The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Peter Gray - What do children need to develop psychologically?
If you’re a parent or a teacher, you’ve probably wondered about what the best conditions are for psychological development in children, and where we might have gone so wrong as a society. This week, we talk with psychologist Peter Gray about the developmental needs of children, and why long school days, risk free environments, and too much supervision are wreaking havoc with their psychological development.
Other episodes on parenting/teaching:
Michaeleen Doucleff on the universals of childhood - https://examined-life.com/interviews/michaeleen-doucleffe/
Links:
Peter Gray's Substack - https://petergray.substack.com/
Peter Gray's TED talk on play - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg-GEzM7iTk
Kenny's Substack - https://substack.com/@kennyprimrose?utm_source=user-menu
The biggest mistake we make in our thinking about education is that it can be measured or that the same measure should apply to everybody. Education is a different thing for every person. You and I have different interests, desires and needs, and that was true when we were children too. But to try to put you and me through the same hole was a waste of time for both of us and probably harmful.
Kenneth Primrose:Hello and welcome to the Examined Life podcast with me, kenny Primrose. In this podcast, I interview a range of leading thinkers about the question they believe we should be asking ourselves. Today, I am delighted to be joined by the American psychologist, peter Gray, where we discuss what the conditions are for healthy psychological development in children. As you'll know, many countries in the West today are going through what's been termed a mental health crisis. There are a number of different explanations as to what's behind this, and no doubt it won't just be one thing. In today's conversation, peter explains why he thinks play is so central to childhood development and why it's been lacking in recent generations. It's a conversation that I find fascinating, something I have a vested interest in, and it's controversial at points, as you will hear, interested interests in and it's controversial at points, as you will hear. It also aligns well and resonates with the conversation I had a few weeks back with Michaeline Duclef.
Kenneth Primrose:I would recommend going back to listen to that episode if you find this one interesting. As ever, your comments and feedback are very much appreciated, as is sharing any of these episodes on social media or with friends. This episode and on the next one, there will be some themes that are potentially divisive, and I would love to hear what listeners think of them. I offer my own reflections in the Substack newsletter, positively Maladjusted. Do find me there or by email at kp-lifecom. Without further ado, I'll move into my conversation with Peter Gray, which I do hope you enjoy as much as I did. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the Examined Life podcast. If we could begin with the question, peter, that you think we should be asking ourselves?
Peter Gray:Yes, well, I guess the big question that I have spent about 40 years of my research career investigating is what do children need to develop well psychologically and what is the role of adults to provide that aid? How do we provide that aid? The question has always been stimulated, in part by my observation that over the course of my lifetime, beginning in the early 1950s until now, we have seen a continuous decline in children's mental well-being. Obviously, we are doing a poor job with every decade in supplying for children what they need to develop well psychologically. And so what do we need to do? How do we do a better job than was done in the 1950s, when children, by every measure, were far happier, far healthier psychologically?
Kenneth Primrose:than they are. It's a question that I think every parent is, if not explicitly asking, thinking about how do I raise children who are going to be healthy, well-adjusted and able to manage life? So I wonder if we could, your perspective as an evolutionary psychologist begin with what you see as the pillars of healthy psychological development for a child. What do they need?
Peter Gray:So, from an evolutionary perspective, what is the purpose of childhood? Why do we humans have such a long period before we reach the stage of sexual reproduction? Why do we have a longer juvenile period than most other mammals do? It's because we have a lot more development to go through in order to acquire the things that we need to know, in order to develop the skills we need to have to be successful adults, than is the case for most other mammals. So the purpose of this long juvenile period is for young people to develop ever more ability to take charge of their lives, ability to take charge of their lives.
Peter Gray:But to develop that ability to take charge of their lives, we have to give them ever-growing opportunity to take charge of their lives as they develop, as they grow up. With every year, kids should have more freedom to do their own things, to be independent of adults. I think that is what has changed over time. We are not giving children the freedom they need to learn how to do things on their own, to learn that they can solve their own problems, to learn that they are the masters of their own destiny. We are overprotecting children. We are too much in their face to put. We're doing too much for them and we're not allowing them to do enough for themselves.
Kenneth Primrose:So there's a kind of learned helplessness that comes with the way that we're raising children. You're talking here about developing an internal locus of control. That's the jargon term for it, right.
Peter Gray:That's exactly right. So psychologists have long known that people who have a strong internal locus of control are far less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than people who have what's called an external locus of control. An internal locus of control is this sense of I can solve problems, I can do things, something happens and I can take care of it. External locus of control is I'm kind of a victim of powerful other people, of circumstance, of whatever happens around me, my environment. There's not much I can do.
