Dear friends,

Our next meeting for paid subscribers will begin at 1:00 pm Eastern time, Saturday, July 18.

If there is interest, we could begin with questions you might have concerning the article by Kaitlyn Tiffany about me and my forthcoming book that appeared July 9 online in the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, such a short article did not present much nuance. It focused mostly on the disagreement between me and Jonathan Haidt about causes of the rise in teen anxiety beginning around 2010 and generated, so far, over 240 comments, mostly (not surprisingly) negative about my views. Then we could move on to questions about anything having to do with the various themes of Play Makes Us Human.

If you would like to pose a question in advance of the meeting, so I and others can think about it beforehand, feel free to do so in the comments section to this post, available to paid subscribers.

The rest of this letter (below my name), which includes the link necessary to register for the meeting, is open to paid subscribers only. You can unlock that portion, and register for the meeting, by becoming a paid subscriber now (for $50 a year or $100 for a “founding subscription”). I donate all funds that come to me for paid subscriptions to nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives, so the money goes to good causes.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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Dear friends,

This is not my usual kind of Substack letter. I’m doing no research for it. I’m documenting nothing. I’m on vacation with my wife at our A-frame cottage on Blodgett Hill in Cabot, Vermont. I’m typing semi-reclined on a futon looking out at a beautiful blue sky above the towering green of the trees. I’m writing as I might in an actual letter to friends. I am not giving it a number, as it is not part of the collection of letters I recycle on Facebook.

I like to think of Cabot as “where I’m from,” but truth be told I only resided here year-around for two years—my last two years of high school. I’m a 1962 graduate of Cabot High School. But my parents and younger bothers stayed here for years after that, and one brother still lives with his family in Plainfield, near Cabot, so this is where I have for 64 years been going “home” to family. I also have ancestors (no longer living) who lived in this area before the ancestral branch that produced me moved to Minnesota, which is where I mostly grew up before we moved to Cabot.

If you have heard of Cabot, it’s probably because of Cabot cheese and other Cabot dairy products. Those now are sold nationally, even internationally, and are made not just in Cabot but also at branch creameries elsewhere. Cabot Creamery products were just local when I lived in Cabot. I worked for a few months in high school at the creamery, as an afterschool job.

Regular readers of my writings know well my distaste for conventional schooling, but I must confess that I liked Cabot School. When I was a student there, there were just 52 students in the high school, just 12 in my graduating class. The school is still going strong, with about the same number of students as it had then. Cabot has stubbornly resisted pressures to consolidate with schools in other towns, which attempts had been present even before I became a student there. I’m glad of that.

When a school is small and everyone knows everyone, it has a kind of family feel. At least that’s how I felt about Cabot School. Courses were adapted to some degree to the needs of the students, and I recall teachers and the school principal being rather humble and open to students’ ideas and opinions. We had most of the usual extra-curricular activities, and the great thing about them was that anybody who wanted to be part of them could be—in fact was encouraged to be. To have boys’ and girls’ basketball teams (which competed with other small schools throughout the state) we needed all the boys and girls who wanted to play, regardless of ability. Similarly with the boys’ baseball team. We also had a school chorus, student newspaper, student yearbook, one or two school plays a year, and a debate team that did well even against big schools, including those in Burlington and Montpelier. I was part of all of them. Our teams did well, but we didn’t feel much pressure about winning. We were in it for fun. We did well despite our small size because, in a setting where they know they can be on the team, kids rise to the occasion and become pretty good.

The A-frame cottage, from which I am writing this letter, was built by my uncle Wyman Smith shortly after I left Cabot to go to New York City for college and graduate school. I helped a little on a visit home one summer. Wyman is the uncle who encouraged my family of origin to move to Cabot from Duluth, Minnesota, where we had previously lived. Wyman was a lawyer by profession, but his love was maple sugaring. He had purchased what people call a “sugarbush,” here on Blodgett Hill, and spent as much time as he could working it. Helping him with the sugaring—at a time when we hung buckets rather than plastic tubing—was another of my learning experiences the two years I lived in Cabot. Wyman also was the volunteer who coached our school debate team and drove us around to meets throughout the state.

When Wyman died his children inherited the cottage and land (about 70 acres of woods), but after a few years I learned they had put it up for sale. I bought it to keep it in the family, I think in 1998, and have spent time here ever since when possible. My mother—who lived up here her last days—is buried on the property. She’s buried the way she wanted to be buried—in a pine coffin made by my brothers Fred and Barney, in a hole my brothers and I (her four sons) dug together in the woods. She wanted no marker, but her brother Wyman put a small one there later, anyway. I’m glad of that, as it has allowed me to find the spot and think about her from time to time as I walk the woods.

But now I want to turn my attention to yesterday, the Fourth of July, 2026, the 250^th anniversary of the founding of this country. Cabot regularly has perhaps the greatest small-town Fourth of July parade in Vermont. People come from surrounding towns to participate in it and see it. Not surprisingly, at such events my own eyes are drawn to the children.

After the parade, as people picnicked and examined the wares at various booths on the town common, children frolicked as children do whenever there is a bunch of them together and nobody stops them. I watched a kid, maybe about 7, somehow get himself up into a tree that had no lower branches. He climbed barefoot, and used his feet the way a monkey would. I watched kids chasing one another around, doing wheelies on bikes, climbing on the Civil War monument, and on and on—doing what kids are designed to do—and nobody was telling them not to. Maybe Independence Day, at least in Cabot, is Independence Day for kids.

We need in this country a new Declaration of Independence, a declaration that children, to grow, must have more time than we currently allow them, and more time every year as they grow older, in which they are not guarded and told what to do by adults, but are free to manifest their biological drive to make their own decisions, play in their own ways, take charge of themselves, and play with other kids unimpeded by adult-imposed constraints. For more on that, I refer you to Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids blog post, The Declaration of Childhood Independence!

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

In Letter #119, I asked two sets of questions:

1. When you think back on your secondary schooling (middle school or high school) what course or lesson seems most valuable to you now, in the sense that it has somehow enriched your life? How has it enriched your life? Do you believe such a course or lesson is sufficiently useful that it should be part of the required school curriculum?

2. When you think back about the years of your secondary schooling, what do wish had been part of the curriculum that was not? What course or lesson might have helped you best as you entered independent adulthood? Given that we have compulsory education with required courses, do you think that course or lesson should be among the requirements?

Forty-two people responded in the comments, 35 of whom gave answers to one or both of these questions. Here I will briefly summarize those answers and then present my own thoughts about life-valuable lessons.

Courses Readers Found to Be Valuable

Twenty-three of those who commented cited at least one course they took in secondary school that they have found to add valuable to their life. The courses listed covered a wide range. The only specific course mentioned by more than two people was typing (or keyboarding), mentioned by 6. Six others mentioned courses that fell into a category I labeled broadly as household skills, including home economics, cooking and nutrition, consumer education, and tool use. Some noted that these courses were not recommended to them in the academic track, but they took them anyway as electives. Four people mentioned courses that improved their ability to speak publicly (labeled oral communication, speech and debate, public speaking, and drama). Only 7 out of the 23 mentioned a course that we usually think of as standard academics. Those were world literature, history, English, French, Spanish, and precalculus. Nobody claimed to believe that the courses they found to be valuable should be required. Not surprisingly, most readers of this Substack agree that coercion spoils learning.

