Ep 223: Why School Is Stressing Kids Out (and What Parents Can Do) — Dr. Peter Gray

In this two-part conversation, pediatrician Dr. Jessica Hochman talks with psychologist and play researcher Dr. Peter Gray about what kids actually need to grow into healthy, capable, well-adjusted adults — and why modern childhood is drifting in the opposite direction.

In Part 1 we talk about why modern school has become such a major source of stress for kids — and what parents can do when changing schools isn’t realistic. Dr. Gray shares what he learned studying graduates of a self-directed school model, why curiosity matters more than pressure, and how to support kids at home without turning evenings into “more school.”

Part 2 is all about play + independence — and why they’re essential for raising confident, capable kids.

Your Child is Normal is the trusted podcast for parents, pediatricians, and child health experts who want smart, nuanced conversations about raising healthy, resilient kids. Hosted by Dr. Jessica Hochman — a board-certified practicing pediatrician — the show combines evidence-based medicine, expert interviews, and real-world parenting advice to help listeners navigate everything from sleep struggles to mental health, nutrition, screen time, and more.

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Transcript

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Hi everyone. Welcome back to your child is normal. I am Dr Jessica Hochman. I'm a pediatrician, a mom of three, and today I'm sharing part one of a two part conversation with the wonderful Dr Peter Gray. Dr Gray has been on the podcast before, and he's truly one of my favorite people to talk about kids. He's a psychologist and one of the leading voices when it comes to play independence and how our children will eventually grow into get this capable adults. So in this episode, Dr gray shares his perspective on modern schooling. He raises thoughtful questions and concerns about how little free play kids actually have, how structured their days have become, and whether they're getting enough exposure to real interests and real life. We also talk about why school has become one of the biggest sources of stress for kids and what parents can do if changing schools isn't an option. If you ever looked at your child before you sent them off to school and thought, why does this feel like it's making things harder instead of better, this conversation will offer perspective, reassurance and a lot to think about, all right, and before we get started, if you could take a moment and leave a five star review for the podcast, your child is normal, wherever it is you listen to podcasts, I would be so appreciative on to part one with Dr Peter Gray. So first, I want to say thank you so much, Dr gray for coming back on the podcast. I've been really looking forward to this conversation, and I think myself as a pediatrician and as a mother, one of my life goals, if I can help it, is to do what I can do to raise healthy and well adjusted children, and to give advice to families on how they can raise healthy, well adjusted children. And so I'm so fascinated by your career and what you've done to look into how children play. And I know this is your expertise. You've been studying this topic for how many years? Oh, boy, I've been studying it, I guess for about 40 years, what drew you to be so interested in looking into the idea of children and how they play? In some sense, I've always been interested in it, but it wasn't the focus of my research. Initially, I had been doing laboratory research studying the brains of rats and mice, so I was really doing neuroscience research, but my son was, meanwhile, rebelling in school, and it reached a kind of crisis point where we had to find a different kind of school for him. When he was nine years old. He had been rebelling continuously in school. He hated school, and finally he convinced us that school was not good for him, and so we found this radically alternative school called the Sudbury Valley School, which was only a couple miles from where we lived, but it was extraordinarily different from what we think of as school. It was really a school designed for self directed education, a school in which children educate themselves through play and exploration and interacting with other kids and figuring out what they want to do and pursuing their own interests. And my son was extraordinarily happy there, but I as a concerned father, as many parents would be concerned, was worried, well, what if he stays in this school all the way through high school? Is this going to limit his future in some way. So I ended up doing a study of the graduates of the school, and the graduates were doing very, very well in life here. They had grown up. Some of them had never gone to a typical school. They'd just been at this very unusual school all the way K through 12. But they they're not segregated by age in this school, and there's no such thing as grades of that sort, nor grades of the other sort. And so here was a pretty large sample of kids who had gone through the school and they were doing very well in life, including going on to higher education, if that's what they wanted to do. I'm curious, when you said they did very well after finishing the high school. Is that defined by going on to graduate school? Or were there other metrics that you looked at? So what I really mean by doing very well