Peter Gray:If something happens, you can see why that attitude that you know I'm really dependent upon luck, upon other powerful people and so on and so forth, that that kind of that's a scary world and also a depressing world, if that's the way you believe. There's a clinical questionnaire which has long been used that assesses whether you have an internal or external locus of control. Over this period of time that I've been talking about, the degree to which young people, both teenagers and young adults, score as having an internal locus of control has been going continuously down. Somehow we've created a world where people are growing up not learning that they can take control of their lives.
Kenneth Primrose:This lack of agency that people develop because things are kind of done for them has led to mental fragility. Is that kind of behind the stats that you see on the crisis in mental health in young people?
Peter Gray:It's not quite fair for me to say that it's entirely that we're doing too much for them. It's also the fact that we have greatly decreased children's freedom over time. With every other group we've been concerned about increasing freedom, but with children we have been decreasing freedom. Children are spending more time in school, where they are definitely not free, than they ever have in the past. When they're not in school, they are very often in school-like activities, whether it's adult-directed sports or some kinds of classes or adult-directed clubs outside of school where adults are in charge. The opportunities for children to play and explore on their own, which are really the primary things that children are designed to do. This is evolution. This is natural selection's recipe for child development Get out there and play, get out there and explore, get out there and get in trouble and figure out how to get out of trouble. Meet some bullies and figure out how to deal with them. This is how children have always grown up until recent decades in the United States and some other wealthy countries.
Kenneth Primrose:Okay, interesting. So a few things. There you say the US and some other countries. Are we talking about the so-called weird countries, western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic?
Peter Gray:Not entirely Western, but largely Westernized. At least there are varying degrees of it. For example, the Scandinavian countries still children have much more freedom than they do in the United States or the UK or Australia.
Kenneth Primrose:Some countries have managed to hold on to childhood better than other countries have, suppose you know, unusual but newsworthy as a kidnapping, but that gets broadly, you know, publicized. Does that change beliefs about the dangers of the outside world, the trustworthiness of our neighbors? My question is what are the things that have happened that have changed beliefs, that have led to this restrictive kind of childhood that people are given now?
Peter Gray:The change has been gradual, almost linear, between about 1960 and now. The biggest rate of change was in the 1980s. I think there are two things that happened in the 1980s. One might argue three things that happened in the 1980s in the United States. One is in 1979 and 1981, there were two highly publicized cases of a child being kidnapped and then murdered. In one case we know it was murder. In the other case the child was never found.
Peter Gray:This made huge news. This led to programs of protecting children. Now look, there are billions of children. Two children were kidnapped and murdered. Terrible, terrible, but percentage-wise this is less than being hit by lightning. This made enormous news. This led to programs. This led to radio announcements and television announcements that were along the line of do you know where your child is now, with the implication that you are negligent if you don't. You began to see milk cartons with missing children's pictures.
Peter Gray:This created a kind of panic among parents in America.
Peter Gray:My child is not safe out there, despite the fact that, statistically, the kinds of issues that people were concerned about were so tiny that if you worried about those kinds of statistics, you wouldn't get out of bed in the morning and then you'd realize it's dangerous to stay in bed too. That was a kind of moral panic that occurred beginning in the 1980s and that was really what led to a huge decline in parents' willingness to allow children to play outdoors without adult accompaniment, and it even led to what we have today, where child protective services will threaten to take your child away if they find that child out playing without an adult watching them. There are cases where what was normal parenting in the 1970s and before now is a threat to you as a parent and to your child. This was a huge change and those instances began to get widely publicized and people began to look at every instance of something awful happening to a child that got played up and led to this real fear, which is still inhibiting people from sending their children outdoors.
Kenneth Primrose:So yeah, I can think of parallel cases. As a child of the 80s, I recall being scared of being kidnapped. I remember being very wary of cars because of the same kind of reasons. There was a terrible case of two young boys 10, 11, killing a two-year-old. An additional belief that came with this fear, apart from adults being untrustworthy actors, you had like children weren't to be trusted either. Those are two beliefs that are slightly different. One I can't trust you know the neighbor's, not a pedophile, nor can I, necessarily, because I don't know them, because communities have become atomized. But also you have this kind of Lord of the Flies view of children that, left to their own devices, they're going to devour each other, and you have some egregious cases of that. I mean, it was an unspeakably horrific case that happened in England in 89 or 91 or something like that. But yeah, did you see that in America as well? It wasn't just distrust of other adults, it was distrust of what happens to children when they're unsupervised with one another. One another.
