Parents: Keep Out!

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Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. A plane goes down somewhere in the Pacific. The survivors, stranded on a deserted island, are a group of schoolboys. At first, they celebrate their newfound escape from adult supervision, playing on the beach. Then they organize. They elect one of the boys, Ralph, as their chief. Ralph and several others get a fire going. But soon, the boys begin resisting Ralph's efforts to lead them. The boys assigned to watch over the fire get distracted and the fire goes out. They become paranoid and stoke each other's fears of a beast they're convinced is stalking the island. They split into warring factions and begin attacking one another. Three of them die. This is the story told in the 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. It was written by an English school teacher named William Golding, and it reflected his harsh view of humans in general and children in particular. The novel ends when a British naval officer lands on the island and finds the children in a ragged, feral state. The novel entered the cultural consciousness as a warning. Without rules, systems, and adult supervision, children left alone would descend into chaos. As with many generalizations, there is some truth to this. A multitude of studies suggest kids thrive when they have stability. Chaotic and unpredictable environments can bring out the worst in us. But today we explore whether many societies have taken William Golding's warning too much to heart. If some supervision of children is a good thing, lots of parents, teachers, and school administrators seem to think, more is always better. When more is less and less is more, this week on Hidden Brain. When you're first learning to swim, it's not a good idea to be pushed into very deep water. You could drown. But it's also not a very good idea to simply waddle around in the shallow. You'll never learn to swim. If you're a parent or a teacher, you're constantly asking yourself how to balance risk and safety for the kids in your care. Tip too far in one direction, and you can put children in danger. Go too far in the other, and you deprive kids of the joy and power of exploration. At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies how the balance between exploration and safety has changed for many children, and the effects this has on their minds. Peter Gray, welcome to Hidden Brain.



Peter Gray: I'm very happy to be here.



Shankar Vedantam: Peter, you were once at a pop-up event where the organizers provided kids with various materials, including twigs and tree branches, old boards, hammers, nails. Paint me a picture of the scene, and tell me what happened.



Peter Gray: Yeah, so there were two young children, maybe around six years old, very happily taking a couple of some of the very narrow boards and laying them out on the grass, and walking along them like they were walking on a tightrope, and pretending that this was a very narrow bridge and there were crocodiles on either side. And it was a very imaginative game. They were clearly having a lot of fun. And the dad, I assume it was the dad, at least of one of the two, came over and said, that's not what you're supposed to do with the boards. We're supposed to be building something with the boards. There's, see, there's hammer and nails here. And then he proceeded to take the boards and to start showing the children how to pound with hammer and nails. And what I observed is that children suddenly changed from really very happy and playful to quite bored as they watched their father show them how to pound nails into boards.



Shankar Vedantam: There was another time, Peter, when a sixth grade teacher told you about a game that her students had invented during the COVID pandemic.



Shankar Vedantam: What was this game?



Peter Gray: She was feeling very bad for her sixth graders. They're still children, really. You know, they're 11 and 12 years old at most, and they're indoors all the school day. They don't have any recess at all. So she thought, well, wouldn't it be nice if I at least gave them a half an hour to play before school starts? Some of them arrived early anyway, and it turns out they arrived eagerly early when she provided that play opportunity. So she let them play in the ways that they wanted to play. And one of the games that they played, this was after COVID, was called something like infection, or maybe it was called COVID, something like that. And some of the children were infected, and if they touched somebody, you became infected and might die. And others were called vaccine, and they could prevent you from dying by coming and touching you. It was quite an imaginative game. I have no idea how they developed, but the teacher said they were clearly having a lot of fun with that, but then one of the school administrators observed that and she said, no, we can't have games like that going on. We can't have people pretending to die. I've heard of many stories where recesses have been very much curtailed and limited because of rules about what you can and cannot do in play.



Shankar Vedantam: Peter noticed something similar in his own life. When his son was little, both of them took part in something called a Pinewood Derby.



