Raising Wildlings
Raising Wildlings
Play, Learn, Grow: Insights from Dr. Peter Gray
Prepare to be captivated by this deep dive into the world of childhood play. In our latest episode, we have the esteemed pleasure of welcoming back Dr Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College. With an impressive track record of studying play's importance, Dr Gray’s insights are sure to fascinate you as he unveils how play shapes children into responsible, creative, and socially adept individuals.
Full Show Notes 👉 https://www.raisingwildlings.com.au/blog/Play-Learn-Grow-With-Dr-Peter-Gray
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In today's episode, we are bringing back the man who has single-handedly been one of the biggest influences on our business and our homeschooling journey Dr Peter Gray. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're recording today the Kabi Kabi and Gabi Gabi people. I would like to recognize the continued connection to the land and waters of this beautiful place we call home. I also recognize Aboriginal people as the original custodians of this land and acknowledge that they have never seen its sovereignty. I'd like to pay my respects to all Gabi Gabi elders, ancestors and emerging elders and any First Nations people listening today. Hello and welcome to the Raising Wildlings podcast. I'm your host today, vicky Oliver, and if you've been a long-time listener of the podcast, you will know that our guest today has been mentioned many, many, many, many times over the course of the past five years, and not only because he was our first ever guest on our first ever episode. It's because he has changed the lives of so many people and so many of our guests recommend his work and his books, because so many of us are on that road that many people haven't travelled and his ideas are just really life changing.
Vicci Oliver:So we've invited Dr Peter Gray back, and this time I wanted to talk to him more about one of our favourite topics, which is play, and he has so much wisdom to share that we have now turned this episode into two parts.
Vicci Oliver:So today we're going to be dropping part one, and next week you'll have access to the second part of our conversation. Now, if you have been living under a rock and you don't know who Dr Peter Gray is, he's a research professor at Boston College in psychology and neuroscience, and his most recent work focuses primarily on children's natural way of learning and the value of play from an evolutionary perspective, which is something I've always been so incredibly fascinated with, and he is the author of Free to Learn. It is the number one recommended book that we have had from people that we have interviewed on the podcast, and he talks a lot about play and self-directed education. So I encourage you to grab a cuppa, settle in, and I hope you enjoy my long-awaited conversation with Dr Peter Gray. Welcome to Raising Wildlings, a podcast about parenting, alternative education and stepping into the wilderness, however that looks, with your family.
Nick Farrell:Each week, we'll be interviewing experts that truly inspire us to answer your parenting and education questions. We'll also be sharing stories from some incredible families that took the leap and are taking the road less travelled.
Vicci Oliver:Wear your hosts, vicki and Nikki from Wildlings Forest School Pop in your headphones, settle in and join us on this next adventure. Peter, thank you so much for joining us for the second time on the podcast. It's been about six or four years since we've had you on and it's still our most listen to episode and we're so grateful that you came on and shared everything that you shared with us during that episode. And we're excited to have you on because I really want to talk to you a little bit about playing, because you've started a sub-stack and you've been sharing so much of your wisdom and your ideas on play, so it's been amazing. So far. I've been really enjoying seeing it pop up in my inbox. So I wanted to start by asking you why is play so important and so fundamental for children and what is happening when cultures start to forget how to play or losing play?
Dr Peter Gray:Well, great question to start with, the play really kind of is how children develop. I mean children. If you think about it, childhood is a period of learning how to take responsibility for your life. All mammals have to learn certain things before they become completely independent. That's just part of being a mammal, and we have more to learn than any other mammal. We have a longer period of development, a longer juvenile period before we are fully adults and kind of ready to be completely independent. And so what happens during that period of partial dependence is that young mammals become gradually, increasingly independent as they develop, and some mammals do this very quickly and we do it more slowly because we have so much to develop.
Dr Peter Gray:Play is how young mammals, including our young children, develop. Play is the evolved means for this. Children naturally play at the things that they need to learn in order to be able to take control of their own lives. So if you think about the things that human beings everywhere have to learn, those are the things that children everywhere play at. They we all have to learn language, and children learn language and play. Little children learn language and play. We don't teach children their native language. Of course they have to hear it to learn it, but we don't teach it to them. They practice it.
Dr Peter Gray:They the first cooling and babbling, and it's always playful. The first words that babies use are never used to ask for anything. They're not used instrumentally. They're not learning it because they're rewarded in some way for doing it. They're just playing with it. They're playing the. They're labeling things. So we are the animal that builds things and we've built our environment. So children play at building things. They're learning how to use their opposable thumbs and the parts of the brain that can think of what they want to build and then go ahead and build it. You know, we're the animal that makes use of imagination.
