Ep 224: Kids Need Independence: The Science of Play & Risk — 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.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why play is not just fun — it’s biologically necessary
 • What children lose when play disappears
 • How over-structuring childhood may be backfiring
 • What parents can do to foster independence 

You can find more of Dr Gray's work here:

• His Substack: Play Makes Us Human
• His website: petergray.org
• His book: Free to Learn

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

Unknown: 0:00

Hi everyone. Welcome back to your child is normal. I'm Dr Jessica Hochman, and this is part two of my conversation with Dr Peter Gray, and today we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, play and independence. Dr gray explains why play is not just a nice extra, it's biologically essential. We talk about why kids need real freedom with other kids, why risky play can actually build courage. And the best part parents, this episode isn't about doing more, it's about doing less and letting kids do more. All right, here's part two with Dr Peter Gray. What I'd love to ask you about, and what I so appreciate your perspective on, is parents involvement in kids play. Because this is something that I think, conceptually, parents have a hard time with. To be honest, I see a lot of parents, they're very involved in their kids when they're playing. They really feel like they need to be constantly supervising children. From your perspective, what role should we play when our kids are having free time and playing? You're right. So there's, there's two ways to respond to the question. One is, I think the real role that parents should play, regarding children's play, is to figure out how, in this world today, you're going to be able to connect your kids in a regular basis with other kids to play with. In the past, that was easy. You just sent them outdoors, you know, it kicked them outdoors. Other parents kicked their kids outdoors. And the most important play for children is play with other children away from adults. That's where children learn the skills for growing up. That's where they learn how to manage themselves, how to negotiate with peers without an authority figure solving their problems. It's where they learn to solve their own problems. You know, if you think about it, the whole purpose of childhood is to become independent of your parents. That's the for mammals in general, mammals are all born dependent on their mom. At the very beginning, that's almost the definition of being a mammal. But over time, they've got to separate. They've got to get on they've got to go on with life and do things on their own. And so all mammals, over time, the parents are less involved with them, and the and the young have to do more. This is as true for human beings, even more true for human beings than for any other animal. The purpose of childhood, if every parent understood this, the purpose of childhood is to become less dependent on your parents. So that has to happen gradually. The two year old already can do some things on their own, and we shouldn't be doing it for the two year old. The two year old wants to do it on their own by four. Four year olds don't want their parents around all the time already by four. There's data showing this. They want a bit of their own life away from their parents in a normal environment. And we don't have a normal environment. We in a normal human environment. Children are always surrounded by other children, not by siblings, sometimes by siblings, but other children and but we isolate children away from other children. We keep them. We have, you know, we have nuclear families and very little extended families that are regularly involved with one another. People don't know their neighbors anymore. We don't have neighborhood play. So this extraordinarily important opportunity to play with other children throughout most of history, children spent more time playing with other children away from parents than they spent near their parents. This is true for hunter gatherer culture, but it was also true even for me in the 1950s you know, I spent way more time playing with my friends than I spent with my parents, and that's normal development. So I'm just curious, when you compare the childhood of the 1950s to today's typical childhood. How did we get here? Is it all is it all fear based? Like, how do we come to this place? So I've got a new book coming out called restoring childhood, and one of the chapters is devoted exactly to that question, what are the things that change? And I list about 13 changes. It's not just one thing. It's a whole set of things, but just to very quickly mention some of them. So one of them was the advent of television in the and the 1950s television. So, you know, let me back up just one minute. So historian, so the historian Howard Trudy cough, has pointed out that the first half of the 20th century was the golden age of children's play in America, because by the beginning of the 20th century, we'd pretty much done away with child labor of the intensive sort, and although we had compulsory schooling, it was not the big deal that it later became. And he says, begin. Around 19 the mid 1950s or 1960s adults began chipping away at Children's freedom to be children to play and do the things that children had always done. And so he cites 1955 as the turning point, because that's when most families had television, and kids instead of, instead of hanging out to play after school, and they would come home to watch the Mickey Mouse Club on television, and so already that began to interfere with kids being outdoors play. That was one step, but there are so many other steps that occur in the 19 prior to in the 1960s was when we began to have adult directed sports. Little League was in existence already in 1938 but was not a big deal until around 1960 and then we suddenly had, we had Pee Wee hockey, and we had football, and