Courses Readers Wish Had Been Part of the Curriculum

Twenty-four of those who commented listed courses they wished had been available to them when they were in secondary school. It was apparently easier to think of these than to think of courses that were part of their curriculum and were valuable. The number of courses listed per person in response to this second question ranged from 1 to 8, with a mean of 3.6. In contrast, the number listed per person in response to the first question ranged from 1 to 4, with a mean of 1.6. And that doesn’t include those who said or implied that none of the courses they took were valuable.

To make sense of the rather large lists of wished-for courses, I categorized them into six groups, which I list below:

• Emotional and Social Wellbeing. Thirteen people listed at least one course in this category. Some of the specific ones listed were mindfulness, self-management, kindness, meditation, group decision making, trauma management, social skills, understanding others, empathy, nonviolent communication, conflict resolution, controlling stress, self-awareness, and science of relationships.

• Home Economics and Home Maintenance. Twelve people listed at least one course in this category. Some of the specific ones listed were home economics, home maintenance, cooking, meal planning, growing food, nutrition, tool use and repair, and fixing things.

• Practical Financial Information and Skills. Twelve people listed at least one course in this category. Among the specific ones listed were understanding finances, economics, accounting, financial planning, practical math, filing taxes, money skills, capitalism, and financial literacy,

• Critical Thinking and Logic. Eight people listed at least one course in this category. Among them were critical thinking, critical writing, applied logic, ethical reflection, executive function, Fermi estimation, reasoning, and learning to learn.

• Understanding Humans, Society, and Social Diversity. Six people listed at least one course in this category. Among them were history of human societies, world cultures, social studies, comparative religions, and human history starting with earliest Homo sapiens.

• Miscellaneous. Eight people listed at least one item that did not fit any of the above categories. Among these were computer programming, ecology, earth science, physiology and disease, systems theory, drawing and painting, and swimming.

My List of Courses That Would Be Valuable

For whatever it may be worth, here is a list I came up with, of courses I think should be available to everyone of secondary school age. (I generated a longer list, but this is all I have energy for right now.) I list them not in an order of judged importance but in the order they occurred to me as I was thinking about the question.

• Swimming. I’m probably biased here because of a long life on the water. Red Cross swimming is the only course my mother ever insisted I take. I was five years old at the time and still remember the struggle of learning the skill of rhythmically exhaling under water and inhaling out of water—an essential skill for feeling comfortable in water. My mother wanted to make sure I would never drown and would enjoy life on any of the 11,000 lakes for which Minnesota (where we lived) is famous. I am grateful for that. I learned early to be comfortable in the water and my life has been enriched by that ever since. I became a lifeguard on a Duluth beach when I was 16 and for four summers after that I was waterfront director and swimming instructor at summer camps. Today kayaking on rivers, lakes, and sometimes the ocean is among my greatest outdoor pleasures.

Surveys show that approximately 15% of American adults report that they cannot swim. Those people are in danger whenever they are in a boat or on a pier over water. Every year roughly 4,000 Americans die from unintentional drowning. That, admittedly, amounts to a small percentage of accidental deaths (dwarfed by deaths from auto accidents), but it is significant and largely preventable. Even more significant is that people who can’t swim, or can barely swim, are, by avoiding lakes, rivers, and oceans, missing out on joyful water adventures. Columbia College, where I was an undergraduate, had and still has a requirement for graduation that students (barring physical handicaps) prove they can swim at least 75 yards. Those who enter unable to do so must take lessons until they can. I felt at the time, and still feel, that swimming was the only Columbia College requirement that made sense. I would not oppose a policy requiring it for graduation from public high schools.

• CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation). Perhaps the most important things for people to learn are things that promote safety without detracting from adventure. Our schools might be more useful if they were run by the Red Cross rather than by people trained in “education.” On a statistical basis, in terms of lives saved, knowing CPR is even more important than swimming. Much more. According to the American Heart Association, CPR saves roughly 32,000 to 36,000 lives per year in the U.S. (here). It would save even more lives if more people knew how to do it.

• Home Economics. Back in the gender differentiated world of my school days, Home Ec was a course taken by all girls and Shop was a course taken by all boys. I’d like to see a revival of these, but without the gender segregation and with a twist toward all the practical skills involved in maintaining a household. We have way too many adults today who don’t know how to plan nutritious meals, or cook, or properly maintain a home, or raise their own vegetables, or fix things around the house such as leaky faucets. A result is that too many people are wasting money eating non-nutritious food out or ordering it delivered, hiring people to make small repairs they should be able to do easily themselves, hiring landscaping companies with big noisy machines to mow their little lawns, and on and on. There is joy in doing these things yourself and much money to be saved. Learning in secondary school how to do these things would allow people to live happier, healthier lives, on a smaller budget.

• Mathematics of Money Management. Speaking of budgets…. Most Americans are terrible at money management. They spend money on things they don’t need or even enjoy, run up debts and waste money on interest, avoid saving for retirement, and can’t manage tax forms. Imagine a course that teaches young people how to solve story problems such as the following: “If instead of spending $25,000 on a wedding you spent just $5,000 and invested the difference in a fund earning 8% a year, compounded annually, how much would that be worth by the time you retire, in 50 years?” (Spoiler: The answer is $926,385.88). Similar story problems could be about money lost paying credit card debt, or a more complicated one on whether a college education is worth it on purely financial grounds, depending on certain reasonable assumptions.

The course would emphasize the value of budgeting and always remaining within budget. I recall long ago reading a quote by some famous person that went something like this: “Earn X dollars a month and spend one more than X a month, and you live with stress and worry. Earn X dollars a month and spend one less than X a month, and you live happily and luxuriously.” While on the topic of quotes about mismanaged money, one of my favorites is an old one from Will Rogers: “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.” The people who benefit from our ignorance, of course, are the financial companies that lend money and the people who sell us stuff that we do not need and do not add joy to our lives.

• Probability and Statistical Reasoning. Aside from math related to money management, the most useful mathematics for most people have to do with principles of probability and statistics. A course on this could focus on many practical applications. One, related to money management, has to do with gambling. Currently, with the promotion of sports betting, huge numbers of people (including teens) are throwing money away, believing they can beat the system when they can’t. The same is true with state lotteries and all varieties of casino gambling. The systems are rigged so the chance of coming out ahead in the long run is nearly nil. The only sorts of gambling where skill is involved are those where there is no “house” running it to make money. A skilled poker player or pool shark who knows how to hustle might make money from those foolish enough to play with him or her, but otherwise gambling is nearly always a losing proposition. The course I have in mind would show why. Next to alcohol and other drug addictions, gambling is the surest way to ruin yourself and your family.