Peter Gray:Yes, I think that is part of it and I think that occurred. There was no evidence that in fact there was more bullying. In fact there's probably less, and there's no evidence that that was ever an enormous problem. Of course it's a problem, but this is part of the learning experience. You learn how to deal with bullies, you learn how to avoid them. There are always some bullies. There are bullies among adults as well as among kids. But when people say Lord of the Flies, I always have to remind people wait, that was a fiction, that was just a story.
Peter Gray:This is not the way kids normally are. Kids normally most of the time are very protective of one another. Most of the time are very protective of one another. One of the things regarding safety is the more kids that are out there, the safer. It is that nobody's going to commit a crime against you in front of witnesses. It does become more dangerous as fewer kids are out there.
Peter Gray:The other thing that has happened I think the term bullying has become blown way out of proportion. I've heard parents say, oh, because my child wasn't invited to somebody's birthday party. That was bullying or the use of a bad name. Kids tease one another and sometimes the teasing becomes kind of mean Is that bullying or just normal kid behavior? Bullying is real. Bullying is where you've got a group of powerful people powerful not necessarily physically, could be in terms of their status or psychologically picking on somebody weaker in a continuously cruel way. Most bullying occurs in school because you can't escape it. Bullies in the neighborhood you just avoid, but in school you're locked in with them. You can't escape them. So the real cases of bullying that in some cases have led to suicide on the part of the person bullied have been largely in school. Just like bullying occurs in prisons, it occurs in any place where people are locked up together it's interesting you mentioned lord of the flies being fiction.
Kenneth Primrose:There there's a an actual historical counter example that perhaps you know. Some boys marooned on an island off tonga in 1966. They were there for 15 months and it was an extraordinary story. It's in the book humankind, which has a more positive view of people and cooperation and so on. And they the story is amazing, it's well worth reading because one of the boys broke his leg and they set the. And they the story is amazing, it's well worth reading because one of the boys broke his leg and they set the bone. They set the bone incredibly well, but they'd also made a garden, they had a continuously going fire. They didn't bicker argue, they had an agreement that they were going to cooperate. So it actually, considering the influence that fiction book had, which you know was in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust and the worst way humanity has ever displayed itself, I suppose it's not surprising that William Golding's novel took hold. But you have this actual historical example of the opposite.
Peter Gray:There are many such examples. Think of the boys of Sudan who helped one another, trekked hundreds of miles taking care of one another, trekked hundreds of miles taking care of one another. Think of the history of street kids in London in the Victorian era who took care of one another. The idea that kids are unable to cooperate, that they don't care about one another, they don't help one another, is just proven over and over and over again in reality.
Kenneth Primrose:It sounds like there's this belief that parents need to disabuse themselves of that. The world around them is unsafe. Broadly speaking, it's much safer than it has been before, and children generally are pretty self-regulating and they need to learn to be kind of, I suppose, streetwise. You only learn to become streetwise by being out in the street.
Peter Gray:That's right, I mean, let me give an example of how much things have changed. I was born in 1944, so I've been around for a while. When I was four years old so this would have been 1948, my mother was a single mom and worked, and my grandmother was the stay-at-home person and she was lame. We lived in a working-class apartment, a working-class area in Minneapolis, a big city, lots of traffic on the street. She would send me to the stores two blocks away to do errands for her.
Peter Gray:Now this was a little bit unusual. I was big for four, but it would not have been unusual at five. You would have found lots of five-year-olds out going to stores getting things for their parents. It was part of early growing up. It's interesting. As an evolutionary psychologist I've been interested in how children in hunter-gatherer cultures are treated and did a survey of anthropologists about 20 years ago who had lived in hunter-gatherer cultures at a time when there were still relatively pristine hunter-gatherer cultures. In every one of those societies, four-year-olds were allowed to go off with other kids into the woods or the fields or wherever they lived. There was a general understanding that up until about the age of four, kids needed to be around adults because they didn't have common sense, they didn't have the ability to make reasonable decisions. But beginning around age four, kids have that ability. We've forgotten that. We don't allow 11-year-olds to do today, at least in the United States, what I could do at four.
Kenneth Primrose:You mentioned that social services might pick up kids because they look neglected if they're not being supervised. They're in a society that has become more litigious. That's made everyone scared, right? So if teachers are in loco parentis, they're going to be looking at the kids supervising all the time in case something happens on their watch and they are then liable for it. I presume that's the case in the States. It's certainly the case in the UK.
Peter Gray:It is definitely the case in the States, and that's one of the reasons that we've got the problems. You don't find any interesting playground equipment in the parks today because somebody wants to hurt themselves on that tall slide or the teeter-totter, and so therefore we can't have it. Somebody might get sued. Schools supervise recess, so it's no longer really play. Even the tiny short recesses that they still have in the United States they're so supervised that you could hardly call it play. That's a part of it.
