in this and similar articles I’ve read by both Jonathan and Peter is a recognition and analysis of WHY parents are making these choices.
As a working mom, I’m constantly bombarded with messaging that my job is to keep my children safe and protected from every possible danger. The moment I allow my older child to walk around the block unsupervised, I get harassed by neighbors who threaten to call the police, who are mandated reporters who must report me to CPS for suspected child neglect. My upper-elementary-age child’s summer camp requires parents to walk into the park district building and sign them in daily; I can’t even just drop them at the door this year, because there has to be a direct handoff between the parent and the camp staff. This means that I must park, get my older and younger child out of the car, walk them inside and upstairs, and sign a paper, before returning to my car with my younger child and dropping them off at daycare. Children apparently can’t be trusted to enter a building and find the camp room without adult supervision. It’s truly insane. I work from home full time and would happily have my older child home during the summer, but they would be bored out of their mind, because all of their friends’ parents are working, so their friends are at summer camp. (Younger child, meanwhile, is too young to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them and that mommy needs to work, so having them home isn’t an option; we have them in a very play-focused daycare setting.) We regularly have neighbors and friends over for child-directed play after camp or school or on weekends, but these have to be organized by parents because the children (fortunately!) do not have cell phones or email and everyone’s schedule is dependent upon the parents’ work schedules. We want to give our children more independence, but without organized support from the community, it feels like we are swimming against a very strong current!
I couldn't have said it better myself. We are in exactly the same boat. Last year I dropped my 8 year old son off at the front door of his camp building (it's a small museum, and I'd walked him in the day before so he knew where to go), as no explicit rules around drop-off were supplied. That night, the camp sent a stern email to all the camp parents admonishing those who had dropped off at the door, and that we had to walk them all the way to their specific room. This has a two-fold detrimental effect:
- Robs my child of the independence of finding his way around
- Adds an extra 10 minutes to an already busy morning rushing to work while dropping off multiple kids
How can we achieve this community support to allow kids more independence?
I live in a big city and most people now raise their children (if they choose to have any) in small condos because they could never afford to buy or even rent a house. I dread to think how it will effect their children’s mental health, especially when combined with all of the other social ills from which our society suffers.
I am on the cusp of millennial/ gen-z and think we have been primed to be over protective of our children because we lack the ability to regulate ourselves due to lack of socialization. Besides technology, smaller family sizes over multiple generations has played a huge role...most of my friends have one sibling and a couple of cousins that they don’t really know or live close to. As adults, they don’t have any family to help them if they are in need of financial help or become ill, leading to more depression, stress and anxiety. They don’t want more than one child because of the financial cost and lack of social support needed to raise children, so it becomes a compounding problem.
Today, children are often without siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents or even fathers/ mothers in their lives. Plus no religion or connection to a culture that gives them a sense of stable identity or familial-like community. Who can they play with besides AI? I can’t help but think all of our social ills will get worse.
Fewer children and the lack of available peers to play with is a huge part of the problem. Parents confronted by this either fall into organized play/sports or they are left with almost no other options.
We ran into this problem of the very few children around us being in sports by perceived necessity, which made spontaneously play impossible because the other kids were all loaded up into multiple organized sports. The upshot was that we had to be in organized play/sports too or else our son had no other guarantee of playing with peers at all.
Also there is a lot of pressure on parents to "keep up with the Joneses", except the Joneses have their kids in after school tutoring, martial arts, soccer, gymnastics etc. The moms are comparing themselves to their mom friends online constantly.
😔 You bring up some great points. We lived in an apartment for one year and it was terrible for everyone's health even with three flights of stairs all the time!! It saddens me that my kids essentially have no cousins/aunts/uncles. Everyone visits once a year or so.
This is splendid. When I was a kid things were quite different. After my first day at school, aged five, I was expected to walk myself there and back, and it was about half a mile away (not always fun as shorts were mandated, not long trousers, and in the winter our legs would be red with cold). I was allowed to go out and play with my friends in the evening, and once we had bicycles, we really had a lot of freedom. Now this was in a Wiltshire village in the early sixties, so paedophilia hadn't been invented then! (I know, but there was no obsession with it.) I think everyone knew everyone else, so we couldn't get up to much naughtiness without word getting back to our parents. A little older and we could pack some sandwiches and set off on an all-day bike ride, and all before starting secondary school.
Now I've had my issues, but mostly in reaction to external circumstances. How much worse would they have been without that childhood experience of making my own adventures, co-operating with my chums and resolving our arguments (occasional) between ourselves? I don't see how a child today could do that, if living in a city, and that's disregarding the nanny state prosecuting parents who even try to give their child a little responsibility.
Your experience brings up an interesting idea. I suppose most of the reason children aren't afforded very much freedom anymore is that their parents don't know the neighbors.
Thank you for this.
I work with canines. Not to compare them to children but the dogs that I care for who are the healthiest and happiest are the ones who are given opportunities to socialize and play freely and engage with nature on a regular basis. They are confident, curious, independent and have good, strong relationships. They also make better choices, especially in stressful situations. If it works for them, it must also work for children?
We are pack animals and require connection and collaboration to grow and thrive.