Dr Peter Gray:We can think about things that aren't even there, and that allows us to plan for tomorrow, it allows us to invent things and so on. And all children everywhere, when they're free to play, play at imagination. They play at fantasy games. What would happen if there is a tiger and if there's a, if there's a troll under the bridge and the bridge is this kitchen table here and they're thinking. They're thinking in hypothetical terms. Imagination.
Dr Peter Gray:We are the animal that has to follow norms and rules, and so children, when they're playing, they're creating rules in their play and following those rules. So children and of course you know, we have to develop our fit. Like all mammals, we have to develop our physical bodies, and children develop that in play. So really, and even most, perhaps most important, we're a very social animal. We need to get along with other people in order to survive and do well in the world, and so children, almost more than anything else, want to play with other children, and that's nature's way of teaching children how to get along with one another.
Dr Peter Gray:You have to. You know, if you and I are children and we're going to play together, I've got to pay attention to your needs as well as my needs. Otherwise you will just say you know, I'm out of here, I'm going to hear my mom calling I'm going home and you're leaving me alone and that's and that's kind of the natural consequence for my not paying attention to your needs. So children are learning how, really learning how to pay attention to their playmate's needs, learning that they have to satisfy their playmate's needs as well as their own needs. And, fundamentally, when they're playing away from adults, where adults aren't solving other problems for them, adults are not telling them how to play, and so on and so forth. They're learning that. They're learning how to negotiate with playmates, how to get along with playmates. So really, if you think about it, all the basic skills that go into a satisfying life are things that children naturally practice in play.
Vicci Oliver:When you say it like that, it's undeniable how important it is, and I guess it's frustrating that we're still having to advocate so much for the ability for children to play. And one of the sections in your book called Free to Learn is titled the Power of Play Lies in Its Triviality. Can you explain what you meant by that?
Dr Peter Gray:Yeah. So we adults tend to think of play as trivial. We may not say it, but we kind of believe that that's true. Most adults do. And the reason we think it's trivial, the reason we think that it's something that we can take away from kids so that they have yet more time to study in school or to do homework or to be in adult directed activities, is because play, by definition, is something that you're not doing for some reward outside of itself. You're not doing it to get a trophy, you're not doing it to improve your resume.
Dr Peter Gray:You're not doing it for a grade in school. You're not doing it even for praise from somebody else. One way you know something's play is if you're doing it even though nobody else wants you to do it. So we adults are so oriented towards the idea that you're supposed to. We have this kind of economics model of human behavior that you do something for something. You do something to get a reward. You do something and our school system operates that way. You know you do something and then you get the reward of a high grade, or if you don't do it or don't do it well, you get a low grade punishment of that. So we kind of implicitly believe that human beings operate in accordance to reward and punishment and that's a kind of a modern belief. Hunter gatherer people didn't have that belief about human behavior. So this is a kind of a modern belief. It's part of capitalism, it's part of the way we function in modern societies.
Dr Peter Gray:I'm not necessarily arguing against this for certain aspects of adult functioning, but even for we adults. We are undercutting a lot of the idea that you know a lot of what we do. We do just because we want to do it and just because it's fun to do it. The side consequence of it is that we gain, but we're not doing it for that gain. We're not doing it because we gain from it. We're not doing it To some extent.
Dr Peter Gray:Adult play is a little bit that way. Like I say, you know, I go out bicycling every morning and I'm doing it because I really love to do it, but on the other hand I also know it's good for me and that plays a little bit of a role in my decision. When a child goes out bicycling, the child isn't necessarily thinking that way, but it's nevertheless good for the child to do it. The kinds of things that children play at are almost entirely good for the child. That's the way natural selection works. It creates instinctive drives to do things that largely, in the long run, are good for you. That doesn't mean it always works that way.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah, that's right, but it makes sense that that thing would be passed down or that you know beneficial things will make us stronger and make us happier and make us thrive as alive beings.
Dr Peter Gray:Exactly. Another way to think about this is so during the law. The idea that children need to be taught and trained by adults is, in terms of human history, is a new idea that's only really been around for a couple hundred years for most of us. Throughout most of human history, children, the idea children became educated on their own accord.
Vicci Oliver:I find this so fascinating and actually I was going to ask you that the anthropological history and hunter-gatherers and how children learned in those circumstances fascinate me so much and you write about this in your book. Sorry to interrupt, but yes, I do think this is so important for us to recognize.