Kenneth Primrose:So interesting. You mentioned indigenous societies Last week. Previous podcast episode was with Michaeline Duclef who is, as I'm sure you know, she's written the book Hunt Gather Parent and she says indigenous parenting gives masses of autonomy to children. They're treated as contributing members of society from day dot, rather than the Western perspective of childhood. You're not useful until you can get a job Right.
Peter Gray:Yeah, I mean we've got this situation that we're not allowing children to grow up because we are not allowing them the freedom they need to learn that they can do things independently, to learn how to solve problems, to learn how to negotiate with playmates all the kinds of things that are important to learn. We've also developed the view that child development occurs as a result of teaching, guidance from adults, what I call sometimes the schoolish view of child development. That sort of all of life should be like school for the child, where you know it used to be that the parent's job was to be sure the child is well fed, to house the child, to make sure that they've got clothes, to make sure that they're not breaking the law in some way the adults have always had some responsibility for that and, of course, the easy part to love the child. But now the parents are supposed to be teachers. They're supposed to be. You know.
Peter Gray:You get messages. I've even heard messages. You're supposed to be talking to your child while it's still in the uterus, because it needs to hear words, and statistics showing that middle class parents speak a certain number of words to their child every day on average, and so all parents should be doing that, you know, as if speaking words is the key to mental development, people automatically assume I'm going to talk about how parents ought to be playing with their children. No, no, we don't want parents playing with children. That's fine if you're really enjoying it, but that should not be the bread and butter of play. The difficult job for parents in this day and age, which used to be easy is to figure out a way for your child to be able to play with other children without adults around.
Kenneth Primrose:So I wonder it might be helpful to define play. You've got kind of four characteristics that make play what it is. Would you mind just running us through those?
Peter Gray:Sure. So I define play as an activity that has the following four characteristics. The first characteristic is that it's freely chosen by the child and self-directed. Play is something where the child is taking the initiative to do it and the child is taking control of how to do it. Now, when more than one child are playing together, that means they have to decide together. What they want always are playing with other children, except in our modern societies where we isolate children from one another. But normal play is social play with other kids. By and large, people want to play isolated if they're playing at something artistic or certain kinds of things, but for the most part, kids want to play with other kids. That means number one you've got to work with these other kids to figure out you've got to mess your mind with these other kids to figure out what you're going to play and how you're going to play. You're learning how to negotiate, how to compromise and so on, as well as how to take initiative. The second characteristic is that it is intrinsically motivated. It's something that you're doing for its own sake, not for some reward outside of itself. You're not doing it for a trophy or a gold star or great on a report card or praise from some adult. You're doing it because you want to do it.
Peter Gray:That's the characteristic of play that leads a lot of adults to think it's a waste of time. Why would you be spending time doing something that you're not getting anything for? One answer to that question is what's the whole purpose of life if not to enjoy it right? A second answer to that question is well, for parents who want to know what their child is getting from it. Think about all the commencement speeches you've heard where the new graduates are urged to follow their passions. Well, how do you develop a passion? What is a passion? A passion is something you want to do. Play is how children discover their passions and follow their passions. Now I've studied groups of people who are growing up without conventional schooling, who have lots of time to play, and a very high proportion of them discover some activity that they really love, they really become good at, and then they figure out a way to go on and make a living doing that. So that's one value of it If you are of the mindset that you need to see some cash value or some long-term payoff for doing what you want to do as a kid.
Peter Gray:And the third characteristic, which seems counterintuitive to some people until you think about it, is that all play has rules. People talk about free play or unstructured play, and I argue that there's no such thing as unstructured play. Play is always that. There's no such thing as unstructured play. Play is always structured. It's not random activity. It always has structure. But the structure is determined by the children themselves. And if you're playing a formal game, the rules and structure may already be there, but you are choosing to follow them. And most kids feel free to change the rules if they want to change the rules to make it more fun. So play is how children learn to create structure. It's how they learn to organize an activity, how they learn to inhibit their impulses. You can't be impulsive during play. You have to play within the boundaries of what you're playing.
Peter Gray:And the fourth characteristic of play is that, although it is structured, it also leaves enormous room for creativity and, usually, imagination. Play is, especially for young children, highly imaginative. It's how children develop their imagination. It's how they practice hypothetical reasoning. In your play you're in this hypothetical world and now you are thinking in this hypothetical world what's possible and what's not possible. And so children are practicing the highest order of human reasoning. There's good reason why Mother Nature gave children the strong drive to play and play in the ways that children do it when they're free to do it because it's almost the perfect design for learning the things that are really important to learn how to initiate activity, take charge, negotiate with peers, organize an activity and be creative. Children are learning all of this in play, and yet somehow we think it's more important for them to be studying arithmetic in school than to have that time to play.