Obviously proper rest and nutrition are key contributors as well but let’s start with kicking the kids back outside to explore and play. You won’t regret it! (Except maybe the dirt that gets tracked in the house 😉)
If what is reported by Dr. Haidt and others is true, kicking your kids back outside to explore and play without adult supervision is likely to result in a visit from Child Protective Services. Before we kick the kids back outside to play, we first need to change the culture that believes that is a dangerous enterprise.
This comment is sad. It says a lot about our “civilization”. Are we more concerned about what our neighbours think or about our children’s welfare?
My siblings got picked up by police in a small town because they were playing at a park unsupervised while my mother took another sibling to drivers ed. They were 8, 10 and 12. I was babysitting for other families at 12. Not far from where I live now a man had neighbors call Child Protective Services while he was home because his 9 year old was playing in the yard independently. It’s truly insane but definitely not about personal reputation. Our neighbors’ thoughts become actions which become police reports or welfare visits. Even if you come out “fine” those reports and visits will still be on your record suggesting you are potentially a problem.
I’m just wondering what kind of people are making these reports? Do they know the kids or parents? Have they ever even introduced themselves or do they just go straight to filing a report? Are they actually concerned about the welfare of the child or are they looking for opportunities to virtue signal?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks in this camp! They are busy-bodies, and it’s my general experience that there is a lot of virtue signaling going on.
Well, that's a leap. Where in the comment did I say such a thing? The facts as reported is that parents who have let their child play outside or walk alone without supervision have been threatened by visits from CPS and, I believe, in some cases had their children removed for a time. This, I believed, happened to Lenore Skenazy and there are plenty of articles documenting that CPS has interfered and even taken custody of children because they were "without supervision." By your spelling of "neighbours" I suspect you are not living in the US. This is what happens in the US, maybe not in your country. It's not about "changing the culture" because we are concerned about what the neighbors think, it's about getting the neighbors and the community to understand that kids need to play free of supervision.
I was just pointing out how sad it is that we have to be concerned about what the neighbours think for fear they will report you. This is insanity to me.
I had my own house key, walked myself and my little brother to school every day by the time I was 11 years old. I babysat multiple children in my neighbourhood by myself at that age and made fairly good money doing it. I am not a parent unfortunately but it blows my mind that my healthy and independent childhood is now considered abuse today.
I knew all my neighbours as a child, even the ones who didn’t have kids. I was outside playing in the streets every single day. I offered to mow lawns and pull weeds every summer. Every house on my block knew who we were, knew who our parents were and knew which kids we played with and which kids we didn’t play with. I used to walk to the store and/or the nearest playground by myself or with kids from my street. As long as we were home by dinner time.
I was also perfectly capable of doing my own laundry, packing my lunches and making my own dinner at that age. Is this considered child abuse today?
I agree with mm. The attitude in the US in many parts of the US seems to be that children who aren’t constantly supervised are in serious danger of abduction or death (despite this definitely not being accurate!). Without changing the requirement from CPS that children be constantly supervised, how are parents supposed to feel they can give their children more freedom? My state’s version of CPS has consistently ignored court orders to stop charging parents who leave their children unsupervised for short periods in safe circumstances with child neglect. I’m not willing to risk losing custody of my kids.
❤️Ape is a verb. "To ape someone" is to mimic them. See Piaget in RIGHTEOUS MIND❤️. Is anyone researching stages of play? Research Role Play as an advanced subset of Play, and research Role Reversal as an advanced subset of role play. Drama Therapy role reversals seem to be a "watered down version" of the more intense Psychodrama. Ask Dr "Magic Button" Burns how many clients have burst into tears after hearing one word:"Reverse"...?😁😁😁❤️😂😲
I made a wild claim to him:"the most powerful word in Psychotherapy is "Reverse." His next six podcasts were about Role Reversal. Monthly for decades he's challenged his CME workshops to do an anger role reversal exercise: THEY ALL FAILED...? see pp210 "Feeling Good Together."❤️
If a group of playless kids asked me WTF is Gray about... I'd show them page 210:"Ace this then you can spend the rest of your life KICKING QUACK ASS!"... and I'd show them how to sue the government on TV to do it:
https://youtu.be/_RDMs54d8mA
❤️I mentored an 18 year old who feared speaking in a speech class. Fear became love. As Mayor of Delano CA he loves to speak at government meetings. So much that he ran for US Congress.😲😂🎉❤️😁 Subscribe for details
I grew up with horses and it helped me immensely with classroom management. I always felt guilty thinking 'jeez. I know this because of a horse' buuut, what you said is true!
These kids are like horses with stable vices...locked up too long, and developing abnormal behavior patterns because of it.
❤️ Hello Fellow "Heightists!"*❤️
Is anyone "stopping to appreciate" that the body heals the body(the exception was COVID that Anti Vaxxers couldn't handle) but the Mind doesn't heal the Mind(exceptions: when 60% of anxious people and or 50% of depressed people are cured by placebo)?
❤️Point: Our body's self healing SPOILS US(implies that we have to do *NOTHING*..."freeplay" is *NOT NOTHING*)
❤️Point: the HUGE placebo effect SPOILS us: causes us to "pay for COSTLY FALSE CURES"(innocuous placebos can mutate into a insidious placebo)
❤️Is there research on Skateboard Parks (🏂unsupervised government built facilities where kids challenge each other AND THE ESTABLISHMENT... the Establishment would force them to wear protection)? 🤔
❤️I'd bet that the organic calmness and cooperation❤️ I observe is enhanced by the "self inflicted Exposure Therapy" ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc2OzeAfYKc
...of constantly facing their fear of being injured and healing from injuries while skating without protection?