Beyond understanding the pitfalls of gambling, statistical reasoning would help people make other life choices. Concerning dangers that people fear and that limit their lives or their children’s lives, what is the likelihood of each danger? Instead of allowing scare stories to control our lives and our children’s, we should look for reliable data on actual probabilities. For example, on average, what is the probability of an 8-year-old getting a serious injury (or being sexually abused) playing an adult-directed sport compared to the chance of their getting a serious injury (or being sexually abused) playing with friends outdoors away from adult control?

The course could also help us think more critically and rationally about the uses of numbers by advertisers or by those who are trying to promote a particular idea or point of view. Even scientists often present their data in ways that make an effect seem bigger or more reliable than it truly is. When I was teaching statistics to social science majors at Boston College, I supplemented the main textbook with a little paperback, published in 1954, entitled How to Lie with Statistics. It was written by Darrell Huff and is still available. That would be a great book to include in a high school course. If everyone read it, we would all be wiser consumers of statistics-based claims slung at us every day.

• Skepticism. A more general course aimed at dealing with the information and misinformation slung at us every day might be called Skepticism or Critical Thinking. In this world of scams, exaggerations, and lies coming from our top officials on down, how do we know what to believe, or what to credit as “likely true,” “possibly true,” or “clearly false?” How do we distinguish among truth tellers, people who think they are truth tellers but are mistaken or ignorant, and out-and-out liars? Skepticism has become a clear survival skill. To be honest, it’s (sadly) way more important than swimming. There is no easy formula for distinguishing truth from error and error from lies, but there are lots of ways to help make those distinctions. There are lots of questions we should ask before making an important decision (such as whether to vaccinate a child) based on somebody’s claim. I imagine a course here in which students investigate claims made by advertisers, politicians, scientists, and social media influencers and hold debates about the veracity of the claims. What information must you gather to test the veracity?

• The Interdependent Web of Life. The course could also be called Ecology. For the long-term welfare of humanity on Earth, we need a populace that understands the interdependence of living beings and natural non-living entities and the disruptive effects of our human activity. We are already seeing disastrous effects of fossil fuel use, throw-away plastics, and the like, yet we continue our reckless ways. Ignorance or deliberate head-in-the-sand behavior may shorten our lives as individuals and as a species.

Concluding Thoughts

It seems strange, or should seem strange, that we have a compulsory education system that teaches stuff quite divorced from people’s real lives and needs, stuff that is learned just long enough to pass the test, by students who see no other purpose for learning it. If kids must go to school, we should at least be offering lessons that are likely to improve their lives in the long run. Here, readers who commented on Letter #119 and I have offered some suggestions about courses students might find valuable. (Of course, now I’m sure the public education monopolistic bureaucracy will jump to it and reform the curriculum.)

I’m not yet done with this topic. If you, after reading this, have further thoughts about useful curriculum reform in public schools, I’d love to read them. Put your thoughts into the comments section below. All comments written respectfully are treated respectfully by me and other readers, whether we agree or disagree. Indeed, disagreements can be especially thought-provoking and valuable. I do value reasoned skepticism!

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If you are enjoying these letters and can afford $50 a year, I urge you to become a paid subscriber. I use all funds from paid subscriptions to help support nonprofit organizations whose mission is to bring more play and freedom to children’s lives. Paid subscriptions also help convince me that people value these letters and thereby encourage me to continue. For you, one benefit is you will be invited to join me and other paid subscribers in a monthly online “Ask Me Anything” meeting and discussion.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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Dear friends,

As regular readers of my writings know, I’m not a fan of compulsory (forced) schooling. It wastes huge amounts of children’s time. In its modern rendition it is the primary cause of anxiety and depression among kids (see here). And remarkably little is learned, remembered, or used from all that time and effort spent. My research and that of others have made me a fan of Self-Directed Education (see, for examples, here and here).

In my most recent (June 20) Zoom meeting with paid subscribers to this Substack, one of the questions and subsequent discussion got me thinking along this line: Given that we have a coercive educational system, and given that for some time to come, many if not most kids are going to be victims of it, what courses should be required? What lessons are so important that we should try to get everyone to learn them? Let’s focus this question on secondary school, not elementary school.

Suppose we believe there are certain things everyone should learn so they can go on to live a good life—a life in which they are happy, can support themselves well, and contribute at least as much to society as they take? What are those things?

In other words, if our compulsory schooling system were truly designed to enable people to live a good life, and if we persisted in the (in my opinion mistaken) belief that certain courses or lessons should be required, what are those courses or lessons?

I’ve been playing with that question a bit myself and have some thoughts, which I’ll share in my next letter. But now, with this letter, I want to get your thoughts. Here are two sets of questions to you:

1. When you think back on your secondary schooling (middle school or high school) what course or lesson seems most valuable to you now, in the sense that it has somehow enriched your life? How has it enriched your life? Do you believe such a course or lesson is sufficiently useful that it should be part of the required school curriculum?

2. When you think back about the years of your secondary schooling, what do wish had been part of the curriculum that was not? What course or lesson might have helped you best as you entered independent adulthood? Given that we have compulsory schooling with required courses, do you think that course or lesson should be among the requirements?

If you have thoughts about either or both of these questions, please share them in the comments section here. Your responses, along with some of my own thoughts, will contribute to my next Substack letter.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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Dear friends,

I’m always interested in people who develop a passionate interest and leave their comfort zone to pursue it. One such person is Bernhard Warsitz, a secondary school teacher in Munich, Germany, who loved some of what was happening at the Montessori school where he was teaching and hated some of it. His love-hate feelings led him to take a sabbatical adventure, traveling partly by bicycle, to visit diverse parts of the world, interview people about issues related to education and human wellbeing, and create a documentary film The Forgotten Sides of Learning: School and the Crisis of the Psyche.

I invited him to write a guest essay about his adventure and, in that way, introduce his film to you.

Here goes:

Bernhard’s Story

The Forgotten Sides of Learning: A Journey from the Classroom into the Unknown

Hi everyone,

I’m Bernhard Warsitz. Since 2012, I’ve been teaching pedagogy and psychology to 11th through 13th graders at a Montessori high school in Munich, Germany. The story of my film begins there, inside the classroom and on our school trips to Albania, where we volunteered at care facilities for people with disabilities.

To be honest, I never wanted to be a teacher. I had dropped out of my traditional teacher-training program and earned a master’s degree in education instead, because the rigid, traditional school system had been a nightmare for me as a student. Yet somehow, at age 44, I ended up in the classroom. Fortunately, it was at a Montessori school, which promised a certain degree of freedom. And it was in some ways quite wonderful.

I used the curriculum merely as a springboard to reflect on authentic, real-world topics with my students. For example, in one classroom discussion a student shared a dream in which she was standing in a ditch by the side of the road, and her parents were reaching with their hands to pull her up. She explained that she didn’t want to let them help her—she wanted to take their hands, but at the same time, she didn’t. She felt torn and isolated. The entire group of students were moved by this dream and its possible meaning. I could see clearly that young people’s intellectual engagement is not distinct from their emotions and personal experiences. This view was reinforced by comments at a 5-year class reunion of former students, who had invited me to be with them. Many of them commented on how valuable the discussions of personal, sometimes emotion-provoking experiences had been.