Kenneth Primrose:Well, let's turn our attention to school in just a minute. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about what happens when they are play deprived. So we've got a mental health crisis, but what are the characteristics of someone who doesn't get those opportunities for imaginative, autonomous, intrinsically motivated play? What are the tell signs that somebody has been thus deprived?
Peter Gray:Well, I think all of what we were talking about earlier is relevant here. So how do you develop an internal locus of control? We've said an internal locus of control is very valuable for mental health. It's valuable for being able to initiate activities, take charge of your own life. How do you develop an internal locus of control? You develop by having control. Play is the place where children have control. In most of the rest of children's life they're being controlled by adults. But when children are playing in the way that I've just defined, they are in control. The presence of an adult ruins play. If the adult intervenes, or even if the children think the adult will intervene. If the adult intervenes, or even if the children think the adult will intervene, that ruins play. There's a lot of evidence for that. So when children are playing, they are the adults. They are the ones taking the adult roles and they're learning how to be an adult.
Kenneth Primrose:Excellent, that's helpful. So as children move through elementary, primary and secondary school, they are increasingly deprived of play. As you've noted, recreation time or break time has become contracted. Some places it doesn't even exist School, we think we kind of input things into the child so they will be a functioning adult. I wonder if you can just mention some of the principles you see schools operating with that are deeply problematic and challenged by the findings of developmental psychology.
Peter Gray:Yeah, I think the biggest problem with school is that it takes too much of children's time. School was never great, but in the past we had less of it when I was a kid in elementary school. The amount of time in school has increased by five weeks, the number of weeks of the year that children are in school. We've taken away a month of summer vacation and another week during the year. We've increased the length of the school day somewhat. We've decreased recesses and lunch hour and greatly increased homework. There was one study that showed that between I'm trying to remember the exact dates, but between, if I remember correctly, between 1981 and 1990, for children the age range of six to eight years old, we added seven hours a week to their school schedule. This is children six to eight years old. That's like adding a whole extra workday adult workday to the child's school day. This counted homework as well as being in school.
Peter Gray:At the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, both in the United States and in the UK, we decided that children should not be laboring at full-time jobs. But now we have children laboring at school for an equivalent number of hours, in many cases more hours than their parents are working to make a living, and it's the worst kind of work for children. It's sedentary, passive. Children are meant to be active, doing things. We have increasingly occupied their time with the worst sorts of activity just sitting there looking at worksheets. I know a lot of kids who would rather be working in a factory than going to school.
Kenneth Primrose:Interesting. So full disclosure. I work in a school Tuesday till Friday. I'm a teacher, but I have every sympathy with what you're saying. My values are often not well aligned to the structure of schooling that we have because of the kinds of things that you're saying. But I see school as a protective factor for certain children and maybe for quite a lot of children. If, for example, you've got a kid who truants, they have very little structure, they're not connecting with people socially like you are in school on a regular basis, then that can be one of the things that keeps them stable in life. They have points of contact with responsible adults, with social connection, that they were held to account in some way. I think that's not a small minority of people. That might actually be in certain communities, a lot of them. What's your perspective on that?
Peter Gray:I completely agree with you. We can't just turn kids out on the street and expect them to develop well in our world today. There was a time when neighborhoods were more cohesive. You could do it in hunter-gatherer cultures, but you can't do that today. Let me tell you what my ideal is.
Peter Gray:I actually got started in this line of research when my own son was rebelling at school from kindergarten through fourth grade, rebelling to the point where clearly there was no choice. He had to take him out of school. The school didn't want him. He didn't want to be there. He hated it. Every day he would say you're sending me off to prison, and he made it clear to the teachers. That was how he felt. It was a horrid experience for everybody. He's a kid who's very strong-minded and he won it. I would fight with him about it. His mother would. He ended up going to a radically alternative school called the Sudbury Valley School A growing number of such schools throughout the world.
Peter Gray:They still are a tiny minority of schools and tiny minority of people going to them. But this is a setting where there are kids from age four through high school age and they're not segregated by age. Part of my research is about the value of age mixing among kids, that age mixed play is more nurturing, more developmentally. You learn more when you're playing with kids who are older than younger than you than when you're playing with everybody who's sort of at the same level.
Peter Gray:So there's a lot of value of age mixing, and this is a setting that is not an anarchy. There is rule of law, but the laws are made democratically by the students and staff together. So there are lots of rules rules about behavior, no littering If you take something out, you've got to put it away. Rules about where you could eat your lunch and not eat your lunch, and so on and so forth. The rules are made democratically and they're forced by a procedure similar to the jury system in the United States.