Peter Gray: Yeah, so this was designed to promote bonding between fathers and their sons, and the boys were about eight years old at this time. And the way it works is each father-son pair is given a kit that includes a piece of very soft pinewood, about seven inches long and wheels that can be attached to it. And the idea is to carve the wood into something that looks like a race car and to attach the wheels. And then everybody brings them back to the next meeting of the group and you race them down a slope. My interpretation of this was this was an opportunity for children to do something a little bit risky, using a knife to carve the soft wood. And for fathers to help out, and that's the way we did it. And I was very proud of it. He was proud of it. He painted it up himself, and I showed him how to attach the wheels on, and he did that. So I played a role kind of showing him how to do things. But then when we showed up, all the other cars were beautifully crested. They were just so smooth, perfectly painted. And my son and I, we just almost left. We didn't even want, his looked like it was made by an eight-year-old, right?



Shankar Vedantam: Yeah, and I'm assuming the car probably didn't run as smoothly as some of the other cars that had the superior craftsmanship of it.



Peter Gray: It did not run as smoothly as the others. And I think the others refrained from laughing at us, but we were embarrassed.



Shankar Vedantam: So there's a common pattern to all of these stories, Peter. A number of years ago, you began taking notice of what adults are doing when they interact with kids. What did you notice?



Peter Gray: In many ways, adults have taken over children's lives.



Peter Gray: I think in some sense, with good intentions, there's a lot of promotion of the idea that parents should be very much involved with their children's lives, that parents are expected almost these days, much more so than in the past, to kind of be teachers to their children, as well as comforters and nurturers and so on. And I think the cost of that has been that it takes away from children's own initiative, from children's own opportunities to figure things out for themselves and learn how to solve problems.



Shankar Vedantam: You write that children perceive adults as potential enforcers of safety, solvers of conflicts, and audiences for whining. And this perception invites the children to act unsafely, to squabble, and to whine. Expand on that. Tell me what you mean.



Peter Gray: In my experience, children are actually take responsibility when there's no adults around. That's part of the advantage of there being no adults around. They have to take responsibility. If there's no adults there to tell you what to do, you've got to kind of say, well, is this safe or not safe? Is this a reasonable thing to do or not? And children are pretty good at that. But when there's adults around, at least in this day and age, they kind of assume the adults are responsible for deciding if it's safe or not. The adults are responsible. If somebody is teasing you, instead of for you to figure out, what am I going to do about this person who's teasing me? You go and tell the adult. So even just the mere presence of adults influences the way children play.



Shankar Vedantam: When kids are left to themselves, they don't automatically become rule breakers. That's the way it may seem from a grown up perspective. But really, Peter says, when kids play by themselves, they learn to become rule inventors. Peter learned this at a family gathering when a couple of 10-year-old girls invited him to join their game of Scrabble.



Peter Gray: I kind of assumed, well, this is an opportunity for me to sort of teach them about Scrabble. I'm pretty good at Scrabble, and I'm sure they're novices. And I sat down to play Scrabble with them and started to explain the rules. But they had played the game before and went right into a game that was modeled after Scrabble, but it had their own rules. So instead of having to play an actual word, they could play any kind of a nonsense word as long as it sounded like a word. And the longer and sillier it sounded, the better. They had no interest in keeping score. They were just having a great time playing nonsense words. And then they would once and a while challenge the other person, what's the meaning of this? And then the other one would pretend to look it up in the dictionary and cite a very funny meaning that fit a little bit with the way it sounded. And I just sat back after a little bit of protesting, hey, this is at Scrabble, let's really play Scrabble. I just finally sat back and I realized, hey, these girls are really playing. My way of playing Scrabble is a little bit more like work than like play.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand your son Scott gave you something of a window into the effects that adults can have on children. He was not a fan of elementary school, and perhaps that's putting it mildly.