Dr Peter Gray:That's right. So, children, you know we wouldn't be, we wouldn't have survived as a species were it not for the fact that children have these internal instincts and drives to pay attention to what's around them, to be curious about what's around them, to learn the information that they see is out there that's important to their survival, and, through play, to practice the kinds of skills that they see are important in the world that they're growing up in. Throughout human history, any children who didn't do this would not likely survive, or if they survive, they wouldn't be great choices as a mate and who wouldn't pass on their genes. So this is how natural selection works. Those kinds of those kinds of characteristics that lead you to do well in the culture that you're growing up in are passed along, and characteristics that don't lead you to do well tend to die out over the course of natural selection. And so certainly, those characteristics that lead you to learn what you need to know to be a fit adult in the world that you're growing up in, those characteristics would be strongly selected for.
Vicci Oliver:And so what kinds of things have you you know were there? Did they find across the world that hunter, gatherer, children or societies would say like an almost be surprised that they would ask the question about like why would you ask that about children? Or what would you do with these babies?
Dr Peter Gray:Yeah, so you know we. I did a survey many years ago with one of my graduate students of anthropologists who had studied, lived in and observed hunter, gatherer cultures in various parts of the world, and what we found was that there's very little teaching, what we would call teaching they might. They might explain to their children. You know, these mushrooms are poisonous. Stay away from them. Things that are really dangerous, that they might not. You don't want to. You don't want them to learn that by trial and error, so stay away from the poison darts and so on.
Dr Peter Gray:The yeah, but those are the those. But other than that, there's the expectation that children are going to learn on their own. But as part of that, they make it possible for children to learn on their own, first of all, in a hunter gatherer. In a hunter gatherer band, adults are not children, are not segregated away from adults, so so children can easily see what adults do and they can incorporate that into their play. The other thing that I've learned is that is that, hunter Gat, if a child wants to participate with an adult in an activity that the adult is doing, the adults generally allow the child to do that, even though it slows them down. Even the child wants to help. You know, one of the things we this is true, there's actually quite a bit of research supporting this in our culture, the toddlers really wanna help, they wanna join you in doing things, but we tend to push them away because they're not really help. You know, they just the truth is it slows us?
Dr Peter Gray:down, they're not gonna do it right and we're just gonna have to redo it and so on. So we're kind of always in a rush and we wanna do things our way, if we adults in our modern culture. So we tend to push the little kids away and then later on, when they're older and we want them to help, now they don't see it as their job to help.
Dr Peter Gray:They're no longer interested in helping, and so we have to force them to help or bribe them to help. What happens in not just hunter-gatherer cultures, but all of the more indigenous cultures, is that they welcome the toddlers who want to quote help, and because of that, the little children are growing up with the idea I'm a full member of this group, I can help. I'm part of it, I'm part of this, and by the time they're old enough where their help is really helpful, they're gladly helping, they're participating. They just assume this is part of what I do. They feel good about doing it. They feel proud about the fact that they're part of the functioning economy of the family or the band or the village or whatever it is, and so that's something that I think we could learn from indigenous people. Our children would be much more helpful around the home if we allowed them to help when they want to help, when they're little kids.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah, that's right, and it increasingly becomes a lot harder when they're older, that's right.
Vicci Oliver:My children are 11 and nine and sometimes, when they do want to help, it's incredibly frustrating. But you have to really be conscious of that, because we're not living in that society ourselves. Like I don't have that modelled to me. Like I have to be very intentional about that now, like it's a conscious choice that I have to make, as opposed to it being as the adult. This is what we do with children. Like now we have to make that really conscious decision to think, oh my gosh, yes, this is going to take me 10 times longer. Or, yes, they're going to make a mess, yes, they could do this wrong.
Vicci Oliver:Yes, this could taste really awful, whatever it is that they're helping with, but it's worth it in the long run, because if I don't do it now, then I'm never going to get any help out of them. So it's such an interesting point to make to always go back in history and have a look at what was working, still does work, because a lot of this is still happening around the world.
Vicci Oliver:It's not like all children around the world don't not every culture is a Western culture these days that there's still some places probably, where children do grow up this way?
Dr Peter Gray:Right, yes, they're definitely are.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah, one of the other really fascinating things. It is stuck with me and I'm pretty sure you said it at the conference we were at when you came to Australia and you're speaking in Gympie and you said one of the interesting thing that you keep hearing educators using. It was a phrase and you said educators keep saying that children need unstructured play and you said play isn't unstructured. This term's being used incorrectly. Is this something you still believe in and what is it that you would say about the term unstructured play?