❤️What ever happened to "Blood Brothers"(two boys press their fresh wounds together and take a solemn loyalty vow... THAT WAS UNSUPERVISED 😁😲)? ❤️What about "Body Cams" for repeatedly bullied kids? Their classmates that come forward to establish a Kid's Tribunal might be the "Next Nader's Raiders?"
https://youtu.be/nhI30oC9LAM?t=6890
*We laugh at Haidt's jokes and Reich's jokes❤️...Yes, I've directed professor Reich in a Climate film where he played"the Witch's Dorothy."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO-Kx-2TOg0
❤️"gratuitous witch humor": Trump is spending MILLIONS to convince us that he's NOT A WITCH!😲😁😁😁
on
The decline of play | Peter Gray | TEDxNavesink
https://youtu.be/Bg-GEzM7iTk?t=96
1:52
If you place one of these play-deprived animals
1:54
with an unfamiliar peer,
1:56
they alternately freeze in fear
1:59
and lash out with inappropriate, ineffective aggression;
2:02
they don't learn to respond
2:03
to the social signals of the other animal.
Is anyone researching humans 0%-10% accuracy at reading (children, etc) emotions(teachers can't, parents can't, counselors can't... until they use a scientific metric)? Imagine a Mom is angry and (per State Dependent Learning) can read anger 100x better than fear. But her baby isn't angry, her baby is afraid. Mom's that projected Mom's current state onto baby's cries(incorrectly) responded while the other Moms' babies died. ...?
I agree based upon working with animals, that childhood play is vital to a successful adult life. But/and, my teenage kids aren't succumbing to the anxiety we see around us, and I think part of the reason is because there are certain times of the year when they have to help me out--feeding an orphan, cleaning a cage. I talked a few years ago to those in the boomer generation and they had fond memories of the chores they did on farms. Besides play, I hypothesise that the other thing kids need might not be unconditional love but to be needed, and to see the results of their efforts.
Colorado recently passed a “Free-Range Parenting Law.”
“... Colorado is the first blue state to pass the legislation. That's great, because at Let Grow, the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, we have always maintained that childhood independence is a bipartisan issue. Many Republicans appreciate our work to promote can-do kids and keep the government out of everyday family decisions, and many Democrats appreciate the same exact thing.
The new law narrows the definition of neglect, making it clear that a child is not neglected simply because a parent lets them engage in normal childhood activities, like playing outside without adult supervision or staying home alone for a bit.”
THANKS!
https://reason.com/2022/04/01/colorado-approves-law-that-gives-kids-reasonable-independence/
That is great news and an example of what needs to happen in all states if parents are to allow their children out to play without the fear of CPS or a meddling neighbor.
You really can’t wait for the government to give you permission. If you have children and live somewhere they really aren’t allowed outside alone, you should move.
The truth is that the parents of our children's friends and the community at large - almost everywhere - is imbued with the fear that letting children play without supervision is dangerous. My children are grown, but when I raised them in the 90's, this mindset was already well established. I let my kids play without supervision anyway. Unfortunately, the parents of my kids' friends-to a one- wouldn't let their children come over to play if they weren't supervised and I got a few tsk tsk along the way. The cultural mindset needs to change and unless you are going to move the kids to them thar hills, we are stuck with this milk carton fear in the community.
This is a cultural choice though. We live in a small town in New England about an hour from Boston (not really them thar hills) where children run free. They go to the playground by themselves, are welcome at the library alone, walk home from school, ride their bikes to the nearby swamp to fish. I guess I don't know how to *return* a community to this kind of culture, and I know that not everyone can change their lives like we did to give their children freedom, but I want people to know that it is out there. Vote with your feet if you can.
> With every decade children have become less free to play, roam, and explore alone or with other children away from adults, less free to occupy public spaces without an adult guard, and less free to have a part-time job where they can demonstrate their capacity for responsible self-control.
We complain about kids (and especially teenagers) behaving like animals, but never stop to reflect on the near-ubiquitous custom of keeping them in cages.
Our school cafeterias require students to be silent after eating because they get too loud and won't calm down. But maybe if they were allowed to speak more often to their peers, they wouldn't get so out of hand when they did.
Wow, that’s insane. There’s absolutely no justification for silencing children during a break period, and it’s disturbing that anyone would require that.
It's terrible and I've seen it at multiple campuses and in more than one district! The last middle school where I worked they played movies at lunch in efforts to subdue the masses. It's not good.
My kids were at a school for awhile that had mostly silence the entire lunch period ( with classical music playing), and then they were allowed to talk for a short period - but only if it wasn’t too loud. Completely ridiculous!
My school district changed it's policies a few years back to prevent silent lunches, as well as taking away recess as punishment. What worked for us was emailing our board our concerns, as well as then asking who recomends wellness policies and contacting them.
We at least have very strict policies about not taking away recess. And kids get an hour of recess a day...while we have the grant 😉
I wonder if unsupervised play requires a broadly shared moral order? I suspect it might.