is that they are happy. They're well employed. They don't have any regrets about the school they went to. But I also was interested in two particular things, did they go into the whole range of careers that we value in our culture? And did they go on to higher education? The answer to both of those was yes. Amazingly, kids who had never taken a course, literally never taken a course, never taken a test, got into four year colleges. Some of them took the root of, I'll go to a two year college first, and they're not very expensive, and you can go to community college and then transfer your credits to a four year college. And they did well. And in fact, what the students themselves said those who went on to higher education, they felt they were at a big advantage, because they were used to taking control of their own education. So whereas some of the other college students were used to, you know, having their mom telling them what to do all the time, or having teachers check their work every day, that doesn't happen in college, and these young people had decided that they really. Wanted to go to college. Most of them were interested in some career that sort of requires College, the way we've got our society set up today. So if you want to be a doctor, you've got to go to college before you go to medical school. And I mean, this is remarkable. We in our culture think that what you learn in school is so important. Here are kids who did none of that, and they went on to very good lives and went on to college if they wanted to do it. What I find really interesting about what you said is, yes, it's interesting that they got accepted to four year colleges and they got admitted to graduate schools. But what interests me the most, to be honest, is that you said they grew up to do what they wanted to do, that they were interested in their careers, that they were happy in their careers, that they were happy as human beings, because I've done a lot of reevaluating of my own time that I spent in school, and you're right, going to medical school, I'm so happy that I got there, but the work and the learning that I had to do to get myself there, to be honest, I really don't use much of it at all in my day to day work. I don't use the year of chemistry, I had to take the year of biology, the organic chemistry, the physics. I did a master's that I really don't use at all. So I'm wondering how he got here. But for some reason in society, we place a lot on school, on higher education. But really that's not, that's not the metric that I think most humans are really going for, right? No, no. People. People really learn best when they're self motivated and when they're learning what they want to learn and what's meaningful to them. You know, I have my vision of the ideal education would be the the first phase would would which kind of would correspond to what we now call kindergarten through high school, or at least through middle years of high school would be sort of years of discovery, like what happens at the school my son went to, where you you follow your interests. You discover what you're interested in. You play at it, you become good at what you're interested in. And then, in my view, the second phase would be apprenticeships or internships. So let's say you're 15 years old, you've decided you want to be a doctor. Now you think you want to be a doctor, you may you may think you want to be a doctor, but maybe you really don't want to be a doctor. As you know, there are a lot of unhappy doctors out there. There are a lot of unhappy lawyers or a lot of unhappy business people, it's because people get this idea of what they want to do, but they don't really know what it is until they've invested so much money and time to try to get there that there's almost no backing up. So my next phase in my view of education would be, if you want, if you think you might want to be a doctor, you know, try getting some kind of a low level job where you're around doctors, you're around sick people, you're an orderly in a hospital. You're an assistant to a nurse, whatever the heck it is. You're not paying any money. You're even paid a little bit for doing it right. But you are learning, hey, do I really like the life of a doctor? Do I want the stress that I'm seeing that the doctors have? Do I want this lifestyle? Do I like being around sick people or not? And if you don't, then it's a good thing. You discovered it then, rather than after everything else you've gone through, and later in life, you try to say, well, I spend all this money, all this time on it. It's a little late to back out now. So if you decide you don't like it, then you try an apprenticeship in something else. Maybe I'd like to be a chef. Maybe I'd like to be a forest ranger. And so this is the phase, kind of in the late teenage years, maybe even into your early 20s, what we think of now as the college years, you're exploring different career options. Then if you choose a career, like a medical career, where we want people, you know, if I'm going to a surgeon, I want, I don't want that surgeon to learn by trial and error on me. I want to be sure that surgeon knows what they're doing, and so this is where it's really important that people get a rigorous education in what they're doing, and are tested and are evaluated, are certified, so things that really could have life or death consequences. It's really important then that the people