In a new interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie, released Tuesday, Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College explains how desperately children need to engage in free play to thrive and develop survival skills — and that unfortunately in our modern, school-centric, parent-hovering world, that’s one thing they can’t do.
Children have been playing unsupervised since the beginning of time
Gray has made it his life’s work to study the relationship between children and play. He wrote a book about it called Free to Learn. Through interviews with anthropologists and research going back several centuries, Gray believes a staple for healthy children who are able to thrive as adults and solve problems independently is directly proportional to how much unstructured, free play they’ve experienced.
He says even back in the “hunter-gatherer” era, children were playing, largely without adult supervision, from the time they were four until their early teen years. “Children are biologically designed to do this. It’s as important to them as eating,” he tells Gillespie. Even in the early half of the 20th century when child labor had finally dissipated but schools had not become quite as mainstream, children were happy and thriving because they were allowed to play with children of all ages, in a “child-chosen, child-directed” activity.
One of the things adults may not realize is that play is not wasted time; play does not just promote learning, play is learning. “Throughout time and across cultures,” Gray says, “children play more than any other mammals,” largely because they have so much more to learn — language, building, getting along with peers, learning how to control emotions. Children play in a way that promotes learning how to deal with those issues.
The current school structure removes play
Though it’s difficult to quantify, Gray cites statistics that show, over the last half of the 20th century, depression, suicide and other forms of mental illness have increased, in a linear fashion, regardless of culture (whether during wartime or not). In short: He thinks, as school has increased and play has decreased, kids have become less happy.
Not only have kids become less happy, but they’ve also become less able to solve their problems in college or early adulthood. Gray points to the myriad of cases on college campuses where kids can hardly seem to bear getting low grades, or solve relational disputes, without the intervention of their parents or another adult.
What has taken the place of play? School. Gray believes one of the tragedies of the 20th century for children is the creation of a school system, the “school industrial complex,” he calls it, which forces kids to sit still for long periods of time and has nearly done away with free play. “School has become an abnormal setting for children,” he says. “Instead of admitting that, we say the children are the problem.”
Indeed, one of Common Core’s side effects is the decline of recess in many schools and more and more boys are labeled with ADHD — something Gray thinks is tragic, because they’re likely wanting to play more, rather than sit in class for hours at a time.
“This is the natural way that children develop. When we began to take that away, children were being deprived of something that in their bones, in their gut, in every part of their DNA is driving them to do that and now they can’t do it,” Gray says. Schools have nearly killed this and forced children to learn in a way that’s largely unprecedented and unnatural.
What can adults do?
Gray presents a clear two-fold, school-related answer to this problem, and a third solution between the lines.
First, he says it’s obvious kids should simply be allowed to play more in schools. There’s no reason, especially after school, kids couldn’t just be let loose on the playground, to free play as they desire.
Second, Gray says homeschooling, or schools that allow lots of unstructured play, like Sudbury Valley, are a boon to society. (I homeschool my four kids, in part, because they have so much more time to play and explore what they love.) This is also one of the many reasons homeschooling in the U.S. is on the rise, and has been for the last decade.
Finally, the third solution, which Gray doesn’t quite articulate but hints at: Parents need to allow their kids more play. Instead of giving into society’s demands that every child must be involved in five extracurricular activities at a time and a parent must know where a child is every moment of the day, let him play, unstructured, mostly unsupervised, with his peers. Gray says you’ll be surprised at how he solves his problems and comes home a happier kid.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
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