we had, we had all kinds of these. And parents began to think, well, wouldn't it be better for my child to be in this adult director sport, rather than for them to just go out and make up their own games, as kids had always done in the past? So we began so children and children kind of wanted to do this too. It seemed like okay, why not do it in this organized way? But once you're doing that, it's no longer play. Now you've got adults telling you what to do. You're not making up your own game. You're not learning the skills how to negotiate with other kids to solve your problems. You've now got adults doing that. So that's another thing that occurred, another thing that occurred that I think a lot of people don't think about. Over time, houses have gotten bigger, much bigger than they used to be. The average square footage of a house today is twice as large as what a house was in the 1950s bigger houses. Kids have their own bedroom. They don't have to leave the house to get away from you. Motivated to kick their go to their bedroom. We had our third kid living in an apartment, and I remember we were very motivated to leave all the time, because it felt very you know, we were absolutely 750, square feet, with three kids. We were constantly outside, putting the kids, you know, getting them outdoors, taking walks, because it was stifling. So, you know, now we live in a home where I can see it. We're not as motivated to leave because it's more comfortable. So I completely agree with you that a bigger house. So not only did houses get bigger, but families got smaller, and so the average size for families that have kids, the average size of the family, has been cut in half. The average size of the number of kids has been cut in half. So you've increased four fold the amount of internal space in the house per kid, the the motivation for parents to kick the kids out of the house because the kids are in their way, and then the has greatly declined. The kid can just go to their own bedroom and watch television or get on the internet, whatever they want to do, and the motivation for kids to get out of the house is less, you know, I I grew up in a you know, we moved around a lot, but we would always, almost always, lived in a small house. I had eight there were eight people in the family. It's part of the reasons for going out was just to get away from everybody and and not everybody was always happy with one another. And the adults would argue, and I'd say, I'm I'm out here. I'm going to go play with my friends. And the sad thing too, is everything can be delivered. Now. I mean, I see all these teenagers get DoorDash brought to their house, so they get food delivered. Your entertainment isn't out in the house. I used to go out to the movies all the time on the weekends and run into friends and see people, and now almost everybody's at home watching their movies. So we're entertained at home. We're eating from home. The reasons why we used to go out and see our friends, see our neighbors are much fewer. So I can definitely see that as exactly right. So, you know. So the other thing that happened is when women went to work, which was a good thing, because women were no longer dependent upon drunken men. We We didn't figure out what we were going to do with the kids, and we didn't figure out what we're going to do to keep neighborhoods together, because women kept neighborhoods together. And to some degree, men did too, because men were men were outdoors more than they are today in their own neighborhood. They were out fixing their cars or mowing the lawn or monkey around. So people knew their neighbors, the women knew their neighbors, and men knew their neighbors. And if you know your neighbors, then you know, you know that guy next door is not a child molester. You know. So you if you know your neighbors, you. Feel safer about your kid going out and playing playing with the neighborhood kids. And so people these days tend to make their friends. Adults make their friends not in the neighborhood, but at their workplace. And the workplace isn't the same as the neighborhood, and the kids are not involved with the workplace, so the parents friends are unrelated to who the kids are and unrelated to the neighborhood. So that plays a role, that plays a role in sort of the development of the fears about the neighborhood kids not getting to know one another. So many changes, even the fact that we have fewer kids. There are fewer kids on any given block, there are fewer kids, and so there's fewer kids to play with than there were in the in the, you know, in the baby boom days when I grew up. I also find when I talk to parents about getting our kids together, they want to know what parents going to be there, who's going to pick them up, who's going to drop them off, who's going to walk them home. Parents now are extremely risk adverse. They don't want their kids on trampolines. They can't walk by themselves. They constantly are asking what adults going to supervise their child? And I understand it depends on what age your kids are. You know, I understand that younger kids, of course, need to be supervised more, but even the older kids, I find that parents want to know who's going to watch them. And I think the fear that's instilled in all of us societally has also played a role. Don't you think the fear has played a huge role? And this leads me to tell you about a project that I'm involved with right now involving pediatricians. So I my wife is OBGYN. She's long told me that if I want to change the world, how the world treats kids, I've got to get to the pediatricians. That parents take their kid to the pediatrician at least once a year for a well child visit, and parents respect the pediatrician, and they listen to what the pediatrician says, so I've got a big grant application in and other people working with me, including a very large pediatric clinic in New Hampshire, where the what we're what we're planning to do an actual systematic