be well trained, that they be evaluated by experts, that they be certified as this person knows how to do surgery or knows how to do whatever it is that they've trained for. I feel the same way about electricians, where, you know bad electrical work would burn the house down. So that's kind of my vision of education. I do away with the four year college, I think it's for large waste of time. There are some people who get something out of it, inexpensive, it's expensive, it's there, and more expensive now than ever. There are some people who get something out of it, and those are people who are legit. Ultimately, scholars of the sort who want to be well rounded, they're interested, they're really interested in reading and writing and scholarly work and ideas. And those people, I think universities should persist, but should be supported by primarily as research centers. And so just as the person who wants to be a doctor would go to medical school, the person who wants to be a scholar or a scientist would go to the university where you're an apprentice in the realm that you are interested in. You're you're working in a science lab, or you're assistant to a historian, do it, helping them do historical work as you're trying to get yourself trained to become a professor of history yourself as you're explaining this advice, I completely agree. I really am fortunate for my career. I really feel like it's a good fit for what I enjoy doing, for my personality, for my strengths. And I am very lucky, because my dad is a pediatrician, and I grew up with an apprenticeship in a way, I would come to work with him. I would file charts in his office. I would make rounds with him at the hospital. I would hear him talk on the phone and give advice to patients. And so I do feel like if I wasn't exposed to his career, I don't know that I would have gone into this field, because I wouldn't have thought about it so much. So I agree with you that the more we can find what our children are interested in and allow them to be exposed to it, to spend time in it and see if it's what they really like, I think that's fantastic food for thought, right? Yeah. So you know the problem right now is that kids are spending so much time doing what they're told to do in school, which has very little to do with real life or any actual careers. They're not exposed to any job other than teacher and and they have very little opportunity, much less opportunity than was true when I was a kid, decades ago, to play and explore outside of school, because school has become such a big thing and then and then, many kids are in school like activities, even when they're not in school. So instead of playing and exploring and pursuing their interests, they they might be in some kind of adult directed sport, which maybe they chose, but not that it's likely that that's going to become a career for them. And so they're so they're, they have very little time even to think about what they really want to do. They're, they're spending so much time doing what adults are asking them to do. It's true. Worksheets in class, media. There's something at my kid's school called i Ready, where they're looking at a computer for hours on end, and I agree, they're not really getting exposure to much of the real world. So question for you, for parents that are listening and they're thinking, you know, the school that Dr Gray's kid went to sounds fantastic, but I don't have a school like that in my neighborhood, and for families that can't change their school environment. Do you have any advice for parents on what they can do outside of school hours to support their independence and their growth? Right? So first of all, I understand your question, and I'll get to your question, but I also want to make the point that an awful lot of people are now doing homeschooling, and homeschooling is a lot easier than it used to be, partly because of the internet and the computer. You can learn anything you want. And as more and more people are doing homeschooling, more and more families are getting together, you can do homeschooling even if you have a full time job out of the home, at least if your kid is beyond the age of about four or five. There are ways to do that, but let's assume that that's not in the cards for you. So get back to your actual question of So, so your kid is going to to the regular school, and what can you what can you do about it? And the first thing that's, I think, critically important is to make it absolutely clear to your child, not just with words, but in your behavior with the child, that you love that child for who the child is, and that's has nothing to do with their grades in school. They're getting already too much pressure about grades in school, and if you add to it, you are possibly increasing the chance that they will be suffering from anxiety and depression. One thing we know from survey after survey of kids, that the biggest cause of anxiety and depression among young people is school. Every survey of kids where they ask, what is it that's making you anxious or depressed? Nothing else comes close. Every summer when school closes, the rates of suicide and depression and anxiety among school aged kids plummets you. I first learned that talking with a clinical psychologist who works with children, she said, my my business dries up every summer. The kids are not anxious and depressed during the summer. What you just