The Turning Point: Despair Within the System

These meaningful connections, however, were only one side of my job. I also had to prepare my young friends for the state-administered Abitur (the rigorous German standardized graduation exams). This is where a story of growing despair began, which ultimately drove me to take a sabbatical and create a documentary film.

I knew every student deeply and cared about them. Yet, year after year, these exams came around, graded by external examiners in ways that seemed arbitrary and unfair. The worst part was that the human beings I had come to know and love suddenly no longer mattered. All that counted was a single, isolated performance on a test, a test that clearly failed to tap the richness of my students’ thoughts and understanding.

In my classroom, I had always tried to follow my students’ thoughts and understand them. In the world of standardized testing, that no longer existed. It was a world of absolute right and wrong. It was almost entirely about who was better at rote memorization and who worked harder to prepare for the test. The system ignored my students’ individual talents. Every year, the state exam results in Bavaria for Pedagogy/Psychology are low. Who is blamed for that? Never the institutions organizing the curriculum and doing the testing, but always the students, who supposedly aren’t industrious enough. There is zero accountability on the part of the state system. There is no attention to the issues that truly engage students both emotionally and intellectually.

After ten years of feeling powerless in meetings with external examiners—almost all of whom believed their own judgment was the only “correct” one—I couldn’t take it anymore. It became clear to me that I was working within a deeply autocratic school system. I was suffering under it as much as my students were. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world came to a standstill, I finally had time to think: What can I do to scream out loud? To take a stand against this absurd testing world?

Stepping into the Unknown

The spark came from Albania, one of the poorest countries in Europe. Before the pandemic, I had taken my students there to complete internships in social care facilities. In Albania, being multi-disabled often means being excluded from society. The students got to know and care about these people. One student spent an entire afternoon holding the hand of a bedridden resident. For that woman, it was the highlight of her day.

After our shifts, we would sit together and process our experiences. Many students later described this trip as the highlight of their school career. For me, too, these were the most moving moments of my life as a teacher. We debated boundaries, closeness and distance, dignity, and appreciation. The teenagers were flooded with intense impressions that overwhelmed them at first, but they grew through sharing their feelings and thoughts. These were incredibly humanizing experiences. We all grew closer to one another, and the students surpassed themselves. These experiences were the opposite of the state system: no preordained goals, no standardized outcomes, but authentic experiences as a foundation for reflection. That was my goal.

In 2019, I was fortunate to have a student named Anton Geiselbrechtinger on the trip. For his independent 8th-grade Montessori thesis project, he had taught himself how to film and edit. He captured the essence of our journey in a 90-second film—no commentary, just raw images, perspectives, and music. That film touched my soul. I asked Anton if he wanted to make a full-length documentary with me. He said yes.

He, 35 years younger than me, became my film mentor and sharpest critic, my ‘critical friend’. He challenged my script ideas; beautifully shaped the composition of words, imagery, and music. His help in the filming and editing was invaluable.

There is so much to be gained from recognizing and fostering the passions of our students, which rarely have to do with the school-imposed curriculum.

I took a sabbatical and planned a journey to explore two major themes—the relation of schooling to societal authoritarianism and the relation of school to young people’s mental health. I had no script, no filmmaking background, no experience in the documentary world. But with Anton’s help and a burning desire do something meaningful, I pushed forward into the unknown. Sometimes traveling with Anton or another companion, but mostly alone, I hit the road.

On a Folding Bike Through Europe: Encounters That Changed Everything

I love trains, ferries, and my folding e-bike. My first major destination was Romania. To get there, I took a ferry across the Mediterranean from Italy to Albania and navigated from there to Romania using my folding bike and local trains.

As I left the port of Durrës, my navigation app guided me along a beautiful route far from the busy main roads. The landscape became increasingly rural, nature felt close enough to touch, and the scent of the Mediterranean coastal macchia filled the air. In that moment, I felt the thing I love most: freedom. As I rode along that road, thinking freely, the question that had plagued me for years bubbled up: “Bernhard, what are you doing here?” But this time the thought was comfortable. I knew that this was exactly the right place for me to be, right now. I was immersed in uncertainty but knew I had the freedom to at least try to do something meaningful. I felt a deep sense of vitality. This is my life.

In Romania, I wanted to meet someone I had often introduced to my students during lessons on social work: Jenny Rasche. She is the mother of seven biological and eleven adopted children and runs an organization that helps children in dire need near Sibiu. At age 19, Jenny had visited Romania for the first time. In the middle of a freezing night, she and her boyfriend picked up a hitchhiking young Sinti and Roma mother with a child who was insufficiently clothed for the weather. That night, she ended up in a slum. On pure impulse, Jenny decided to help, and the help continued. Today, her organization has built 158 permanent houses and eliminated hunger for countless families, ensuring that—as she puts it—“a new generation can grow up learning to feel their own worth and embrace education.” In 2021, the EU honored her as a Woman of Action.

I wanted to understand what decades of poisonous pedagogy under the Ceaușescu autocracy - which produced some of the worst orphanages in human history - had done to the people. And I wanted to see how Jenny manages to interact with her employees, who grew up under that system of subjugation, in ways that help them rebuild their sense of agency and self-esteem. Jenny herself grew up in East Germany, making her a child of autocracy as well. This was my first film topic: authoritarianism.

Jenny generously permitted me to shadow and film her for three weeks. I have never met another human being with such energy. She works 12 to 16 hours a day to ensure that people can live in dignity and, what moved me deeply, die in dignity as well. While I was there, she rescued a completely neglected, severely disabled child from a state institution, Christoph, 15 years old, who weighed just 30 pounds (14 kilograms). His limbs were shockingly frail. Jenny had fought with the officials to get him. She provided him with medical care and brought him into her own home, making him part of her family. For a long time, it was uncertain if he would survive. He did. Jenny explained to me that she prefers to take in the toughest “system-crashers”—the ones who have nowhere else to go. She believes that no child is a lost cause; they just need a safe harbor to heal and pull their life together.

Uncovering the Youth Mental Health Crisis: From Herbert Renz-Polster to Peter Gray

After my time with Jenny Rasche, with my growing concern about the harm of an authoritarian mindset and lack of emotional security for children, I made my way to the home of the German scholar and author of the 2009 bestseller Understanding Childen, Dr. Herbert Renz-Polster. In our interview, we spoke about the first system of governance a person experiences, the family. He described a study by the advocacy organization Save the Children, which ranked U.S. states based on where children experience the greatest emotional and physical abuse. The study revealed that those states correlated perfectly with the states where Donald Trump received the most votes in the 2016 election.

According to Renz-Polster, the study illuminates an underlying psychological mechanism: Those who experience harshness, helplessness, and submission during childhood often crave authoritarian structures and strongman leaders later in life to compensate for their deep-seated insecurity. The autocratic structure of modern schooling and upbringing worldwide may be part of what fuels the shift toward societal autocracy we are witnessing, especially among young people. I wanted to show this in the film.