If everyone in your society essentially sees the world the same way, leaving your children to explore is relatively safe. This sort of cultural homogeneity is attainable in lots of ways: very small towns, countercultural groups, churches, even gang-banger neighborhoods probably exhibit some of this.
Whether it's a hippie commune or a homeschool group, I suspect children are granted more freedom precisely because each parent has confidence other parents are training their children in roughly the same values.
However, if your group is of heterogeneous culture and philosophy, it makes the parents (and associated children) more difficult to predict and therefore more dangerous. The fact is, a parent who sees the world radically differently than you truly can be dangerous. In an extreme case, perhaps he thinks killing people in defense of his faith is acceptable. Perhaps he thinks sexual contact with children is acceptable. In less dramatic fashion, perhaps she lets her kids have an unfiltered smartphone. Or perhaps she's on a crusade to queer childhood? These aren't abstract fears; they're quite real. Communities that lack shared cultural values also tend to lack trust. And parents are wise to be careful in such settings.
So, perhaps the decline in unstructured play is merely reflective of the decline in shared American values and associated trust across the board.
I think the word ‘broadly’ is key here. Children need to come up against risk and resolve conflict. If they were just among like minded folk, would there be ample opportunity to do that?
Part of the problems of the world (I am in the UK) in my opinion is the (often willing) segregation of communities.
That said, as you suggest, children need a safe space in which to sharpen skills because some places would be just too out of sync with our own values.
8 year olds are perfectly capable of creating child-level conflicts entirely on their own. It's the intrusion of adult level conflicts, and the associated inability to predict how other parents and children will react, that gives parents pause.
Homogenous societies are more trusting. This is a well established (but very uncomfortably acknowledged) sociological fact.
I believe the age of the children is key. At 8, I agree but at some point they have to come out of whatever playpen we impose and navigate wider society. I imagine it is better done incrementally rather than as one great shock.
The question is, what makes a society homogenous? I used to be a Christian, until I discovered that other Christians did not share my values at all.
I heard a talk once by John Gatto in which he observed that the various religious groups who originally came to America did not so much come here believing in religious freedom (not within their own communities), but rather the freedom to not be interfered with by outside groups. But being secure within their own communities, they found it to their advantage to trade with neighboring communities who had different ideas about salvation. They decided that they had shared interests, and became willing to "live and let live", an attitude that gradually extended even toward members of their own community.
I certainly agree that to establish mutual trust and cooperation, a society has to have something that they believe in, something that makes them feel "we're all in this together". But for awhile in the U.S. at least I thought we had that, on a level that was above anything tribal. We've lost it. I do not know how to account for that, as on the surface at least it seems it seems due to White People reacting to the Browning of America. Yet it was White People, a great many of them, who embraced the civil rights movement in the 60's.
An alternative explanation, implicit in Peter Gray's work, is that play deprivation and agency deprivation in children has led to a great increase in moral stupidity and its counterpart, tribalism.
I suspect it's far more basic. Patrick Deneen expounds on this a great deal in Why Liberalism Failed. His latest Regime Change isn't as good, I think, but contains many of the same points. For that matter, Brad Gregory in the Unintended Reformation traces our philosophical divergence back to Luther and even Scotus. It's difficult to conceive of a philosophy as radically individualistic as the Lockean Enlightenment in the absence of a faith as radically individualistic as Protestantism.
The theological division of the various sects of Protestantism that founded America masked a philosophically homogenous undercurrent. They disagreed about baptism, salvation, the Eucharist, legalism, works vs faith... but they agreed on individualism. They agreed that faith and salvation were based on an interior change of the heart of the individual. These groups only look radically different until you compare them with something that truly is radically different (Confucianism for example) and you realize how much core philosophy they had in common.
This homogeneity held for a long time, but the seeds of its demise had already been planted by Locke (that's Deneen's thesis.) Once you ignore religious differences ("live and let live" as you say) in name of economic liberation (ala Locke) and especially once you privatize morality completely and declare that the only "harm" is a legitimate reason to regulate behavior (ala Mill)... cultural divergence is pretty much inevitable.
Cultural divergence may then be inevitable, but also has little more meaning than a preference for different clothing.
I was raised as a Lutheran, but I can tell you that in our congregation 80% were there for singing hymns, and for whatever salutory effect exposing their children to Sunday School might have; in fact most had little use for sermons and attended only at Christmas and Easter. They probably had only the vaguest idea who Luther was, or how Protestantism differed from Catholicism. I think that most did not take the idea of hell very seriously, and would not have been inclined to think that Taoists (or Jews) were going there, for not accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
I see all this as enabling community, not disabling it. In fact I think of it as similar to what JRRT, who was personally Roman Catholic, purposefully did when writing LOTR: he left any specific references to Christian dogma out of it, while very much leaving the best of Christian sensibilities in. And indeed, Jesus himself demonstrated the true qualities of a spiritual leader in the "Let him cast the first stone" incident; he gets people to identify with each other, to empathize with each other. (Even if that was added by a 12th century scribe, its now part of the accepted myth.)
I see your point about Protestants of various sects sharing an outlook that would make them sympathetic to Lockean individualism. But it is my understanding that the Catholics who had settled in Maryland achieved a similar degree of conviviality with their Protestant neighbors, to a greater degree than those who remained in England.