said right there, that's that is blowing my mind, because I talked to so many kids that are anxious all the time, and we think of school as so necessary for their well being. But what you're saying is the opposite may be true. Oh yeah. No, school is hurting. There's no question about it. Let me give you an example. In 2013 so the American Psychological Association does, I think, annually a survey called Stress in America, usually they just include adults in the survey over 18, and it's demographically balanced and so on. And they ask questions about how anxious you've been over the period of time, and they also on a checklist, ask you to check what are the things that are making you anxious. But in 2013 they included high school age teenagers. High School Age teenagers in the United States came out to be the most stressed people by their own rankings, more so than adults, the most stressed people in America on the checklist, and there are a number of things they could check that are causing the stress. 83% check school, nothing else came close. Nothing else came close. And this was true across the socio economic gap, true for poor kids, true for rich kids, true for kids in the middle. Nothing else came close. This has been ever since Common Core and school became far less pleasant than it was before when they did a similar study in 2009 Before Common Core, still, school was checked more than anything else, but at that time, it was 43% that checked school that was in 2009 we adopted Common Core in Our school systems across the country, between 2010 and 2013 so by 2013 when that second survey was done, all states had common core, or something similar, in the public schools. And over that same period of time, we saw a huge increase in anxiety and depression among school age kids and and my mind, there's no question but what that increases the result of Common Core. People want attribute it to smartphones, but it's common core that did it. Then all the studies, when you really look objectively at the studies, point to that. And just to make people aware, when you say common core, are you talking about the specific curriculum that's being taught? So what happened is, around the year 2000 the United States government got very much involved in the school system. They passed a law called No Child Left Behind, which had the effect of altering the way teachers are evaluated. In order to get federal money, you had to within the states develop a system for evaluating teachers and whole schools based on how well the kids were doing on standardized tests. So at first, the state sort of floundered around trying to find some way to do that. Then the majority of states got together and they said, rather than as individual states trying to develop a way of meeting the federal requirement, let's, let's develop a core curriculum. Let's develop a similar way that we're all going to evaluate teachers and schools and so on and so forth, and so that's why it's called Common Core by 2013 every state in the country had either adopted Common Core or had developed something on their own very similar to it. This dramatically changed the way classrooms operate. But the result was that because the teachers, principals, superintendents, were now being evaluated based on standardized exams, primarily on literacy ability and mathematical ability. Those, those were the two items, the fun things were largely removed from school to a large extent, and even classes in those areas became focused on the skills that are being tested on the exam. One of the effects of that was that in English classes, teachers stopped assigning books because that began to seem like a waste of time. Now that was one of the joys of school, was reading the books that were assigned. But instead, what's tested on common core on the reading assignments is reading a paragraph, just one paragraph, and then answering some multiple choice questions about what the paragraph said. Can you imagine? You anything more boring than that, right? Flashing back to studying for the MCAT, that's what 1/3 of the test was, was reading boring paragraphs and answering multiple choice questions. Yeah, exactly, absolutely horrible. So school became far less enjoyable teachers, many of the best teachers quit because they were no longer being respected. Their wisdom was no longer respected. I have a sister who was teaching middle school, and she had been teaching for 22 years. She was apparently an excellent teacher. The kids loved her, but in 2010 suddenly there was an assistant principal going to every classroom to see that every class was on the same page as every other class on that same subject. And so teaching is an art, and the art depends upon your ability to really engage the kids where they are and get them intellectually involved in what you're doing. And she was good at that, and so she would be maybe talking about some idea that came up yesterday, and everybody's interested in this idea, and they're involved in this, and their minds are growing, but this assistant principal says, No, you can't do that. This is what we're supposed to be doing today. Well, this is somebody who was probably 20 years younger than her, not nearly as smart as her, telling her what to do. So she quit. She quit, and I've heard from a lot of experienced teachers who quit. So this was a horrible thing that happened. Very interestingly, it turns out, on the national