Peter Gray: Putting it mildly is correct. He hated school right from the beginning, and he complained all the way from kindergarten through fourth grade. He would come home and be angry. He would say, you know, they're acting like I'm a puppet, and I'm supposed to just do what they're telling me to do, and I have no say in it. And of course, that's the way school works. And I would say to him, well, just do what they're telling you to do, you know? It's not that hard, just do it.



Shankar Vedantam: You know, all kids in some ways have conflicts with parents and teachers. And so, you know, kids are unhappy at school, they're distracted, they're bored, they talk to their friends instead of studying or paying attention in class. And, you know, they run into, they run into teachers. I mean, this is a routine part of childhood for almost all kids. What was he doing that was different? Was it actually, was it just that garden variety kind of rebellion, or was it something more than that?



Peter Gray: Yeah, I mean, his rebellion was very different from the typical, you know, naughty boy, you know, who's maybe shooting spitballs or, and so on. His rebellion was almost like a planned rebellion. It was, so just for example, when the teacher would teach him a specific way of doing arithmetic problems and how you're supposed to show your work, he would deliberately find a different way to do it. And then the teachers complained to us about that, and I asked him, so why do you do it a different way? And he said, it's because it's the only way I can make it fun. And when they were teaching about punctuation and capital letters and how to put them into sentences, he actually declared, I'm going to write now like EE. Cummings, the poet, and put punctuation and capitals wherever I please. So that was him. Ultimately, it led to a meeting in the principal's office in which his teacher, the principal, assistant principal, school psychologist, another psychologist called from outside, his mom and me were all there to tell him in no uncertain terms that he had to follow the rules of the school. And he, nine years old, looked at us big adults, and he said, go to hell. Go to hell.



Shankar Vedantam: As a dad, Peter knew something had to change. But as a researcher, he started to ask himself, is it possible the problem was not with kids like Scott, but with adults like himself? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When it comes to rearing happy and healthy children, when should we lend a helping hand, and when should we step away and let kids figure out things for themselves? At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies what adults today do and what they ought to do to maximize the well-being of children. He says an important question parents, teachers, and school administrators should ask themselves when it comes to rules and structure is how much is too much? Peter, you decided to start your research by delving into what anthropologists have found about child rearing practices throughout human history. What was the typical pattern before modern times?



Peter Gray: Yes, so I began to get interested in how children historically have acquired the culture that they're growing up in, learning from others what you need to know to succeed in that culture eventually as an adult. And I'm an evolutionary psychologist, so I look at human nature from the perspective of Darwinian evolution. If you look at human nature from that perspective, you automatically become interested in hunter-gatherers because we were all hunter-gatherers during 99% or so of our biological evolution. And as you will undoubtedly know, there have been hunter-gatherers in isolated parts of the world who, at least into the middle to even late 20th century, were still living in a rather pristine hunter-gatherer way of life. And there were anthropologists who had trekked out into those areas to make contact with them and study them. And I began to read what I could of such work. And ultimately, along with a graduate student, surveyed a group of anthropologists who had studied various different groups of hunter-gathers in different parts of the world to find out from them, what are children's lives like in the culture that they observe? What's the relationship between adults and children? And what I found in every case, seven different cultures on three different continents, was that the children were free to play and explore pretty much all day long. They might be asked to do little chores, but no such thing as school. You know, the adults might say, don't eat these mushrooms, they're poisonous. They would point out things that are dangerous. But the assumption was that children would learn by observing, by exploring, by playing. And when I asked the anthropologist, well, what did the children play at? They talked about play that seemed to be, in essentially every case, modeled after the activities that were important to the culture in which they were growing up. So in a culture where the men hunt big game, the little boys and middle-sized boys, too, were playing at hunting big game. In a culture where they used dugout canoes, the kids were playing with dugout canoes, and so on and so forth. They played at the games and music and art of the culture. And not because anybody was requiring them to do so, but because it just seemed apparently natural for them to do that. And what the anthropologist pointed out is they would play at these things, and eventually they were actually doing these things. The play would merge into adult-like activity. So there was no real difference between what you're doing when you're playing and what you're doing when you're an adult actually doing this thing that you were playing at before. So this was very interesting to me.