Do you see a classical education as aiming at understanding what is good for a society? Because if so, it makes a very rough start, with Plato advocating censorship and Aristotle defending slavery. And not sure Kant would be considered classical or modern, but I'd be inclined to categorize him as "not helpful".
Actually LOTR is a perfect example of how much Christians agree on philosophy even though we disagree on theology.
"Cultural divergence may then be inevitable, but also has little more meaning than a preference for different clothing."
This defense of multiculturalism usually takes the form of, "I love a diverse community because there's lots of choices for dinner." I doubt the same suburban wine-moms who embrace Arabic fusion cuisine and Indian sari dresses would be thrilled about burkas being sold in Macys though. (Or perhaps they would, steeped as they are in the Millian idea that that society has no business regulating behavior unless it's harmful.) I find burkas incompatible with Western civilization and would use law (as the French do) to render them unavailable. Since I reject Mill's premise, I have no problem placing "the common good" above the personal autonomy of someone who might want to wear a burka.
Classical education also begins by rejecting the modern idea that "good" and "true" and "beautiful" are entirely subjective. That's the largest hurdle for most modern people. Let's take architecture as an example. Either you teach the Golden Ratio as a key to timeless beauty, or you teach students to design whatever they think is beautiful -- doing that gave us brutalism. Same for art and humanities and literature; either there are timeless works that speak to the human condition or there aren't. When it comes to defining "good", what's shocking is the similarity of opinions over the centuries. Social systems that work are based on personal virtue, and thinkers as diverse as Buddha, Aristotle, and Ibn Khaldun have all figured this out. That's where Classical education starts. Different schools and societies would built it differently from there, but it starts with defining "good" objectively and being willing to teach it.
John Holt once suggested that, for those parents who are unable to provide an alternative to school, the parents can simply tell their children: how you want to deal with the school is up to you. Don't hurt anyone and don't break any actual laws, but choosing in what ways to participate in what is expected of you (or not) is up to you.
This suggests the interesting possibility of treating the school itself as a source of conflict, in response to which one may develop resilience, as well as skills that will be useful later, as you can probably look forward to people trying to intimidate or manipulate you for the rest of your life.
Of course a young person may have difficulty separating what adults in authority think and feel about them from who they are. But some young people are able to do that, and its an interesting question how they manage that.
As a young person I personally did not really succeed at that; but feeling very clearly that the school did not have my best interests at heart, I simply opted out, ignoring what was going on in class and doing my own reading instead. I had very poor grades and very high achievement test scores.
I appreciate that comment and it is certainly something to reflect upon. As a mother of a child of high school age, it is an interesting take and approach to dealing with school. My own son struggles with classroom learning and we may have to home ed at some point ourselves. Should this occur I would definitely take a child/interest led approach as he is extremely motivated when learning on his own terms.
Since this thread concerns play deprivation, I might add that as an adult I have found humor to be a great resource - a way to engage a playful attitude. Its generally more comfortable to respond to perceiving that things are not as they could or should be by feeling "that's absurd!" rather than with outrage.
I probably do talk too much though.
At any rate, I can frequently be found amusing myself on Peter Gray's Play Makes Us Human substack.
Absolutely. It’s a great strategy. Playfulness and goes a long way and is a great way of deflecting conflict.
We home educate, Mark, and have friends who are essentially unschoolers, which the the word for the process you are describing.
Holt's Why Children Fail is a great book, but in some ways I think he was so disillusioned by his experience of the dysfunction and incompetence and pointless structure of urban public schooling that he went all the way to the other extreme, no structure at all. There is a different path from both the uber-managed and unmanaged systems though, which is Classical education. This involves conscious choice on the part of the educator about what is good and true and beautiful, and then creating a structure that intentionally exposes children to these things at all ages, with the goal that some of that rubs off on them. This can be done either at home or in the classroom setting. Even though I'm a homeschooler, in many ways a classroom setting works better for this kind of education.
That said, the 17 year old unschooler I know has lots of diverse interests, is able to carry on a conversation on a variety of topics, and can add up the bill at the grocery store. This may seem like a low bar, but for most people, these sorts of basic skills are vastly more important than trigonometry or advanced literary analysis.
I sometimes wonder whether what we call "dropping out" isn't in some cases simply a realization on the part of the kid that formal academic structure isn't for him. You know who does this balancing act of academic structure really well? The Germans.
I have been thinking some lately about the students who do well in the traditional compulsory setting - what makes them "opt in"? I have been thinking about this because they are the ones who go on to be academics and intellectuals, who see no problem with coercive schooling; the Alison Gopniks of the world (see The Gardener and the Carpenter), and perhaps even Jonathan Haidt.
I am guessing that in their case the school was telling them to do what they wanted to do anyway; and while that may be vaguely annoying sometimes, its really no big deal. Besides, having succeeded there, they may conclude that it was really for their own good (Alice Miller wrote a book titled that about that being the path to Nazism by the way, and not metaphorically). I think they may pay an unconscious price though in believing that the students who fail at school and become society's losers (having been prevented from discovering what else they might have been good at instead, and the "10,000 hours" needed to get good at anything (Malcolm Gladwell), deserved it. After all, they should have just done what they were told, and worked harder.