As my journey continued, the second major theme took center stage, the dramatic decline in youth mental health. I had previously listened to Peter Gray give an online lecture in Germany. His insights on the fundamental importance of free play resonated deeply with me, and after reading his book Free to Learn, I knew I had to interview him. I deeply respect pedagogical thinkers like Herbert Renz-Polster, Peter Gray, Remo Largo, Janusz Korczak, and Maria Montessori who anchor their thinking on knowledge about our evolutionary roots. Peter agreed to an online interview.

Our conversation became a game changer, altering my travel itinerary. Peter argued that the common narrative blaming smartphones and social media as the primary cause of a sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide among adolescents is not supported by research. Instead, he pointed out that schools’ increasing reliance on standardization, high-stakes testing, and top-down state control of curricula has created severe, chronic psychological stress among students.

The Tragic Side of School Reform in India

Knowing that India had aggressively aligned its school system with this Western, hyper-competitive model over the last 15 years, I looked into the data there. The findings were horrifying. The increase in youth suicides from 2009 to 2021 was nearly 400%. I immediately decided to travel to Delhi and Jaipur, where I had excellent connections to local schools, as I had previously organized school exchange programs there.

What I found in India weighed heavily on my heart. In one of my many interviews, I met 16-year-old Samriddhi. She unhesitatingly and dramatically confirmed Peter’s theories: “Academic competition is killing many of the children here in India.” With courageous vulnerability, she shared how much she suffers under the system. She cannot celebrate her successes because an internal expectation immediately demands that she must do even better. A profound sense of insecurity follows her everywhere. Even if 100 people agree with her, it takes just one critic to trigger an existential self-doubt. It is easy to see how a system that looks continuously for mistakes, and which sees achievement, by the superficial criteria the system establishes, as a measure of young people’s worth, creates deep-seated anxiety.

An Indian teacher pointed out one of the core problems with the system. In schools, we ask almost exclusively closed-ended questions instead of asking open-ended ones that allow for individual thought and creation. Closed questions, which lend themselves to standardized testing, have fixed answers and promote memorization. Open questions lead to creativity, personal takeaways, and self-actualization. So simple, yet so profoundly true.

On top of the school pressure, the students in Delhi live under a permanent, toxic cloud of smog, surrounded by plastic waste. The weight of global crises, wars, and climate change rests heavily on this new generation, not just in India but also with my students back in Germany and everywhere. In contrast to the serious local and world problems to be solved, the problems put to students by standard curricula in schools are largely meaningless.

Learning as Discovery: Learning from a Former Student in Uganda

At the end of my journey, I traveled to Uganda to visit my former student, Alexandra Müller. At just 20 years old, she had already founded her own school there. I wanted to know what skills and competencies enabled her to bring such a massive project to fruition.

Her answer was revealing. First, she said, “It is so important to realize that you don’t hold definitive knowledge and that you don’t know better than the local community.” Talking to Alexandra, and weaving in Peter Gray’s insights, the circle closed for me: Most learning happens naturally when we stop trying to force it. It happens implicitly—through daily life, self-directed exploration motivated by curiosity, and self-directed play. It can be abetted by internships and projects without rigid lesson plans or standardized benchmarks. When we try to mold children according to our own agendas and force them into standardized molds, we crush their vitality and destroy their zest for discovery. At some level I always knew this, but my interviews with these insightful people made it clear.

What I Hope to Achieve with This Film

What, for me, is this documentary truly about? I have always identified with David in the David-Goliath story. I find it exciting to create something powerful from small resources.

Of course, I would feel good if the film broke even financially. But what is infinitely more important to me is that the film be seen in schools and be debated deeply among those who might influence how schools operate. I want to inspire many Davids to initiate their own journeys and help conquer the societal forces that are making people unhappy.

In Germany, I am organizing screenings where teachers, students, school administrators, and parents sit down after the film to engage in open dialogue. I would like to achieve this also in the English-speaking world, including the United States. I am looking for individuals who can help promote this documentary and organize events where we can reflect on the two parts of the film:

• Part I: Authoritarianism and School. The number of young people drifting into anti-democratic, extremist right-wing spaces is alarming. In Germany, that number spiked by 50% between 2021 and 2023; a third of all adolescents now hold views aligned with these mindsets. In the U.S. similar drifts are occurring.

My documentary suggests that the autocratic structure of our schools—where young people experience almost no agency and are treated as passive consumers at the bottom of a strict top-down hierarchy rather than as active thinkers and creators—fuels this trend. School must shift from a focus on ovedience to autocratic demands to a focus on active, creative participation in a democratic community that promotes self-efficacy and a sense of belonging. To achieve this, we need an educational revolution.

• Part II: Mental Health and School. Here, too, the data cry out against our current ways of schooling. Across Western school systems, a quarter of all adolescents now suffer from clinically diagnosed mental health disorders. Mental well-being must finally become more important than a high GPA or high scores on standardized tests. Instead of being a place of toxic pressure, school could be students’ strongest safety net. As Herbert Renz-Polster writes: Children do not become strong, curious, and creative by merely executing their teachers’ lesson plans. They must be allowed to follow their own learning agendas and shape them alongside other children.

I would be deeply grateful if educators and other concerned people in the United States and elsewhere would reach out to me about ways to bring this film and associated discussions to their local community. You can email me at warsitz@education-for-future.com.

Watch the English trailer here:

Stream the full film (for $6.99) here:

movie.education-for-future.com

Thank you for reading this.

Bernhard Warsitz.

Concluding Thoughts

Thank you, Bernhard!

Friends, I hope you will watch the brief trailer, consider watching the whole film, and think about possible ways the film might be used to advance public discussion about the need for a true revolution in how we do schooling. Bernard’s welcomes thoughts about how the film might be used, which you can email to him at warsitz@education-for-future.com. He has also told me that he would be glad to respond to questions you may pose to him in the comments to this letter.

Leave a comment

As the world moves ever more to extreme versions of Western style shooling, kids everywhere become increasingly anxious, depressed, and suicidal. It is time for a reckoning.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Our next meeting for paid subscribers will begin at 2:00 pm Eastern time, Saturday, June 20.

The meeting will begin with discussion of a question, raised by Moira Mills, about what “success” in school actually indicates and why it may not be a meaningful index of education. See her Substack post on this topic.

Then, the rest of the time will be devoted to any questions from participants that are in any way related to the themes of this Substack—particularly having to do with play, child development, education, and being a parent.

If you would like to pose a question in advance of the meeting, so I and others can think about it beforehand, feel free to do so in the comments section to this post available to paid subscribers.

The rest of this letter (below my name), which includes the link necessary to register for the meeting, is open to paid subscribers only. You can unlock that portion, and register for the meeting, by becoming a paid subscriber (for just $50 a year or $100 for a “founding subscription”) now. I donate all funds that come to me for paid subscriptions to nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives, so the money goes to good causes.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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Dear friends,

I have seen data like these before, so I should not be shocked. But every time I read of a new survey showing how restricted American children are I’m shocked again.