test, up until when common course started, there was a gradual improvement. Every year the students were doing a little bit better. Interestingly, ever since Common Core, the scores have been going down, gradually, going down people that attribute to anything else, but it clearly changed with Common Core, and I can see why. What's happening kids learn when they get intellectually engaged and get re curious about things and thinking about things, and Common Core worked against that. I'm putting it in the past. It's not in the past, but I think it's beginning to die out. So what I'm understanding from what you're saying is that Common Core was well intentioned. It sounds nice, right? No Child Left Behind. Let's make sure everybody learns how to read. Let's not let anybody fall through the cracks. But in but in practicality, it didn't end up that way. Teachers were losing their creative ability to teach. They were losing that flexibility, that autonomy, and they had to stick to a certain curriculum, which sounds less fun for everybody, and net result is everybody ended up losing That's exactly right. That's exactly why. You know, one of the purposes of Common Core, one of the stated purpose, was to reduce the education gap between rich and poor. There's been, it's long been the case that kids from wealthier families perform much better in school than economically poor families on average. And interestingly, and no surprise to me, ever since Common Core, that gap has increased. Everybody, on average, was doing more poorly, but that was especially true for the kids who were doing poorly from the beginning. So in terms of its stated goals, Common Core was a total failure, and a lot of people aren't ready to admit that. You know, I ask a lot of kids when they come in for their well visits, how they feel about school, and it's interesting. I ask them what they look forward to when they go to school, and almost always their answer is, they like recess and they like seeing their friends. And when I try to ask them, Is there a specific subject that you like, you know, they'll answer that with with more hesitancy. But I wish we could make school better for the kids, because I would personally love to have a day where I could spend the whole day learning. It sounds so interesting to me, but I think it really depends on how it's delivered. If it's delivered as a lecture and you're bored all day, well, you're learning about ancient civilization, and that's that's not what you're interested in learning about. That sounds like a boring day, but if we could figure out how to make it appealing to the individual child and and touch upon what they're interested in. It could be a dream situation, right? The problem is, everybody is different, and if you have a classroom where everybody's supposed to do the same thing, then it's not going to be no matter how you do it, it's not going to work for everybody. Not everybody is going to be interested in the same things at the same time, a really good teacher can kind of seduce you into some interest in it. And I think the kind of school that my son went to is a school that where you can do exactly what you're saying that would be your dream. You can study whatever you want to study, anytime you want to study. You can pursue it in your own way. And in this day and age, you don't need a physical teacher there. There are whatever you want to know. You can find experts on the internet. You can find courses in whatever you and it's free or very low cost. You don't. Have to go to a physical institution in order to learn whatever it is you want to know in this world today, it's true. It really is amazing, yeah, and kids understand that, and the world has changed quite a lot over the last 150 years, but school has not changed at all over the last 150 years, except that it's gotten worse because it worse, because it takes more of children's time. There's more testing that school day is longer this kids are expected to spend more years in school. But the basic, fundamental way it operates, despite huge changes in the rest of the world, has not changed. What I'm taking from you is that it's important that we let our kids know that we love them no matter what, no matter what grade they bring home, we want to make sure that if they have an interest in something, that we as parents try our best to help them have real life experience in the areas that they're interested in, and that there's the whole internet world out there that they can use as a great opportunity for learning exactly. I think there's a couple of other things I could say in answer to your original question about, what can parents do? One is, really talk to your kids about, do they really want to be involved in all these outside of school activities? You know, kids are over scheduled these days and they don't have time, so even when they're not in school and not doing homework, they're often in other adult directed activities. So it's they've got hectic days, you know? And I don't think it's good for the kids. I don't think it's good for the parents who are carting them around, spending so much time getting them there, and then before you know it, they're there went their childhood? Yeah, I'm also wondering one complaint I hear from kids about school, in addition to the curriculum that can feel unstimulating or boring to them, a lot of kids don't like how early they have to wake up. They don't