But back to that question: what makes people "opt in"? I think its an important question, because really the only kind of learning there can be is self-chosen learning. It may be in response to a " learn this or else" situation, but still the decision is made either to go ahead and learn it to avoid the "or else", or to adopt one of the strategies that Holt described to avoid the "or else" without actually learning anything (the "I'm stupid" gambit, among others). Or in the case of someone who suggests that "this will be good for you, and its really important that you learn it", they may decide, OK I trust this person in other matters, I'm going to trust them on this one". The psychiatrist Milton Erickson was famous for exercising this kind of authority (charisma really), issuing directives to his clients that were designed to create important learning experiences for them, rather than merely hashing things out verbally.
Thank you for letting us know, Prof Gray rocks! I think your work on smartphones might not be so far from his conclusions, if you look at it like this: his argument is that the sandlot is better than little league, ie it seems like baseball to us, but the kind that kids come up with themselves is way, way better for their minds and souls than the kind with coaches telling them what to do. Well, with smartphones and social media, all those algorithms are carefully programmed by adults, so even though there's the illusion of independence, it seems like the kid is in charge of his social media experience, it's really a bunch of advertisers/silicon valley executives/programmers/etc. Like little league, it's a simulacrum of independence, not the real thing -- it's all about being programmed! Prof Gray is all about kids playing freely - free of adults, including the ones that program their minds via social media. So I think it dovetails nicely, if any of that was comprehensible : )
I read somewhere that kids of different ages playing together ( on their own) is very valuable- they learn negotiating skills & resiliency. There is no perfect childhood, but we did encourage our boys (22& 24) to play with older neighbor kids- kick the can & such. They were often frustrated as the younger kids, but I do think it helped them with social skills & independence.
I have so many great memories of playing kick the can and flashlight tag in our neighborhood. Playing with the different ages is so important too, I was a younger one also, but learned how to stand my own and run faster etc so I could keep up.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! We are trying so hard to parent counter-culturally right now. I have four kids, from kindergarten to late teens. No phones for our kids until 15 years old.
We welcome other kids to play at our house with the younger ones, but I try to let parents know that I will not be checking in on them every 10 minutes. I will not be directing their play. I will not be arranging cooking or crafts, and I will not be sending them pictures of their play escapades. OK, I don’t say all of that… 😂
Many families and friends think we are “irresponsible” in the way that we do things because we don’t hover, and only our oldest teen has a phone, so I can’t check up on the rest of them constantly. Seems to me that our kids who are quite motivated and engaged in things like youth group, civil air patrol, scouts, various school, sports, part – time jobs, reading and the like are doing just fine.
Do video games and games played on smartphones NOT count as play? Because if they do count, I would offer that kids today play more than I did as a child of the '60s and '70s.
The article is quiet concerning screen-based games as play. Why? Is there a quality of that kind of play that is unfulfilling? If so, why is this not unpacked and compared against more fulfilling types of play? Perhaps we need a definition of what actually constitutes play for kids and what doesn't.
For instance, is it only group play that counts? Play that involves movement and running around? Would playing a board game count as play?
Not sure what to make of this article in light of this. Can we get further insights that address the issue of video games and what constitutes fuilfilling play for children and teens?
It seems important to me that video games are designed (usually by adults) and typically prompt the player to pursue pre-determined paths for structured rewards (and / or in avoidance of punishments). It’s a kind of play, but it’s not free play.
That may be the case for many games, but I would say that a large percentage of video games and computer games do not follow that paradigm and are more open/free than not.
Video games are just another tool for the self-proclaimed overlords to collect your data so they can control and manipulate you. The game is literally capturing how the player problem solves and handles conflict while destroying mental health through instant gratification. I would never let my child play video games. Period.
Yes. It was exactly what I was thinking about when I was reading the article.
In a past children were preparing exactly for a challenges of the past when they were playing.
Nowadays when they play e.g. Minecraft don't they establish new skills for a new environment of the 21st century (autonomy, competence and relatedness)?
PS My commentary doesn't mean I lower an importance of the real-world interactions in children (and adults though).
Your description of video games is also a description of sports. Do you also oppose kids playing sports against each other?
I oppose neither of them. But neither of them is "free play" -- they are both "organized play." This is definitional, not oppositional. :)
I’m no expert, just a parent and grandparent. The immediate response to your question that came to mind is that play is a necessary part of helping the young (both humans and other mammals) learn to navigate the REAL world with their peers. Simulations, while maybe valuable in developing decision-making skills, can never be the sole substitute for real life play.
I would agree that video games can't constitute the entirely of play, just as playing nothing but wiffleball in the backyard can't either.
But that distinction isn't being made in the article. If we consider video games play, then kids today are getting plenty of play. VARIETY of play is a different issue.
As for limitations of video games, the sheer breadth of them available offers a plethora of touch points for cognitive and neurological growth, certainly more than a child would receive who lacks access to them. Again, it's a question as to why the article doesn't talk about this.
The article states that play is considered free play when no adult is directing it. My impression as a parent is that video games become problematic because they over stimulate the child's brain but the body isn't expelling any energy. Which creates a strung out and frustrated kid. Also, it's not always the video game, it's what the video game is replacing.