The most recent such study I’ve come across is one by the Institute for Family Studies. The researchers surveyed almost 24,000 U.S. parents of over 40,000 children whose ages ranged from less than 1 to 17. One question, pertaining to each child, had to do with parental permission for the child to go away from home without adult supervision. As illustration, I’ll present here the findings for 10-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and 17-year-olds:

…………………..CANNOT LEAVE

AGE …Home …Yard …Street ..Neighborhood

10 .……..28% ……58% ……88% ………98%

14 ……….11% …….27% …..55% ……….91%

17 ……….8% …….16% …….30% ……….62%

What has happened to us!

Looking just at the second data column, 58% of 10-year-olds, 27% of 14-year-olds, and 16% of 17-year-olds cannot leave their own yard without adult accompaniment. And looking at the last column, 98% of 10-year-olds, 91% of 14-year-olds, and 62% of 17-year-olds cannot leave their own neighborhood without adult accompaniment. There is no way to describe this other than to say it is both crazy and cruel (though not deliberately cruel).

The study further showed that these data are very little affected by the nature of the neighborhood or the socioeconomic class of the respondents. Children and teens in neighborhoods rated by the EPA as highly “walkable” were just as restricted in movement as those in neighborhoods rated as less walkable, and the findings were very similar across socioeconomic groups.

Remarkably, in the same survey, 62% of parents said that children in the 8 to 12-year-old range should receive more supervision than they currently do! It’s hard to imagine how that would even be possible, when 58% of 10-year-olds are not allowed to leave their own yard without an adult guard.

One of the clear effects of such restraints on independent movement is loss of opportunity to socialize and make friends with other kids. The researchers found that, regardless of age, the primary variable affecting children’s time spent with other children, outside of school or other adult-controlled activities, was their degree of freedom to travel away from home on their own.

What has happened to us! If I put a question mark at the end of that sentence rather than an apostrophe, I have a lot to say. I’ve written about the societal changes that have led to such craziness and about the harm this has done to children’s development in previous letters—e.g. Letters #D4, #41, #52, #53, #54, #56, #68, #73, #79. My new book, Restoring Childhood (to be published Sept. 15, 2026), will give a full account of the craziness and harm and how we can reverse this child-harming trend. I’m keeping this letter deliberately short, not repeating causes and effects I’ve described before. But no matter how much I have looked into the causes and effects of such chaining of kids, each new study showing the degree to which we infantilize children and teens shocks me once again.

Are you shocked by such findings? The natural goal of children is to grow up—to become increasingly independent and responsible for themselves with each passing year. We are preventing children from doing what they are biologically, for good evolutionary reasons, designed to do. So, of course, they are suffering. Of course, as kids have become more chained over decades, they have become increasingly anxious, depressed, and suicidal. There should be no mystery about it.

Sadly.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Several people have suggested that I occasionally post Substack letters announcing upcoming events that I’m involved in that are open to the public and new articles that may be of general interest. Here is the first such letter.

This Wednesday, June 3, 12:00-1:00 pm EST. National Learning Institute Webinar

This free webinar opens with a recording of a talk I presented at a recent NLI convention, entitled The Forces That Have Brought Kids Indoors, and How We Can Get Them Out Again. This will be followed by about half an hour of facilitated Q&A/discussion, live, with me. Here is the link to register for this event.

Summary of the presentation: Over the past 75 years, multiple societal forces have combined to limit children’s free play, independence, and outdoor freedom. What are these forces—and what movements are countering them? If we want children outdoors more, we must give them the freedom to play outside with peers, without adult interference. That is the challenge.

Thursday, June 11, My Presentation at the AERO (Alternative Education Resources Organization) Conference in Manchester, NH.

This in-person conference will run from June 11-13, at St Anselm College, Manchester, NH. My presentation will be from 1:00 to 2:30 June 11. It will be a précis to my new book (to be published in September of this year), entitled Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in an Age of Anxiety. You can find out more about the conference and purchase tickets at the conference website. It would be great to see you there.

Looking Ahead. Outdoor Play the Scottish Way!

I am delighted to announce that I will be joining Rusty Keeler, Cameron Sprague, and the Stramash team on what promises to be an amazing week-long professional learning journey, exploring pioneering outdoor nurseries and play environments in Scotland, March 1-7, 2027. I’m announcing this now because this event is very likely to sell out well in advance of the start date. It will be limited to 20 participants. For more information, and to reserve your spot for this adventure, see the event website here.

New Free Brief Article Published by Big Think, in May 2026 Issue

You may enjoy this whole issue, entitled The Power of Play. My article, which you will find there, is titled What Children Learn When Adults Aren’t Around.

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Please this with others who might be interested in any of these.

Share

Happy June.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

For the past three years, I have been deeply immersed in the research literature pertaining to changes in children’s and teens’ mental health over the past 75 years and the societal changes that have caused those mental health changes. (This was on top of decades of previous research into conditions that promote children’s healthy psychological development.) If you have been following this Substack since its inception three years ago, you have seen some of the preliminary fruits of that immersion.

Now comes the whole story, refined, integrated, in the form of my new book, to be published by Penguin Random House, Sept. 15 of this year. The full title is Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. It is heavily research-based, as you would guess if you have been following my work, but fleshed out with stories from my own life experience over the decades described in the book.

I want you, my Substack subscribers and followers, to be among the first to read the book. You will have opportunities, here and elsewhere, to give me your thoughts about it after you have read it. Those of you who have been regular readers of Play Makes Us Human deserve my thanks, as your reading and comments have helped keep me on task and sharpened my thinking.

I could have called the book Destroying Childhood (one possible title I flirted with was Huckleberry Chained) as much of it deals with the ways we have, as a society, restricted children’s natural ways of being, their natural ways of growing up, by preventing them from behaving as Mother Nature (my anthropomorphic term for natural selection) intended. But that title would have been a downer. I am optimistic. We can restore what we have destroyed. In the book, I describe multiple societal changes that have reduced children’s freedom to be children. In one chapter, I describe in some detail eleven of those changes. The longest chapter by far, however, is the last one, in which I set out, in concrete terms, ways that all of us, regardless of our position in society, can help restore childhood.

I’m deliberately keeping this short. I don’t want to give away too much. But you can read more about the questions the book addresses, and find links to preorder the book, on the book page of my personal website. I do hope you will preorder it soon. Preorders help convince retailers that there is demand and prompt them to stock up and promote the book. By preordering, you will be assured to be among the first to receive the book after Sept. 15 and will be doing me and the book’s cause a favor by helping to demonstrate the book’s potential to reach a large, broad set of readers.

Please share this letter with everyone you know who might be interested in Restoring Childhood (the book and the act).

Share

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

PS: What do you think of the cover? Do you get it? Those kids are going away from us, and we are letting them go. But we’ve made sure they’re wearing helmets!

A few weeks ago, I was walking in the woods near my home, as I often do, and I happened upon a trail I had not been on before. As I was walking, I came across two piles covered with tarps. Next to one was a sign saying, “Let Children Play.” Wow. I lifted the tarps. In the photos here you can see what I found—loose parts for play.