Shankar Vedantam: And of course, the children would have been hanging out with a range of other children, probably of different ages. Presumably, they would be learning not just from children who are exactly their own age but from children who are a little older, and those children might have learned things from children who are a little older than them.



Peter Gray: That's a very important observation that these are all banned cultures, so they're relatively small. Even if you wanted to just hang out with kids your own age, there wouldn't be enough. So you're always playing with kids who are both older and younger than yourself. So a typical play group might be kids from age 4 to 12 or age 8 to 16, all playing together. But when children are playing across age, the younger children are always learning from the older children. They're being boosted up to higher levels of activity. And the older children are in very important ways learning from younger children. They're learning how to be leaders. They're learning how to be caretakers. They're learning in some sense how to be teachers as they're explaining to the younger children how to do whatever it is that they're doing.



Shankar Vedantam: So your research suggests that when adults leave children alone to play and learn and socialize in their own way, kids become more likely to develop a range of skills. Like what, Peter?



Peter Gray: I could really run through all of the basic skills that children have to develop in any culture in order to succeed. These are social skills. These are the skills of knowing how to initiate an activity and direct that activity, problem-solving skills. Children practice these skills when they're playing and when they're playing with other children. When adults are around, adults step in and solve the problems for the children. The adults tell them how to play, and that children, therefore, are not learning how to take initiative, not learning how to create rules for themselves, not learning how to negotiate with other children to solve problems. If there's always an adult there, doing it for them.



Shankar Vedantam: And in some ways, I suppose all of this points back to the central thing that children need to learn, which is to learn to be independent. Perhaps we're taking that away from them.



Peter Gray: That's well put, because again, from an evolutionary perspective, what do we even have this long period of childhood? What is the purpose of the juvenile period, as we would say, in all mammals? It is to develop the skills that allow you to become increasingly independent. But the only way you can develop those skills is by being allowed increasing amounts of independence as you are growing older from year to year. That used to occur in our culture. That was certainly true when I was a child many, many decades ago, and it was even true when my son was a child fewer decades ago. But today, we are not allowing children to do the things that they should be doing, that they're capable of doing, for a variety of reasons. But the end result is that children are more or less supervised, directed, monitored, corrected all the time.



Shankar Vedantam: You say that when children spend a lot of time in the company of adults, they are less likely to participate in what you call authentic communication. And they're more likely to do this when they're in the company of other children. What do you mean by this term, Peter?



Peter Gray: Let me refer to a research study that was done some time ago. These researchers recorded children's voices while they were playing with other children. These were young children, about probably five or six years old. And then also recorded them when they were in class talking with their teacher, and also recorded them when they were just sitting around having lunch. When they were playing, the language was far more sophisticated, far more real, far more authentic than in any other situation. Because when you're playing with other kids, you're constantly negotiating, you know? Maybe picture a group of young children playing that they're going to the king's ball. And, you know, who's going to marry the prince? And so then there's a discussion about that. Or who gets to wear this beautiful set of necklaces that you find in the dress-up corner of the kindergarten room? And so there's constant, they spend more time negotiating and discussing what they're doing than actually playing it out, which is a good thing, because that's how you think of what they're learning when they do that. They're learning this incredibly important skill of being able to use words, language to decide mutually what they're doing as a group. How are we going to play this game?



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



Peter Gray: Well, you know, sometimes it's just ridiculous. You'll hear a parent or an adult say to a child, so, Billy, what color is that? Oh my gosh. This is so patronizing. You know, it's as if the purpose of the discussion is always kind of pedantic to try to teach the child something rather than an actual authentic back and forth discussion.



Shankar Vedantam: And I suppose also there is some pressure that parents and teachers feel to give positive feedback. So when, you know, the four-year-old comes back with a scribble on a page, there is some pressure to say this is a masterpiece.