Peter Gray:All children want to learn and do things that are in relationship to what their interests are, and if you allow them and provide opportunities to pursue their interests, they will become well-educated by any reasonable measure of education, and so I began this route by studying. My first study was of the graduates of that school. I was concerned, to be honest what if my son stays here, which he ended up doing throughout? What would be his school? He never takes a course, never takes a test. What will his future be like?
Peter Gray:So it turns out, the school had already, at that time, been in existence long enough that there were about 90 graduates, some of whom had done all of their schooling there. I as a scientist, wanted to look at those graduates, see how they're doing out there in the world. Part of my decision to allow my son to stay where he wanted to stay but also I got intellectually interested in this ended up publishing the study in the American Journal of Education. And lo and behold, they were doing very well out in the world. Believe it or not, this was the biggest surprise to me. Those who wanted to go on to higher education seemed to have no problem doing it. Some of them went to rather prestigious colleges. Right out of high school they studied for the SAT, which is kind of the college entrance exam for a lot of schools.
Peter Gray:They studied for the SAT, which is kind of the college entrance exam for a lot of schools. They studied for it deliberately, didn't spend a lot of time on it. Some did well and they went on. Those who didn't were people who didn't need it. They were people choosing careers that really didn't require higher education and, as I said before, one of the interesting findings was that a very high proportion of them I would say 50% by my estimate when I went through it carefully were in careers that were direct follow-ups of passion, interest and abilities they developed in play. They had the opportunity to play at different things. They discovered what they really loved to do, they became good at it and then they went on to turn that into a career.
Peter Gray:My ideal would be that this kind of setting be made available for everybody. It's safe. There are adults there. It's much less expensive than our public schools because you don't need so many adults. The kids are learning from one another. The staff members don't call themselves teachers, but in some sense they are. They're the adult members of the group. They're the wise elders at the school meeting. They don't have any more vote than the others, but they tend to have more influence because people look up to them and they have more ability to debate and argue the case. The adults play a big role there, but it's a much more natural role. It's a much more democratic role. It's like within hunter-gatherer bands the wise elders may have more influence than some of the younger people may have more influence than some of the younger people.
Kenneth Primrose:It's absolutely fascinating. I mean, it makes me think that the way you see schooling, it must be an absolute catastrophe to what's happening to young people. Being so deprived of this psychological development is very much an inversion of the way most people view schooling and education and indeed childhood and children.
Peter Gray:This runs so, contrary to the way most people think, that despite the fact this school has now been around for almost 60 years, it has a long history of success. There are about 20 schools modeled after it throughout the world maybe more, but they're all relatively small. The example has been out there for a long time, but almost nobody's willing to look at it. It just runs so counter to the prevalent belief about what children need growing up. People ignore it. It's not that people argue against it, they just ignore it. Every time I give a talk on this, people nod their head. That's a oh, that sounds terrific, but then they would never send their own kids there.
Kenneth Primrose:I feel like it feels somewhat risky in a culture of metric fixation. We're worried about not having things that are quantifiable. How can we measure that things are happening if they can't be quantified? I think that's part of the fear for schools certainly is that they're going to be measured and countries will be in the PISA tables and so on. How is that going to fare?
Peter Gray:I believe that the biggest mistake we make in our thinking about education is that it can be measured or that the same measure should apply to everybody. Education is a different thing for every person. You and I have different interests, desires and needs, and that was true when we were children too. But to try to put you and me through the same hole was a waste of time for both of us and probably harmful. One of the things you can say positively about our world today is there are so many routes that people can take.
Peter Gray:You know, hunters and gatherers. You're going to be a hunter or gatherer, right, but here there's no end to possibilities. Yet we deprive children of even learning about those possibilities. They have no idea what other adults are doing out there in the world. Some kid decides I'm going to be a doctor, but they don't really even know what a doctor does. They don't know what it's like to be a doctor. They don't have the real world experiences.
Peter Gray:So the other part of my vision for education is that once you've gone through this period of self-discovery and play, the next thing would be apprenticeship Do something related to the career that you think you want to go into, and so you get a realistic understanding of what that is. Do I actually like being around sick people? If not, I probably shouldn't be a doctor. Do I actually like the job that a lawyer has, or do I want to be a middle manager in a business? Do I really want to do that? It'd be good to have some experience, some relatively low-level job or an apprenticeship related to whatever it is you want to go into, before you spend all that money for a four-year college degree and then possibly more for graduate school or medical school, and then at some point. As an adult, you discover I really hate doing this.