Wow again. This is what I keep telling people. If you want to get kids to like the woods, you must find ways for them to play in the woods, more specifically, play with other kids in the woods, with no or minimal direct adult involvement. Someone had done it. This charming spot had more than piles of human-made loose parts, it also had the playthings that nature provides—trees, boulders, dirt, mud, and sticks. All just an easy couple of miles walk from my home.

I put the tarps back over the loose parts and when I got home I did some Googling and made a phone call and found that the “someone” who set this up is Megan Devendorf. She was as surprised to learn that I live near her play area as I was to discover her play area near me. To make it all legal, she had formed an LLC and contracted with the person who owns the woods. (See her website.) She invited me to visit at any of her “Play Fridays,” and today (the day I am writing this, Friday, May 22) I made that visit.

Because school is still in session, the kids were mostly preschool age, though there was one 8-year-old. There were probably about 12 kids (I didn’t think to count), and parents were sitting on blankets talking with one another, letting the kids play, not even paying much attention when the kids were engaged in what some might think of as “risky” adventures.

I focused most of my attention on kids who were very carefully climbing up the side of a boulder and sliding down a plastic slide that had been set up against it. I was impressed by their natural caution. This was difficult for some of them and a bit scary. They moved carefully, testing each foothold before putting weight on it, especially the first few times. The biggest challenge was climbing up the back of the boulder, and some of the little ones couldn’t do it, though they tried persistently. I was pleased that no adults came over to help them up or to stand guard in case someone fell.

I was even more pleased when the 8-year-old (the one in the green shirt), seeing the little kids struggle, unearthed a little ladder from the loose parts pile and brought it over. No adult prompted him to do it. He saw what the little kids needed and provided it. Now all kids could get to the top and slide. As I keep saying, when kids play in age-mixed groups, everyone benefits.

There should be nothing surprising about this. Kids are amazingly competent in play. It’s just that many adults today have forgotten that or maybe never knew it, and, as a consequence, intervene in kids’ play and prevent them from manifesting their competence. The parents of these lucky kids did not intervene.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Netflix is airing a 4-part “Lord of the Flies” series based, of course, on William Golding’s classic 1954 novel by that name. It strikes me, therefore, that this would be a good time to re-post an essay about Golding and his famous novel that I posted originally on my Psychology Today blog nearly 6 years ago. Here goes:

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“Well, what about Lord of the Flies?” How often I have heard someone say that after I’ve talked about the value of children’s independent play, away from adults, or about a democratic school where children of a wide range of ages interact without adult supervision. “Lord of the Flies” is the shorthand that people use to express the belief that children are incapable of self-discipline and will eventually run amok and attack one another if not supervised by adults. My first response, when I hear this expression, has always been, “Well, you know, Lord of the Flies is a work of fiction.”

William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, as you probably know, is about a group of British schoolboys who were stranded on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. At first, they cooperated and worked out rational survival strategies, but, over time, the worst instincts of the least disciplined of them took over and they broke into warring factions. By the time a rescue ship arrived, three of the boys were dead and the island was in flames. Golding saw it as a story about human nature, not just children’s nature, but because the characters are children, it is passed along as a lesson about children’s nature, especially boys’ nature.

In the real world, children rarely, if ever, act like the fictitious children of Lord of the Flies. When children become brutal, there are usually adults leading or provoking the brutality. When real children are abandoned and realize their lives are in danger, their survival instincts kick in and lead them to cooperate even more than they normally do. They know, deep in their DNA that cooperation is their only chance of saving themselves.

Think, for example, of the Lost Boys of Sudan—the thousands of orphaned boys who, in groups of various sizes, escaped the genocide in their homeland and trekked, in some cases thousands of miles, toward refugee camps, helping one another along the way. Generally, the older boys were the leaders in any given group, but in some groups, those older boys were as young as 10 to 12 years old.

A true-life example of boys stranded on a deserted island

The Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman, some years ago, unearthed a nearly lost true story of boys who actually were stranded on an uninhabited island, much like the island of Golding’s fantasy, and he wrote about it in his wonderful book Humankind.

The boys were students at a strict Catholic boarding school, in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, who, sick of school, decided to “borrow” (without permission) a fishing ship and escape to Fiji, about 500 miles away. But they didn’t know much about sailing, and a storm came up and ruined the ship. After eight days of drifting, they came to an uninhabited Island. The boys were on the island for 15 months, beginning in June of 1965, until they saw and hailed a passing ship and were rescued. Bregman managed to locate the ship captain and one of the boys—who were by then old men and were still close friends to one another—and learned the story.

The boys did quarrel, but they developed ways of resolving their quarrels peacefully. One of them managed to create a fire by rubbing sticks together, and they carefully kept the fire going the whole time they were there. They figured out what they could eat. They created a garden. They kept regular watch to hail any ship that might pass. They made a sort of guitar using driftwood, a coconut shell, and steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat and played it to lift their spirits. One of the boys fell and broke a leg, but the others managed to set it and all of them took care of that boy as he healed. They survived a severe summer drought by taking great care of what water they could find.

When they were finally rescued, the doctor who examined them was amazed at their excellent health and at how well the boy’s broken leg had been set and had healed. The conditions of this real-life story were very much like those of Golding’s fiction, but the outcome was entirely different.

The attraction of schools to Golding’s book

In 2010, Time Magazine included Lord of the Flies in a review of “The Top 10 Books You Were Forced to Read in School.” Yes, it’s right up there with Macbeth and The Scarlet Letter. I think it’s no surprise that this book is so often assigned in school. It’s a morality tale that fits with a fundamental assumption behind compulsory schooling—the assumption that kids just make a mess of things if left to their own devices.

As I noted in a previous post (updated here), schools, as we know them today, have their origin in the schools of the Protestant Reformation, which were premised on the idea that human beings are innately sinful and need discipline to drive the sinfulness out of them. Our secular schools today don’t generally talk about sin, but the premise remains that obedience to authority, not self-initiative, is the route to improvement.

It’s interesting to note that Golding himself was a schoolteacher, up until his earnings from Lord of the Flies allowed him to leave that job for full-time writing (Carey, 2009). I can’t help but suspect that classroom teaching played a role in the development of his book.

Keeping control of the classroom is the number one task of the teacher. Teachers who fail at that will be fired; teachers who succeed at it will be kept on, almost no matter how terrible they are at actually helping kids learn. Teachers have the constant fear that if their authority lapses, the class will erupt in chaos. They may be right about that, but that’s the result of the unnatural, repressive classroom situation, not evil human nature. In Golding’s Lord of the Flies, children released from the classroom with no adult control start killing one another, literally. It’s a teacher’s worst nightmare.

As Golding’s biographer (Carey, 2009) has pointed out, Golding himself had a very dark side, with which he struggled throughout his life. In a memoir that he never published, Golding admitted to attempting to rape a 15-year-old girl when he, at age 18, was home from college. He drank heavily throughout his adult life, sometimes behaved violently when drunk, was often depressed and had a turbulent relationship with his own children and wife. He struggled consciously with these aspects of himself, and his biographers attribute his book about the darkness of human nature in part to that struggle.