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



Shankar Vedantam: You also say that in the course of playing, children come to understand that rules, in fact, are invented things. They are things that have been invented by other people and that they can be modified and changed. And it's harder to do that if you believe that rules are sacrosanct and handed down to you by an all-powerful adult.



Peter Gray: One way to think about this is the difference between, let's say, little league baseball, a pickup game of baseball, the way we used to play it when I was a kid. There would be a bunch of kids who would show up in the vacant lot, and there was never 18 players. We had to kind of figure out how we're going to make up the sides. We had to create ground rules. Anything, you know, hit in the direction of those windows over there, that's an automatic out and so on. Have to pitch soft to little Timmy. We'd make up all the rules so there'd be fun for everybody and fair for everybody. This is just the way kids always play. Little league, you play by the official rules of baseball. You don't vary them. You just do it. And there's adults there making sure you follow those rules.



Shankar Vedantam: You say that one reason adults are less inclined to give children the freedom they used to have is that adults are increasingly concerned about their children's safety. When did this fear arise, Peter, and how does it affect the lives of children?



Peter Gray: So when I was a kid, many decades ago, the regular song of parents was, get out of the house, get out of the house, I don't want you around. So kids were outdoors, and they'd find one another, and they'd play with one another. This was not just the 1950s and 1960s America. This is the way hunter-gatherer children played, as I described before. This is generally the way children throughout the world have played. And so this is a new thing, in some sense, in the history of the world, where we are not allowing children independent activity away from adults. We've got adults around them all the time.



Shankar Vedantam: But talk a little bit about sort of the concern for safety and sort of the concern that many parents have, that if they were to give kids the kind of freedom that they had before, that bad things could happen to them.



Peter Gray: Yeah, so if you ask parents why they're not allowing their children outside, you'll get a variety of answers. Some of them are quite legitimate. One of them is, well, there's nobody else outside, and so my child goes outside to play and there's nobody to play with. Or, you know, I've heard of this case recently in our neighborhood where somebody let their child out to play with other children and somebody called the police, and then protective services arrived. So the culture has changed such that you are considered to be a negligent parent if you allow your child outside without observing that child. Now, why did the culture change? And I think that the biggest change occurred in the 1980s. There were a couple of cases of young boys, in both cases they were six years old. One of these instances occurred actually in 1979 and the other in 1981, who were taken by a stranger on the street and ultimately murdered. This is, of course, a very rare event. And because it's rare, it made headlines. It was in the news all the time. And it led to programs trying to protect, make sure that this doesn't happen again. And among those programs was to put pictures on milk cartons of missing children. And the assumption was that when you were eating your breakfast cereal and looking at this milk carton, that these missing children were people, little kids who had been snatched away by some stranger on the street. And the whole concept of stranger danger was developed. And once a person has this image in their head, it's hard to get it out of your head. So it leads to a belief that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. The truth of the matter is the world is not more dangerous today than it was decades ago.



Shankar Vedantam: You know, it's also the case that families are having fewer children today. This is not just in the United States. It's in many countries around the world. And I'm not necessarily suggesting that parents who have many kids love their children any less than parents who have few kids. But it is certainly the case that I think parents direct more attention to their kids now, in part because families are smaller, and that's driven by demographic and economic changes that are probably well beyond the control of any individual.



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



Shankar Vedantam: You say that another reason adults have intruded in their children's lives is that increasingly many adults feel the need to prepare children for a very competitive world. Talk about this idea, Peter.



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



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



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



Shankar Vedantam: Can you tell me a little bit about that? What is the evidence?