study in which pediatricians, for some of their patients, will, as part of the well child interview, talk about the importance of independent activity, doing things independently of the parent, including free play, but independently of the parent, and talking with the parent, recognizing that teenagers doesn't have a lot of time to do this, but talking with The parent are the things that your child is already doing, are the things your child could be doing the independently of you, sort of reminding the parent that that this is part of growing up. We've created a brochure that backs this up, that the pediatrician would hand out, and the brochure, once we get this going, has a QR code, and the parent can connect to a website that we're going to have that provides all kinds of suggestions and things you could do. And so I, you know, given that you're a pediatrician, I wanted to run this by you. I tell you, I we have the brochures in our office. Oh, do you Yes? Yes. And I've spoken a couple times to the people involved brainstorming on ideas on how to expand this program. I think it's one, right? Yeah. So we're trying to defend that. We're going to create a better version of the brochure. So if, if part of that interview was to talk about the, you know, in terms of long term safety, I think there's two ways to think about safety for children. There's the short term safety of you know that doing risky things, you might hurt yourself, but their long term safety comes from learning. I can do things and I can control myself, and I can solve problems and life is worth living, and I can do adventures, and I don't have to be so afraid of the world that kind of long term safety should be more in parents minds and recognize that the short term things, there's no reason to be so afraid of them. Some of them are things like things that you might hurt yourself at, but you're not going to die from it. You know, using a sharp knife or using the oven or lighting fires and things like that, but the body heals. This is not a big issue. The fear that created a huge change in our culture was the fear that began around 1980 the fear that your child would be snatched away by some stranger and murdered or raped or something like that. That stranger danger fear came about was really exacerbated in around 1980 when there were a couple of instances of. Of six year old boys who were snatched away and apparently murdered, one of them clearly murdered. And of course, the media made a huge deal of it. And so parents began got this image in their mind and began to think, because the media kept hammering on it, began to think this is very common. And of course, it's not at all common. It's extraordinarily rare. You know, it's like you could get hit by lightning too. But this is if you were to run your life based on these tiny probabilities, you wouldn't get out of bed, and then you'd realize it's just as dangerous to stay in bed as to get out. I mean, you couldn't, you'd be paralyzed. So parents get this image in their head, this terrible image in their head, and they say, you know, how could I live with myself if that happened to my child? And so that has had a huge effect and and I think we're beginning to in some realms to overcome it, but it had the effect of changing the morality of parents. Also, I'm wondering what you think about this, but also maybe it's been exacerbated because we're having fewer children that we we sort of put all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak, and we're thinking about each individual kid more than is healthy for them. I think that's absolutely right. I think that's played a role. And, you know, you put all your eggs in one basket, you're going to protect that basket. I'm sure that that's part of it. I'm glad that you brought up the short term risk. I think that's a really important reminder for all of us parents about not putting too much weight into the short term risk. Because, for example, I'm bringing up the trampoline. A lot of parents don't want their kids on the trampoline because they have a friend who broke their leg and they fell, and they don't want that to happen to their kid, but that is a short term risk. Yes, it's inconvenient. Yes, nobody wants their kid to break a leg, but the truth is, they will get over it. They'll recover from it, and if we avoid those experiences, they're going to miss out on so much fun that they could that could be had during their childhood. Exactly. That's exactly right, and not only so much fun that they could have, but learning to learning how to deal with risk, learning how to control themselves so they don't break a leg, learning, learning to judge what what they are capable of doing or not capable of doing. That's an excellent point. You're right. More than just having fun, it's a it's a learned experience. They learn what their body is capable of, what they can handle. They'll improve for the next time. I do think we forget about the learning that can happen from play. And now I'm curious. You've talked a lot about how play is not optional, but it's biologically essential. Can you explain what you mean by that? Because I think many parents view play as elective. So how did you come to say that it is biologically essential? So? So the first point to make is that children are biologically designed to play. That's obvious that they are. It should be obvious that they are. You don't have to teach children to play. Children just play. The only thing children need to play is time to play, and they especially need to really play socially. They need other kids to play with nothing else do they you don't need to teach it. They do it too. So children all over the world play. It turns out young mammals in general, all over the world, all, essentially, all young mammals play. So why would they have this? Why would they do this? There's some clear costs to play. You could injure yourself and play, as we've just been talking about, animals injure themselves and play