Dr Peter Gray:Yeah. So people use the term unstructured play and I often say well, there's no such thing as unstructured play. Structured play is always structured. Play is not random activity. Play is activity that has structure to it. When you're playing, you're doing something. You're not just behaving randomly. So you're making a sandcastle, or you're building a treehouse, or you are having a sword fight, or you are imagining that there's a troll under the bridge, or you're always doing something. When you play, you have some idea in your head about what you're doing and you are carrying that idea out in your actual behavior. So I think what people mean when they say unstructured play is they mean it's not structured by an adult.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah.
Dr Peter Gray:And the sense you get when you hear the word unstructured play is well, this is just random activity, so you need an adult in order to structure it. That's right, and so I don't like the term unstructured play. It's always structured. Play is always structured by definition. Play has structure. Play has children are abiding by a mental set of guidelines or rules.
Vicci Oliver:And they co-create them together sometimes as well, right Like when they're working in groups.
Dr Peter Gray:And, of course, when children are playing together, they have to agree on what the structure of their play is what they're playing at, what the rules are, what you can do and what you can't do, to be within the bounds of this, play together. We're making a sandcastle. We can't be working, playing on the same thing if I'm making a sandcastle and you're throwing sand around, you know.
Vicci Oliver:You're right, exactly, we have to talk about what we're doing.
Dr Peter Gray:Otherwise, you just go off and play sand, throw sand. You play that way. I'm going to make my sandcastle. But if we're going to play together, we've got to figure out are we throwing sand or are we making a sandcastle? So that's where a lot of negotiation comes in about the rules, about exactly what we're doing. You watch kids.
Dr Peter Gray:Normally this would be boys playing a play fight, you know, and it looks kind of wild. But the truth of the matter is it's structured. It has rules no kicking, no biting, no hitting hard. If you're the bigger and stronger of the two, you have to self-handicap. If you push somebody down, you need to push them down on something soft. All of these are part of the usually unspoken rules. But both boys know that these are the implicit rules of whatever the play fight is. If you're swinging sticks at one another, you hit one another's stick, but you don't hit the person with the stick. These are the rules and they normally don't even have to be spoken. But if one of them, either accidentally or on purpose, violates a rule, it will be spoken. But the other one, hey, that really hurt.
Dr Peter Gray:No hitting no actual hitting, and then the other one has to apologize and then they go back to playing. So rules are really the great Russian development psychologist Lev Vygotsky many, many years ago argued.
Dr Peter Gray:His view was that I think he actually said the most important thing I would say one of the most important things that children learn in play is how to create and follow rules, Because he was one of the first to say all play has rules. And so children in play, among other things, are learning to inhibit their impulses. They're learning to control themselves. They're learning to not just abide by their immediate whims and wishes and instincts, but to behave in a kind of controlled manner in accordance with the social expectations of whatever it is that they're playing.
Vicci Oliver:Do you think that this sorry, I was just going to say I'm going to ask a question more around. When you're saying that, it's making me think a lot about when adults play with kids and how they sometimes really struggle with following the rules that children set out and feel like unequal in how they can set out the rules of the play, and then children aren't actually able to learn all of those lessons with an adult because there is it's not the same as when they're playing with children, because there's an equality in that, with children playing together, co-creating those rules. But what happens when an adult steps in there is that they either have to abide by all of the rules that their child sets out, and then they get very frustrated because then they're being bossed around and then they're sort of losing that opportunity then to get the benefit that children would normally be getting without doing that with another child.
Dr Peter Gray:Yeah, I think that's a good point.
Dr Peter Gray:I think that a problem we have with adult child play in our world today is that, partly because there aren't enough children around for our children to play with, we feel like, well, we have to be the playmates for our children. And not only that, but we're advised by some experts with quotation marks around experts that we should play with our children, that play is valuable, play is a way of for us to bond with our children, and the worst part of the advice is that we are teaching our children in the context of play, and so play becomes teaching opportunities. Play becomes a bonding opportunity. Play becomes something that we should do, and I've done this thing of sort of googling should I play with my child or playing with my child and found that there are a lot of especially moms out there who admit to hating to play with their child. They feel they're supposed to and then they feel guilty because they're really not enjoying their play with their child.
Vicci Oliver:And yeah, I have to admit it was difficult for me.
Dr Peter Gray:And the reason is because what they're doing is not really play, because they're doing something that they're not enjoying. It's not play if you, as the adult, are not enjoying it, and it should be no surprise. I mean, if you're, let's say, over 30 and you're playing with a five year old, you have extraordinarily different interests, different, different energy levels, different sense of humor, different tolerance for repetition.