Kenneth Primrose:Yeah, as you say, everything in school is abstract, but experience is really the teacher. It's the teacher in childhood and it's the teacher in terms of what you discover about your passions and what you're interested in and so on. But I'm aware and I want to be respectful of your time, peter, but I would actually like to ask you about the contemporary kind of backlash on smartphones, because you're someone who I initially came across your work through Jonathan Haidt, who's leading the charge on smartphone-free childhoods. I have sympathy because I see smartphones as pretty damaging to a lot of young people, but you're wondering if this is a moral panic and it clouds the real issue, which is kind of schooling and lack of free play. Is that right?
Peter Gray:Here's where Jonathan Hyatt and I disagree. So if you look at, let's take suicide rate among teens as our measure. But other measures of mental collapse would work too, measures of depression and anxiety. But suicide is a good thing to do because the way of measuring it hasn't changed. Between 1950 and 1990, the suicide rate among teenagers in the United States increased about sixfold. A 600% increase in suicide rate reached a peak in 1990. I told you that in the 1980s was the worst time. Now here's something interesting that almost nobody talks about. Most people aren't aware of it. Things got better between 1990 and about 2008. Actually, suicide rate went down about a third of the way back to 1950s levels. Other measures of anxiety and depression also went down for teenagers in the United States. Then, beginning around 2012, the rates went up again, finally reaching the 1990s peak. Jonathan Haidt doesn't mention that earlier peak. He acts as if this is unprecedented. We've never seen such high rates of depression, anxiety and suicide. Not true. We saw those high rates in the 1990s.
Peter Gray:The 1990s was before the internet, but we had already been depriving children of freedom to play and explore. Now two questions that I've been addressing, and I'm writing a book on this now. One question is why did things improve between 1990 and 2010? My answer to that is the internet. I have been writing about that. The internet brought new freedom to kids Everywhere. Kids learned to use computers faster than adults did. They became the experts on it. They developed competence of feeling. They developed a certain amount of freedom. They developed some prestige that they didn't have before. In almost every family, the kids were the computer experts who would show the parents how to do it, and now we had deprived them of the opportunity to play and communicate in the physical world. But now they found a new way they could do it online, and there are lots of studies showing that the more they did this, the more their mental well-being improved. Those kids who were online more were doing better psychologically than those who were online less. The myth was they were doing worse, but the actual research showed they were online less. The myth was they were doing worse, but the actual research showed they were doing better Online. They were developing connections, they were exploring interesting ideas. They were playing games real games, real play. Things got better, but then why did they start getting worse again around 2012?
Peter Gray:Jonathan Haidt thinks that it's smartphones and social media. I've gone through the evidence. It's interesting Almost everybody praises Jonathan Haidt's book To the Skies, except the people who actually do research in this area. They have all criticized it. They all say this is cherry picked. This is not a true story of the research evidence.
Peter Gray:The research evidence does not support the view that increased use of social media, increased use of smartphones and so on is a cause of increased anxiety and depression overall. That might be for a few people I mean, anything you do, there's always a few people but there's no evidence that this may. Among other things, while this increase occurred in anxiety and depression with the rollout, at the same time that there was rollout of social media in the United States and in the UK and to a lesser degree in Canada, it did not occur elsewhere. In all of the European Union countries it did not occur Taken as a whole. Over this period from 2010 to the current time, suicide rate has actually gone down among teens. It's been relatively flat, but trending down among teens in the rest of Europe.
Kenneth Primrose:Those kids are not deprived of cell phones and social media. Peter, there's a lot you've said that's really interesting. The idea of kids getting mastery on the internet more so than their parents. I can buy that. I can also understand that some data might have been cherry picked and selected certain years to show the hockey stick uptake, et cetera, and selected certain years to show the hockey stick uptake, et cetera. But I think the reason Jonathan Haidt's book landed so well is because we feel it. We feel the dopamine rush of Instagram, the addiction, the fact that we're disembodied. One of my biggest concerns about the new technologies is that they're kind of flat, they're one-dimensional, they're disembodied, they hold people in their grip. I haven't given my kids smartphones. I won't for a while because I think they'd play an awful lot less if they had them.
Peter Gray:So what you're saying is that you agree with Jonathan Haidt because it fits your prejudice, it fits your intuitive feeling, and so the actual evidence is irrelevant. It's your feeling, and I've heard this over and over from parents. I've heard this over and over.
Kenneth Primrose:Let me come back on that, because I did say that. But what I meant was I know very well from experience it's different from intuitive feeling or prejudice. I know that a phone will keep me up at night if I have it in my bedroom. I know you say there should be phone-free spaces, but I know it's addictive and it keeps my mind from idling or getting bored. It's a place of safety in some sense. So I'm not going to chat to someone at the bus stop if I've got my phone there. And you see it on trains, 100% of people have their phones out. If you go back 30, 40 years, people start small talk with each other and I see it as a force of atomization rather than you know, are you willing to throw your cell phone away?