quite often, and some of the play is deliberately risky play. And why would that be, you know, why do young monkeys Chase one another around high enough up in Chi trees that if they fell, they could hurt themselves? Why? Why have people observe? People observe chimpanzees climb into the top of a tree, young chimpanzees and letting grow and catching themselves just before they hit the ground. You know, why do they play that way? And the answer to that, to the risky play part, is because that's how they develop courage. We're all going to face some emergencies at some point in our life, real emergencies, and if we have not experienced some fear in situations where we're controlling the fear, where we know we can handle it, or we're pretty sure we can handle it. If the first time you experience that is a real emergency, you freeze up, you fall apart, you you get frightened of your own fear, you have a panic attack. So instead, natural selection designed young mammals, including our young mammals, to play, not just to play, but even to play in risky ways, so that they would develop courage, so they would develop the sense I can do. I can climb this high in that tree, and I can come down and live to tell the tale. You know, the little girl who does that, she is a stronger, psychologically stronger girl, because of it and will, and she may save her own life, or her own child's life at some point, because she was allowed to climb trees. Once I can picture it, she'll have more grit, she'll have more confidence, she'll be a better problem solver. That's absolutely I agree that you have to live the experience, and by living the experience, it'll only serve you better in life. I hear so much about kids that are, you know, the quote, unquote Failure to Launch kids, where they've never done anything for themselves, and then it comes time for college, and they're just not ready for it, and they're it, and they're scared. And that's right. I think that's a state of that shows that we're not letting them do that. We're not giving them the opportunity to be independent anymore. That's exactly right. So they're not they're not having the opportunity. There's so many ways in which we have limited kids opportunities to independent. I mean, we've been talking about play, but independent mobility. Kids used to get to places by themselves. They would bicycle or walk, or they'd take public transportation. Now, parents, you know, drive them, take them. You know, kids are not even learning how to get around, even, even, even like home chores. You know, kids in the past had responsibilities at home. This was part of and partly because parents want to protect their children's time for academic stuff and outdoor and adult directed things. Kids have less chores at home. That's part of growing up, is learning how to cook a meal or how to at least make your own bed for goodness sake, or you know better about yourself when you when you're part of the family and you're part of the family, you're part of the team. And then kids. Kids also had jobs outside of the house that they earned some money at, and things like, I'll just take myself by the time I was nine or 10, I was mowing neighbors lawns, shoveling their sidewalks, getting some money, doing that, not a lot, but my own spending money. It was a grown up thing to do. By the time I was 11, I had a paper route. By the time I was 13, I was working after school as a delivery boy at a print shop. Probably remember feeling really good about that. And of course, I felt really good about that. And partly, and for a lot of reasons, felt good. Number one, I was doing this adult like thing. And becoming an adult becomes less scary. I can actually make money. I can actually work a job like an adult like job and I can do it, I would say most kids were doing something along those lines, babysitting, even as a boy I babysat at the age of 12 or 13, who would hire, who would hire a boy at all these days for babysitting as I'm thinking about it? Of course, parents are playing a role in kids being less independent, but there are also a lot of rules, right? There's a lot of laws where kids can't work until a certain age that I think makes it harder. What happened is it started with these parental fears, and then it became kind of a moral issue. You're you are a bad parent if you're not watching your child all the time, and I hear from parents all the time who say, I know that my kid could walk to school, but I also know that my neighbors may very well call the police if they see my child walking to school. So what happened is it became, initially, it was sort of like a recommendation to parents watching. But then it became sort of a moral imperative, and then now it's almost kind of a legal imperative, because there are cases where parents who, in perfectly sound judgment, are allowing their child to do something on their own outdoors, where somebody calls 911, and in most states, when somebody does that, there's a requirement to follow up on that a requirement. And usually Social Services follows up. And it's traumatic, just in itself. And this has happened doing what would have been regarded as good parenting not that long ago, is now regarded as negligence by Child Protective Services in many states, I also find for a lot of parents, their identity sort of becomes their relationship with their kids. They walk their kids to school because they feel like they're supposed to be with their kids all the time. You only have so much time with your kid before they go off to college. So you want to, you want to soak up every moment you can with them. I can see how there's many, many factors that play a role in this. I will tell you, though, since we talked the last time, you really inspired me to let my kids do more on their own without me. And boy, does it make a difference. If there's something that they want to do, and I don't have to be there for it, and they can achieve that on their own, whether it's, you know, I give