Peter Gray: So, let me begin with just the theoretical part. Play makes children happy. We shouldn't have to prove that, right? I mean, play is what makes children happy. It's also the case in other kinds of independent activities. Children feel good, they feel proud, when they can do things by themselves. You know, it gives you a sense of confidence and so on. So, you take that away from children and write off, they're going to be less happy. And famous play researcher, Brian Sutton Smith, who died a few years ago, and he used to say, the opposite of play is depression. And I think in a sense, he's right, that if you take away play from people, they're going to be depressed. But in addition to that, what research shows is that when children are playing and doing other things independently, they are acquiring the skills and the sense of agency, the sense of what psychologists call an internal locus of control that leads them to recognize that they can solve problems. They can deal with the bumps in the road of life. You're dealing with that when you're playing. Somebody is bullying you a little bit, and instead of a parent or an adult solving the problem, you figure out how to solve that problem, or you get hurt and you figure out what to do about it, or you get lost and you find your way home. All of these are the kinds of experiences that children throughout history have always experienced, and it's how they learn, I can deal with problems, I don't have to be afraid of the world, because I can solve these problems. But if we're not allowing children to do that, they don't develop this internal sense of control. That sets you up to be anxious, and if it goes too far, it sets you up to be depressed, a sense of hopelessness about the world. So those are the theoretical reasons. The empirical reasons come from a whole range of other kinds of studies that show that those children who do have more opportunity for independent play are doing better psychologically than those who have less.



Shankar Vedantam: Do you think there are any positives, Peter, to the increased involvement of adults in children's lives?



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



Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, how to balance the imperatives of exploration and safety? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Peter Gray is a psychologist at Boston College. He's the author of Free to Learn, Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Peter, you've laid out some of the problems that arise from our present-day approach to parenting and education. You say that we can get a glimpse of what a healthier culture of childhood would look like by turning to the past. What was your own childhood like, Peter?



Peter Gray: I was a kid in the 1950s, which was a time there were a lot of kids. We moved a lot, but I found I made friends very quickly because all I had to do was to go outdoors and I would find other kids. And certainly by the time I started school, I was walking to school by myself, as was everybody else.



Shankar Vedantam: When Peter turned five, his family moved from Minneapolis to a small town in southern Minnesota. Job number one for little Peter, find new friends.



Peter Gray: I remember my mother saying, well, why don't you just go door to door, knock on the doors, and ask if there are any children there your age. So I did that all by myself, went door to door. And it turns out that right across the street, the mom came to the door and I said, do you have any children who are about my age? And she said, yes, yes, I've got a daughter, Ruby Lu. And so Ruby Lu came to the door and we went out to play. And Ruby Lu very quickly became my best friend.



Shankar Vedantam: Tell me a little bit about her. What would you do together?



Peter Gray: So Ruby Lu was a little bit older than me. She started school before I did, but it's partly just the difference in when her birthday was. And she was kind of bolder than I was. I was kind of a shy kid in some ways, a little bit afraid of heights and so on. But she was a great tree climber. She showed me how to climb the trees, and she would challenge me to climb higher and higher in the trees. I think the story that I remember best is that she had a bicycle. I at that point did not have a bicycle, and I was really eager to learn how to ride a bicycle. So she said, well, I'll teach you how to ride a bicycle. So it turns out the street between our houses was on a small slope. And so she said, well, the easiest way to learn how to ride a bicycle is start at the top of the slope and give yourself a push. And then you just start pedaling and go as far as you can go, and see if you can go a little farther every time. What wonderful instructions for how to ride a bicycle. And so I did that. And her bike was a girl's bike, which made it easier to learn because I didn't have to swing my leg up over that bar. And so she taught me how to ride a bicycle. Then once I could ride a bicycle, I convinced my parents to buy me a second hand bike. She and I would take bicycle trips all around town. And my mother said, it's fine for me. I could buy myself. I had to stay within the town limits on the bike. But with Ruby Lu, it would be okay to go wherever we wanted, because she assumed Ruby Lu was wiser and a little older and smarter than I was. I think she was. And we could go places together.