like the kids that they're around. Sometimes they're afraid of being teased at school or even bullied at school. They complain about the lunches they get. They complain about the bathrooms at school. So I do find there's a lot of things that kids take issues with with current day school. So I'm curious if there's other factors that may play a role, and why they feel anxious. So for example, I said earlier, this school has changed for the worst over the years. So let me contrast when I was in elementary school in 1950s I was in elementary school. The school date was six hours long, but we were outdoors two hours. We had a half hour recess in the middle of the morning, half hour recess in the middle of the afternoon, and a full hour at lunch. Some kids walked home at lunch, even first graders walked home at lunch, but most of us stayed at school. We brought a bag lunch. We ate the lunch in five minutes, and we had 55 minutes to play. Teachers weren't even watching us. We played in ways that would not be allowed at school today, but it was real, genuine play. In other words, out of the six hour school day, we had two hours of play during the school day that's respecting children's needs. Play is extraordinarily important, and especially like some of the schools I went to, a lot of the kids were rural kids, and this is the only chance they got to be with other kids and to play. And I think school people recognize that that play is at least as important as the lessons being taught in school. The other thing that's happened between 1950 and today, the school year has increased by five weeks. We have taken a full month away from what used to be summer vacation and another week away from the year, so more time in school. The biggest change, though, is homework, especially in elementary school. There was no homework in elementary school, when I was in school, when you were out of school, you were out of school, and so you had lots of time for self play and self directed education. You had lots of time for that. But now, between the amount of time in school, the taking away of play in school, the amount of homework here, you're never free from school. You go home and you're still in school, and your and your parent is supposed to be nagging you to do your homework, and that never used to happen. It sounds like the changes that we've made in our school system, and the setup and the homework, our kids are not any better off for it. They're worse for it. Oh, they're way worse for it. They're worse in every way and and they're even worse academically for it. You don't improve children's academic abilities by burning them out, by making them do boring stuff over and over again by having the little kids sitting in their seats, as you know, as a pediatrician, is not natural for little kids. They want to be up and around and they should be. It's not healthy for them to be spending that much time sitting in seats doing worksheets. And I'm so glad to hear you say that because the culture that we're in, parents have become obsessed with their kids learning. And getting ahead and learning more and being ahead of their peers academically. And if what you're saying is that more school is doing the opposite of that, I think that's really important for all of us to understand. I think it is, and the extreme of that is what we started with kids who went to this school that my son went to, it did none of that stuff, and yet they weren't behind. You know, we're just wasting kids time. A lot of parents will tell me they don't want to send their kids to private school, because the private school system compared to the public school system, where I live in Los Angeles, there's less school time. They have more vacation time, a longer summer break, and the school day is shorter. And I'm thinking, that sounds glorious. Yes, private school is more expensive, of course, but I think that's more of what kids need. I think public schools should follow in that model from what you're describing exactly, of course they should. So, you know, we have this mentality, if something isn't working, let's do more of it. You know, isn't that kind of the definition of insanity. That's the way our school system operates. Oh, they're not learning to read in first grade. Let's start teaching it to them in kindergarten. They're not learning to read in kindergarten. Let's start teaching it to them in preschool. Or they're not learning the mathematical manipulations with 100 hours of drill, let's do a 200 hours of it. I'm so glad you're shining a light on this, because I know that some parents, yes, they can do the homeschool option. I think that's wonderful, but for us parents that can't do that and that isn't an option, at least we know that we don't have to play a role in putting pressure on the kids to do to do more in school, that we can have an approach when they come home from school to really make sure they're doing activities that they want to do, to really make sure they're having free time, to really make sure that we're not playing a role in their stress when it comes to school. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of your child is normal. Also, if you could take a moment and leave a five star review, wherever it is you listen to podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it. It really makes a difference to help this podcast grow. You can also follow me on Instagram at ask Dr Jessica.