them money and they go into the store and they buy what they need all by themselves, if they can do something without me, they are so much happier. You can see it on their face. They're so happy to do something all by themselves. Exactly, exactly. So that's why I say it's not just play, it's independent activities. And it shouldn't surprise us, as I said, the purpose of childhood is become more and more independent. So it's not surprising that children are endowed with this biological mechanism that makes them happy when they do something on their own and do something independent. Kids want to grow up and they want to be like grown ups. They want to do grown up things. I was proud of myself, because my 10 year old asked to bake cookies all by herself last week, and that included turning the oven on, using the oven great. That was the part that was the hardest for me not to supervise. But she did it, and she turned it off afterwards. But she did it from start to finish. She made the cookies, and they turned out great. And she was proud of herself. I was proud of her, and so that taught me that she can do more than I give her credit for. That's right. And I think this is a, this is a lesson that, if everybody could learn that kids can do a lot more than most parents. They believe they can, and and they benefit from it, and, and the parents benefit from it, because who wouldn't want, who wouldn't want their child to cook dinners? Well, Dr, gray, before we end, I thought it would be fun to end with a lightning round of some quick and fun questions. If that's okay, okay, right, all right, in your opinion, what is the most overrated fear that parents carry in their heads? I I think right now, it is fear of the internet. Okay, I like, I think that's, that's the new parental fear. That's the fear that's similar to the fear of sending your kid outdoors that occurred in 1980s now we're in this new era of parents extreme, irrational fear of their kids on the internet. What is one thing that you wish parents, I can see that I agree with you. A lot of people are talking about roadblocks, and now that's where the child predators are online, and I agree with you that is a that is an increase in fear. Okay? What is, what is one thing that you wish parents would stop apologizing for ignoring their kids. Their kids want to be ignored some of the time. The biggest misconception about play. The biggest misconception about play is not understanding what play is, believing that an activity that is initiated by an adult, like like adult directed sports or a teacher directed game in the classroom is play, and that's not play. Play is something that children initiate and direct themselves, a phrase that you wish parents would use more often with their kids. You can do it. If you could change one school rule everywhere, what would it be? All right, this is going to be a little bit radical, but if I could change one school rule, it would be to do away with required attendance. Oh, that is that. That is a different one. If you did away with that school would have to be a place where kids are happy, otherwise they wouldn't go. They've had workplaces like this too, where they've made attending work not required, and people have shown up and done a good job, and they've been happier at the workplace, right? One thing, one thing kids should do every week that most don't do anymore. I guess, the way I would put it is, it would be great if every child every week did something on their own that they have never done before. I think that'd be good for adults too. It would be. It would be a belief about childhood you held early in your career that has since changed. I think very early in my career, I believed that parents play a meaningful role in shaping who their children become. I now believe that the shaping, if it occurs, is in the other direction that children affect the way parents are more than the other way around. We have very little control of how our children turn out. I would agree with you. The longer I am a parent to my children, I can see that my parenting does not play as much of a role in how my kids are turning out, and I can see that because they're all so different Exactly, yeah, we over emphasize the role of parents and children's development. Of course, children need parent. They need they need to be loved, they need to be fed, they need to be cared for. But we. But most of the rest of their needs are better met by other kids. Dr Peter Gray, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on this podcast and tell everybody if they want to learn more from you. Tell them about your books. How can they learn more from Dr Peter Gray, okay, well, I do a sub stack called Play makes us human. Write a new essay for that roughly once a week. You can easily find that Peter Gray sub stack or Google Play makes us human. I have a personal website, Peter gray.org, where, among other things, many of my academic articles are posted and they're quite readable. You don't don't have to worry that it's a lot of technical jargon in them. Also, my book, free to learn, is still selling very well. There's a lot of people throughout the world. It's been translated into, actually now, 19 languages. So you can get a lot of my ideas from that. The book was written 12 years ago, but I think everything in it is still relevant today. I've got a new book coming out, but it won't be coming out for a while. I've just learned that the publication date won't be until September of 2026 that's going to be called restoring childhood, and it's going to be about, what do I mean by childhood? How have we destroyed childhood and what do we need to do to restore it? I think your books are something that every parent should read, even though we're talking about independence. If we could require reading for any parent, I would recommend your book. Thank you. Thank you for your time, and thank you so much. Thank you again. 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.