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



Peter Gray: Yeah, so the kids were all into baseball there. And we would just get together whenever we could on the vacant lot, whatever kids were around, and we'd create our own baseball games. And so each team had to sort of choose their own player who would kind of be the coach, who would decide who's going to play what positions and so on and so forth. And for some reason, even though I was one of the youngest players, the players chose me on my team to be the coach. So that meant that I was the one who had to remind people when the games were. I had to decide who was going to pitch. Everybody wanted to pitch. So I had to figure out some rotating way to please everybody. I mean, the biggest challenge, of course, you have in a situation like this is you want everybody to stay on the team. You want to keep everybody happy. And it was kind of a very much an adult-like responsibility to manage this team. When I was, I suppose I would have been about eight years old at that time. But there were no adults. Adults never came to these games, you know. The only adult involved was, it probably was a teenager who would be an umpire there, who would call balls and strikes and fair and foul. And that's what made it different from our pickup games.



Shankar Vedantam: I mean, it would be hard to imagine an eight or nine year old in charge of a little league baseball team today.



Peter Gray: That's right, and this is a change in our expectations. It's not a change in what people are capable of biologically, but it's in other cultures, in huster-gather cultures, you would not be surprised by something like this, that an eight-year-old could take that kind of responsibility.



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



Peter Gray: What is something that you really would like to do that you feel you could do, but you'd like to do on your own? And initiate that conversation, see what the child says. And maybe the child will say, well, you know, I'd like to be able to ride my bicycle all by myself to my friend's house. Or maybe the child will say, I'd actually like to cook dinner. But now the child is asked and the parent is having this discussion. And the idea would be to reach some kind of agreement. Well, okay, you can do this. And it may not be exactly what the child's asking for, but something that the parent thinks is okay. So that kind of breaks into this cycle where you sort of change the discussion. It's not now just about safety. It's now about balancing safety with an acknowledged value in independent activity. And an acknowledgement that what the child wants to do is actually important.



Shankar Vedantam: You say that parents can also work with other like-minded adults to make space and time for lightly supervised play. How would this work?



Peter Gray: This has actually occurred in some neighborhoods, I wish it occurred more, where some parent, or maybe more than one parent, have decided, you know, we really would like our children to have more opportunities to play without us intervening. We remember our own experiences as children and what we benefitted from play. We need to provide this for our children. How can we do it? And so one strategy is to get together with the neighbors who have kids, and you say, all right, every Saturday, we're all going to send our kids out and keep your devices inside. We're going to send you out, but they're all going out. If some of the parents are concerned about safety, we'll have one adult out there just for safety. In my opinion, ideally, that adult is a grandparent, because I find that grandparents tend to be a little less likely to intervene than parents are. But the understanding would be that that adult is there like a lifeguard on an ocean beach, only there in case there's some kind of real danger, but not to tell the children how to play or to solve minor problems. And so there are a few neighborhoods who have done that, including some that have actually got the city to close off the streets, if it's a busy street, during that period of time when it's playtime. And once the kids are playing together and they get to know one another, then they may find other ways to play during other times as well, other than just the formerly chosen one.



Shankar Vedantam: Peter says schools can also play a role in promoting play. He has been working with schools around the country to create play clubs.



Peter Gray: And what play club is, is an hour of free age-mixed play, usually in elementary schools, all the grades combine, so it's age 5 through 11, roughly, all combined, all playing together. Usually it is before school, but sometimes after school. And so this takes a little bit of effort on the part of the school. They have to have somebody there to manage it. And the teachers who monitor Play Club are advised, taught, really, not to solve little quarrels, not to tell the children how to play better, not to worry if somebody looks unhappy. The whole purpose of play is for children to learn how to solve their own problems. For the schools that have adopted this, this has been very successful.