Peter Gray:I find it too useful. That's why they've got me.
Peter Gray:Wouldn't you say the kids also find it useful. There is some harm potential. There's also harm in playing outdoors. What we used to do before we banned kids from playing outdoors, is we taught them safety rules. We said look both ways before you cross the street. If somebody stops their car, a stranger, and asks you, gives you candy if they get into their car, don't do it. We didn't deprive them from going outdoors. We should be doing the same thing regarding technology. We are in a technological age. You deprive children of a smartphone. You are depriving them of the single most important tool of our time Well, the biggest educational advancement that has ever occurred in the history of humanity. Why? Because you're afraid it'll keep them awake at night, All right. So have a rule Don't take it to bed. Safety rules don't deprive them of it.
Kenneth Primrose:So this is sorry we're out of time. I know you've got something on, but I think things like cyberbullying, where someone can insult their classmate without ever their mirror neurons don't fire, they don't see them.
Peter Gray:That surveys of kids who have asked them about bullying have consistently shown it's bullying in the real world at school. That bothers me, not bullying online. Online, I can just turn it off. Kids are not idiots.
Kenneth Primrose:Interesting, peter. It's really helpful to hear your perspective on that. I think I remain wary because I see technology as giving us convenience as opposed to what we need, which is real, embodied play with physical danger as opposed to the wild west of the Internet. Jonathan.
Peter Gray:Hyde believes if we take cell phones away from kids, suddenly they'll be playing outdoors. They were already not playing outdoors before we had cell phones. For all the reasons that I've given before, that's not going to be the problem. For all the reasons that I've given before, that's not going to be the problem. My experience is, for example, at this school I was talking about. They can be on internet all day long if they want, but they're not. And the reason is because there's a lot of kids there and they're free to play outdoors without adult intervention. When kids have a real open menu, when kids can play outdoors without adults controlling what they're doing, they will choose that. They will choose a mix, not everybody.
Peter Gray:Even when I was a kid in the 1950s, there were some kids who didn't want to go out fishing or playing baseball with me. They wanted to read. Well, they didn't get any outdoor exercise. Somehow they grew up. I still know some of my brother was one of them. He lived a good life. Different people are different. We now have had the internet long enough that I know kids who grew up and you would say they were just internet nerds. They're out there with good jobs now. They're happy. They've got families. There's a lot of different ways that people can behave and grow up. The most important thing is that you have a choice to make, and my observation is that most kids, when they have a choice, choose a pretty good balance between playing outdoors and being on the internet. But if you're not going to let them play outdoors, then they're going to spend most of their time on the internet.
Kenneth Primrose:Well, I think that sounds like a really helpful point we can totally agree on. Giving choice is crucial to a sense of agency, to developing an internal look of control, and so on. Yeah, peter, thank you so much for sharing your time with me today. It's been a real pleasure chatting. Thank you, it's been fun.
Kenneth Primrose:Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Peter Gray and I wonder where you stand on some of those controversial issues on schools, on autonomy, on phones. They can be divisive and I would love to hear what you think in the comments section, on YouTube or wherever you are listening to this. Next week, I'll be dropping an interview with the strictest head teacher in Britain she's often called Catherine Verbal Singh where we're going to be picking up some of these same issues but from a different angle. I'm going to leave you with a clip from the forthcoming interview now. In the meantime, I do encourage you to subscribe to like to get in touch. I'd love to hear how you are enjoying these episodes and what they're making you think of. Thank you very much for listening, and here's Catherine Burbleson.
Katharine Birbalsingh:So this idea that somehow it's wrong or oppressive to teach children how to behave, or somehow we're taking away their agency by teaching them the difference between right and wrong.
Katharine Birbalsingh:Pushing over the autistic kid is wrong. Being kind and actually to move in such a way that your basketball game isn't exactly as you would have wanted it, but you sacrifice in that moment to allow that autistic boy the thrill of jumping up and down in that one spot that he loves, this is a good thing. I don't see how this is a good thing. It's good to teach children kindness and decency and it's good that they can then apply that kindness and decency to making the world into a better place. And so when they see harm happening to another vulnerable person outside of school when they're older, they will then step in because they've had practice of doing the right thing while they were in school. If they don't ever have that practice because we say take away everything, no structures, just do whatever you want, if I'd done that in the yard we'd have to keep that autistic boy inside because he would not be able to jump up and down on that spot.