I found this on Peter Gray's Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/petergray/p/2-what-exactly-is-this-thing-we-call?r=33463&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Unfortunately, that does not explicitly state whether video games are considered play or not. However, by the defining terms of play Gray provides, the answer would be yes, video games are play.
And if that is so, then I reject the conclusion that kids don't get enough play, because kids today play a heck of a lot of video games.
Leonard Sax wrote a good book on this topic several years back, Boys Adrift. He was very concerned about the effect of video games on boys in particular.
This is one of his quotes from the book. He makes a real case for why video games are generally destructive for kids, and boys even moreso. You have to look at his book references to get specific research articles.
“The destructive effects of video games are not on boys' cognitive abilities or their reaction times, but on there motivation and their connectedness with the real world.”
This. So many really bright boys apply their intelligence to things like building Turing machines in Minecraft or working out how to beat Mario games without jumping. These things are cool, but ultimately useless. There is a big opportunity cost for society here...
Free range parenting is where it’s at. Kids are happier and it makes a parent’s job so much easier not worrying that you need to be monitoring the little goblins all day.
Yes..though we are literally free range- on 70 acres 15 miles outside of town and we worry that our kids don't get enough opportunities to play with other kids, bike to get a drink etc. They are definitely the happiest when we RV and can zoom around on their bikes, meeting new kids, etc.
That's the trick. My friends who would prefer to raise freer kids are stuck with the problem that the *other* kids aren't allowed out. So it can be lonely.
I've heard about how frustrating that can be, when every other kid is at back to back sports practices and you said no. I certainly feel lucky that we don't deal with that.
I’m betting you don’t have kids.
I have two
There's a critical piece missing from this analysis. Free to roam sounds great in theory but differences in family values and access to technology is the major impediment. Most kids in the neighborhood carry "online" with them at all times while in the "real world". I don't need my kid climbing trees with the neighbor kid who's got a phone so they can look at porn from the treetops. I suppose I can "supervise their free play" but the supervision would seem to defeat the purpose. On the other hand, try convincing all the parents in the organized neighborhood play group to ban tech from the group. It's much harder than it seems.
Perhaps I’ve just been fortunate to find other families with similar concerns and values in our neighborhood, but at least for our family, it’s been reasonably easy to connect with other folks within walking distance in our suburb who also limit access to technology and want their children to play. If you’re striking out with people you know personally, perhaps reach out (using social media!) for families in your neighborhood with similar concerns?
So true. I've been a teacher at my children's school and there are very few children that I would feel comfortable allowing my kids to roam with.
Playing a video game provides autonomy and competency, but, depending on the type of game, can lack opportunity for relatedness. If you have ever put on a pretend theatrical show with your friends or gone on an adventure in a real place, you will understand that video games are very different from in-person play in the real world. In my opinion, they don’t prepare children for dealing with as many of the real situations they are going to encounter as they grow as does actually playing in the world with other flesh and blood children with whom they can physically interact.
My mother was born in 1936. She tells countless stories of playing with her friends in inner-city Detroit. Those kids played in ways kids today wouldn’t even imagine. They had fun, they explored, they learned how to deal with all sorts of people and situations, and they did it in the real world in which they were going to have to live and survive as adults. Their play prepared them for their futures. They play arranged for my young relatives doesn’t seem as if it is giving them much true life experience. They play organized sports in which problems of all sorts are solved by the coaches. My mom, and also myself, played unorganized sports where conflicts were solved by the children. Kids should have opportunities to play both, in my ideal world.
I agree with Dr. Gray that not allowing children to play unsupervised is doing them harm. I saw the difference in my young relatives when the schools stopped offering recess: it was abrupt and negative. I don’t know how the powers that be can think removing free play from children’s lives can be beneficial. Our children are dying. Even if it’s still just a correlation between lack of free play and the deteriorating mental health of our children, allowing them to play on their own as they themselves feel they need to do is an easy treatment to try.
Me and my buddies regularly left school grounds in the fourth grade during recess. We hung out in an abandoned shack on the nearby farm in rural north Louisiana. Obviously, this isn’t the answer, but it sticks with me 50 years later as a great adventure. When I tell kids about it now, they are amazed.
I was fortunate enough to send all three of my kids to a Waldorf school. In fact, we moved out of state so that they could go to a really good one, and I could be the Administrator (like a principal) there. We also jettisoned our television, which was truly the best thing (other than loving our kids as fully as possible) we ever did as parents. I write about that here: https://marypoindextermclaughlin.substack.com/p/best-thing-we-ever-did-as-parents
Waldorf has its flaws, but the education is BASED on childhood play, which is essential. And for those who ask, "aren't video games play?" I would say. yes, that's a type of play, but not the kind that calms the nervous system and nourishes the imagination.
In my experience, it's the interaction with real, live elements (earth, water, trees, sky, etc.) and human beings that is inherently healing/calming. I have zero data to back that up, btw. I'm making observations from witnessing my own children and the children at the Waldorf school, vs. those who spent much of their childhoods in front of video games.
The health benefits of a walk in the woods are becoming more widely known: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/7-amazing-health-benefits-walking-the-woods-you-probably-dont-know.html
Thank you for introducing me to Peter Gray's substack! This is a topic that I find so important and one that I try to support in my area as an educator. Kids need more free play to develop critical shared imagination skills which are a building block for positive social skills. Schools need to get back to supporting more free play along with getting computers out of the hands of kids all day at school!