Shankar Vedantam: So, Peter, you say that much of this boils down to a question of trust, to the willingness that adults have to trust their children that left to their own devices, they're going to spend that time in positive and productive ways. Can you talk about this idea that at its core, there's an emotional element here that if parents actually trusted their kids to do the smart thing and to do the right thing, they might be less interested in engaging or intervening constantly in their children's lives? Really, what we're talking about here is to what degree do you as a parent feel that you need to control your child? And to what degree do you feel you can trust your child to do what is good for the child themselves without you controlling? So really, ultimately, what I mean by a trustful parent is one who trusts the child's developmental processes and allows those developmental processes to occur, which really means allowing the child to play, to explore, ask questions of adults when they want to ask those questions and all of that, to do the things that children, by nature, want to do.



Shankar Vedantam: In your work, you recount a remarkable story that is a kind of real-life version of the novel Lot of the Flies. The story was unearthed by a Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman. Tell me that story.



Peter Gray: There was a real case in the 1960s of a group of schoolboys about the same age as the fictitious children in Lord of the Flies living on a Pacific island. They ranged in age from 13 to 16. And they had decided they were tired of school. They were at a boarding school, and they called it borrowing, but they basically stole a fishing boat. And they weren't really very good sailors, so they went off into the ocean aimed at another island that they wanted to get to. But a big storm came up, and they ended up shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. And nobody found them for 15 months. Unlike in Lord of the Flies, these kids took care of themselves. They did not war with one another. They recognized, you know, our lives are in danger here. They figured out how to find food. They figured out what's edible, what's not edible. They actually planted a garden. They created a garden in case they were there for a long time. They always had one child on watch for passing ships to try to flag them. One of the boys broke a leg, and the kids figured out how to set the leg to protect it, and it actually healed up. They took care of one another in a remarkable way. They survived. And so this is a story that's the exact opposite of the fiction Lord of the Flies.



Shankar Vedantam: You Peter Gray is a psychologist at Boston College. He's the author of Free to Learn, Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Peter, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.



Peter Gray: Thank you very much for having me on.



Shankar Vedantam: Do you have follow-up questions for Peter Gray about children, play, and independence? If you'd be willing to share your question with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo and send it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. 60 seconds is plenty. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, play. Play. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today with a story from our sister podcast, My Unsung Hero. It's brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Our story comes from River Adams, who uses they, them pronouns. In 1991, at the age of 19, River and their family came to the US as Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union. Though the family received a small amount of support from welfare and food stamps, it wasn't nearly enough to survive on. So River and their older sister tried to apply for jobs, but neither spoke much English.



River Adams: For the first several months, no one would hire us because, well, we couldn't pass an interview. We didn't even understand the simple questions the employers were asking. So the four of us were always hungry. Our diet consisted almost entirely of macaroni with ketchup, discounted manager's special bananas, and the cheapest cereal we could find, which was Froot Loops. But, you know, still there was never enough of these foods either. Then in the summer of 91, my sister and I were hired to work at Roy Rogers. It was a fast food chain that was very common then, and they specialized in fried chicken. And the manager who hired us, he did us a kindness just by giving us the job, because we were still, you know, really not with it. And all I remember about this man is that his name was Ed. So the work was hard, but being hungry and surrounded by all this food was harder. We couldn't afford any of it. When other workers bought their meals during breaks, we didn't eat. And I think after a while, Ed realized the financial situation we were in, and he began to help us. We worked the evening shift, so after we would close and clean the restaurant, Ed would put the leftover fried chicken into a bucket and give it to us to take home to our family. And for the first time in months, the four of us ate, we didn't go to sleep hungry, and suddenly we had hope that we would survive. Of course, we didn't understand then that Ed was breaking the rules by giving us this food. I doubt that Ed remembers us, but he is a hero in our family, and we mention his name often and with utmost warmth. I doubt he knows that these two new immigrants that he once hired and fed remember him as the first American who was kind to us. He is the man who saved us.



Shankar Vedantam: Listener River Adams of Marlboro, Massachusetts. River went on to become a pianist, medical interpreter, and author. Today's My Unsung Hero story was brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Thanks for listening. I'm Shankar Vedantam.