Vicci Oliver:Tolerance for repetition. That's a K-1.
Dr Peter Gray:Maybe children. You know play is a form of practice, so repetition is part of practice, and so when children are playing they'll do the same thing over and over and, over and over again. And you know, some years ago I read one mom saying about the child wanted to play something called disco, disco ball or something like that and her. What she wrote in her post was admittedly it was fun the first 500 times, but then it got a little tedious and so and so the this, so and so one of the things I say is you know any, if, if this child were playing with another child, the child wouldn't tolerate that Once it reached the point where the other child is no longer having fun, this is no longer fun for me. That child would say you know, let's play something else. So let's. Let's now talk about what we want to play.
Dr Peter Gray:The mom feels, because she's been told this or she has come to believe this, that her job in play is to follow whatever that she knows. She's not supposed to take it over, and that's correct. But she goes too far in the other direction of letting the child take it over, and then the child is and then and then she's just becomes kind of a prop in the play.
Dr Peter Gray:The child is telling her exactly what she has to do and and that's not good for the child's development. That makes the child feel like you know, I can just boss my mom. The other thing is it's it's a little bit for children. I think it's a little bit for children. Revenge, like the mom normally bosses the child around, here I could boss the mom around. That's not a good relationship.
Vicci Oliver:Well, I'm actually it's actually got me thinking too about sometimes where we have some children who really struggle when children do change the play or get bored of a game. And then we have those children running to us and they say they're leaving me out, they're being mean to me, and it's not. And it's, that's not exactly what's happening at all. It's just that they don't want to play that game anymore. And then they're misinterpreting that reaction from the other child and I'm wondering whether that might have something to do with that as well.
Dr Peter Gray:I think that's a very good point. I think I think the fundamental problem we have with play, I mean in a, in a traditional society and even in the world that I grew up in in the 1950s I was a kid in the 1950s there were just always lots of kids not for, not for everybody If you were a farm kid, there weren't necessarily a lot of kids around, except for your siblings, but for most people there were always a lot of kids around, and in traditional societies there are always a lot of kids of all ages.
Dr Peter Gray:So if one kid doesn't want to play with you, you go find somebody else to play with. And if you, if you don't want to.
Dr Peter Gray:If the kids that you're playing with are acting like bullies, you leave and you go and play with somebody else, and that's just. And so you find the playmates that are compatible with you, and that's, and that's a good thing, because because it means that you have to learn to if you want to keep people playing with you. You have to learn how to adapt, you have to learn how to compromise, you have to learn you can't try to control it and so. And so the little girl who says you know, I'm gonna, we're gonna play house and I'm gonna be the mommy and you're gonna be the baby, and who always says you're going to be the baby and never lets you be the mommy, that that little girl is at some point going to find nobody's going to play with her because nobody wants to be the baby all the time.
Vicci Oliver:So All the time. Yeah, I find. I even find that with my kids, as, like you know, there's one that's usually quite dominant, but then after a while the other one says no, I've had enough and we need to switch.
Dr Peter Gray:Exactly and and so and so the good thing is, most children really want to play and they want, and so they're willing to switch. It doesn't necessarily happen all the time or automatically, but but I think that you know we also have like a lot of a lot of preschools and nursery schools and so on. You know they have the rule you can't say you can't play, which means that you're not allowed to exclude somebody from your play. Well, I can understand why people might want to make that rule, but it really destroys a very important function of play, because part of what children are learning in play is how to become socially acceptable, how to behave in a way that people want to play with you. If they're playing with you because they're not allowed to not play with you, that's not necessarily a good thing for your development.
Vicci Oliver:Well, and also I think kids become very sneaky then, because then they start doing other other things to cause that child to not play with them. So they use other tactics to push them out, which can be quite nasty and antisocial, so it can have the opposite effect. I think you're right. I think it's a very misguided. I understand as well why people do that, but it is misguided.
Dr Peter Gray:Right, exactly.
Vicci Oliver:If you're anything like me, you are hanging on to every word that Peter was saying throughout this conversation, and so now you have something to look forward to in our next episode. I think it's just so important that we talk about play from its historical context, our anthropological viewpoint, so that we can start to make sense of where we are now. So in the next episode, we're going to pick up where we left off. We're going to talk a little bit more about the importance of mixed age to play and the difference to having a playful approach as opposed to play itself. So, as always, I love doing this journey with you and until next time, stay wild.