Absolutely! I remember a few years ago reading an article about the disappearance of kitchens in kindergarten classrooms. It's not a zero sum situation, we can play and learn.
I’m 100% all about free play. What I don’t see in this and similar articles I’ve read by both Jonathan and Peter is a recognition and analysis of WHY parents are making these choices.
As a working mom, I’m constantly bombarded with messaging that my job is to keep my children safe and protected from every possible danger. The moment I allow my older child to walk around the block unsupervised, I get harassed by neighbors who threaten to call the police, who are mandated reporters who must report me to CPS for suspected child neglect. My upper-elementary-age child’s summer camp requires parents to walk into the park district building and sign them in daily; I can’t even just drop them at the door this year, because there has to be a direct handoff between the parent and the camp staff. This means that I must park, get my older and younger child out of the car, walk them inside and upstairs, and sign a paper, before returning to my car with my younger child and dropping them off at daycare. Children apparently can’t be trusted to enter a building and find the camp room without adult supervision. It’s truly insane. I work from home full time and would happily have my older child home during the summer, but they would be bored out of their mind, because all of their friends’ parents are working, so their friends are at summer camp. (Younger child, meanwhile, is too young to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them and that mommy needs to work, so having them home isn’t an option; we have them in a very play-focused daycare setting.) We regularly have neighbors and friends over for child-directed play after camp or school or on weekends, but these have to be organized by parents because the children (fortunately!) do not have cell phones or email and everyone’s schedule is dependent upon the parents’ work schedules. We want to give our children more independence, but without organized support from the community, it feels like we are swimming against a very strong current!
I couldn't have said it better myself. We are in exactly the same boat. Last year I dropped my 8 year old son off at the front door of his camp building (it's a small museum, and I'd walked him in the day before so he knew where to go), as no explicit rules around drop-off were supplied. That night, the camp sent a stern email to all the camp parents admonishing those who had dropped off at the door, and that we had to walk them all the way to their specific room. This has a two-fold detrimental effect:
- Robs my child of the independence of finding his way around
- Adds an extra 10 minutes to an already busy morning rushing to work while dropping off multiple kids
How can we achieve this community support to allow kids more independence?
This is so ridiculous! It’s just infuriating. We have dealt with similar stuff.
I live in a big city and most people now raise their children (if they choose to have any) in small condos because they could never afford to buy or even rent a house. I dread to think how it will effect their children’s mental health, especially when combined with all of the other social ills from which our society suffers.
I am on the cusp of millennial/ gen-z and think we have been primed to be over protective of our children because we lack the ability to regulate ourselves due to lack of socialization. Besides technology, smaller family sizes over multiple generations has played a huge role...most of my friends have one sibling and a couple of cousins that they don’t really know or live close to. As adults, they don’t have any family to help them if they are in need of financial help or become ill, leading to more depression, stress and anxiety. They don’t want more than one child because of the financial cost and lack of social support needed to raise children, so it becomes a compounding problem.
Today, children are often without siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents or even fathers/ mothers in their lives. Plus no religion or connection to a culture that gives them a sense of stable identity or familial-like community. Who can they play with besides AI? I can’t help but think all of our social ills will get worse.
Fewer children and the lack of available peers to play with is a huge part of the problem. Parents confronted by this either fall into organized play/sports or they are left with almost no other options.
We ran into this problem of the very few children around us being in sports by perceived necessity, which made spontaneously play impossible because the other kids were all loaded up into multiple organized sports. The upshot was that we had to be in organized play/sports too or else our son had no other guarantee of playing with peers at all.
Also there is a lot of pressure on parents to "keep up with the Joneses", except the Joneses have their kids in after school tutoring, martial arts, soccer, gymnastics etc. The moms are comparing themselves to their mom friends online constantly.
😔 You bring up some great points. We lived in an apartment for one year and it was terrible for everyone's health even with three flights of stairs all the time!! It saddens me that my kids essentially have no cousins/aunts/uncles. Everyone visits once a year or so.
This is splendid. When I was a kid things were quite different. After my first day at school, aged five, I was expected to walk myself there and back, and it was about half a mile away (not always fun as shorts were mandated, not long trousers, and in the winter our legs would be red with cold). I was allowed to go out and play with my friends in the evening, and once we had bicycles, we really had a lot of freedom. Now this was in a Wiltshire village in the early sixties, so paedophilia hadn't been invented then! (I know, but there was no obsession with it.) I think everyone knew everyone else, so we couldn't get up to much naughtiness without word getting back to our parents. A little older and we could pack some sandwiches and set off on an all-day bike ride, and all before starting secondary school.
Now I've had my issues, but mostly in reaction to external circumstances. How much worse would they have been without that childhood experience of making my own adventures, co-operating with my chums and resolving our arguments (occasional) between ourselves? I don't see how a child today could do that, if living in a city, and that's disregarding the nanny state prosecuting parents who even try to give their child a little responsibility.
Your experience brings up an interesting idea. I suppose most of the reason children aren't afforded very much freedom anymore is that their parents don't know the neighbors.