Well, that’s fine, but let’s not jump from Golding’s struggle with his inner demons to a conclusion that people in general, or boys in particular, are innately vicious and require authoritarian control to keep them in line. Authoritarian control much more often incites violence than prevents it.

And now, your thoughts

Readers, I’m curious to know about your history with Golding’s novel. If it was required reading in high school, what do you recall was the message reinforced by the teacher or class discussion? Regardless of when you read it (or saw the film), what impact did it have on you? Have your experiences with children generally affirmed or disconfirmed what seems to be Golding’s message? This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion, and your comments, stories, and questions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree.

Leave a comment

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind. English translation.

Carey, J. (2009). William Golding: The man who wrote Lord of the Flies.

Time Magazine (2010, July 9). “Top 10 books you were forced to read in school.”

Dear friends,

Our next meeting for paid subscribers will begin at 2:00 pm Eastern time, Saturday, May 23. This will be an “Ask Me Anything” meeting. I will be online from 2:00 to 3:30 pm Eastern time, and you can join me for as long or as little as you would like during that period, to ask whatever you would like. I can make no promise, of course, that I will have a good answer, but it will be fun to hear what you have to ask and, if I have thoughts, to share them.

It would be great to see you there, whether you have a question or not.

If you would like to pose a question in advance of the meeting, so I can think about it beforehand, feel free to do so in the comments section to this post available to paid subscribers.

The rest of this letter (below my name), which includes the link necessary to register for the meeting, is open to paid subscribers only. You can unlock that portion, and register for the meeting, by becoming a paid subscriber (for just $50 a year or $100 for a “founding subscription”) now. I donate all funds that come to me for paid subscriptions to nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives, so the money goes to good causes.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Read more

Dear friends,

This is the second of two guest posts (see here for the first) by Laura Kriegel, founder and executive director of a remarkable camp, Camp Stomping Ground in Middle Grove, NY, which deliberately brings kids together who differ widely in age, personality, economic background, and cultural background. Conflict is inevitable, and Laura’s theory—proven correct repeatedly—is that the role of adults is not to solve the conflict but to create the space and freedom for the kids to solve it.

Laura’s Post

When a fight breaks out between two kids, the adult instinct is to stop it. Separate them. Assign blame. Issue consequences. Move on.

We’ve built entire systems around this instinct: zero tolerance policies, behavior charts, referrals, suspensions. We’ve professionalized conflict management to the point where children are rarely allowed to sit inside a hard moment long enough to learn anything from it. The mess gets cleaned up before the lesson can happen.

Peter Gray’s work on free play has been making the case for years that what children need most is what we keep taking away from them - time, autonomy, and the chance to work things out themselves. And that sounds like conflict. Real conflict, with real stakes, in a community that trusts kids enough to let it get uncomfortable before it gets resolved.

At Stomping Ground, conflict isn’t a problem we manage. It’s the curriculum.

Jaylen, Darius, and Joseph

A few summers ago, two campers named Jaylen and Darius arrived at camp with a long history between them. Sometimes friends, sometimes rivals, they were placed in the same cabin, both jockeying to be cool, one edging into bullying the other. Darius was neurodivergent and wasn’t always reading the social dynamics clearly. Jaylen was frustrated. It was exactly the kind of slow-burn conflict that in most settings would get someone kicked out - the tension managed rather than acknowledged.

We didn’t do that. We sat in circles with them. Almost every day.

My camp director Klee and I kept showing up, kept asking questions, kept trying to help them see each other. We were coming up short. The circles felt repetitive. I wasn’t sure they were working.

Then a young staff member named Joseph said something that cracked it open.

Joseph was new that summer. He’d grown up in inner-city Rochester, and camp - the woods, the bugs, the whole unfamiliar vibe of it - was a stretch. He was figuring it out in real time, giving everything he had, not yet sure what he believed about any of this circle stuff.

In one of those daily circles, Joseph looked at the boys and said something like: you have to think about what people are going through at home. And then he named it. Darius’s dad was dying. Darius thought everyone was against him. He was moving through the world braced for impact, and none of his behavior made sense until you knew that.

Something shifted in Jaylen. A recognition. An oh. He realized he could let Darius’s behavior go. That it wasn’t about him. That Darius was carrying something enormous and didn’t have the words for it.

What made it land wasn’t the insight itself. It was Joseph. These boys thought Joseph was cool. He was from where they were from, he talked how they talked, and here he was, in the middle of the woods at this weird camp, naming big feelings out loud without flinching. That was the permission slip. If Joseph could do it, maybe they could too.

I called Joseph recently to ask if he remembered that circle. He did. He said it was a moment of clarity, for the boys and for himself. He saw, maybe for the first time, why this process works. Why it matters. Why you have to keep showing up even when the circles feel like they’re going nowhere.

Free time and a Container

No curriculum would have designed that moment. No adult could have scripted it. It required free time to build the tension, daily circles to build the container, and Joseph, barely older than those boys, still finding his own footing, to say the true thing at the right moment.

Here’s what we’ve learned from watching this happen summer after summer: kids don’t need adults to resolve their conflicts. They need adults to hold the container while they do it themselves.

We’re explicit about this from the first night of every session. We tell campers: conflict is going to happen here, and when it does, we’re going to talk about it. Not punish it. Not manage it from above. Talk about it. The norms are visible. The expectations are shared. There’s no hidden curriculum.

Sociologist Iannaccone, whose work Anna Lembke draws on in Dopamine Nation, describes this kind of transparent community norm as a “club good,” the shared rules that make belonging real. The clarity of what a community asks of you is part of what makes it yours. Kids figure this out fast. Within a week, campers who’ve never heard of restorative justice are calling their own circles, facilitating conversations between their friends, running the process themselves.

Zoe, Maya, and Conflict Resolution as Play

Two campers named Zoe and Maya (both now on staff) used to come to their counselor Klee every single day at age seven and eight asking for a circle about everything. She took my thing. She was mean to me. She’s not my friend anymore. Klee sat with them every time, patiently. What she eventually realized was that the circle had become a form of play. They were practicing it the way kids practice everything important: by doing it over and over, with low stakes, until it was theirs.

That’s the free play argument right there. You don’t teach resilience, self-regulation, communication, empathy, accountability. You build conditions where kids have to practice all of those things because the stakes are real, the community is watching, and there’s no adult swooping in to make the discomfort stop. The conflict is the curriculum. The mess is the lesson plan.

Agency and Empathy Grow Together

A 2024 study published in Conflict Resolution Quarterly tracked empathy and perspective-taking in adolescents during a two-week session at Stomping Ground. Researchers found that emotional empathy and perspective-taking increased significantly over the course of the session - not from instruction, but from the conditions. Autonomy. Creativity. Restorative circles. On days when campers felt more in control of their choices, they reported higher empathy. Agency and empathy, it turns out, grow together.

But the study can’t fully capture what I watched happen in that circle with Joseph and Jaylen and Darius. You can measure the outcome. You can’t schedule the moment. You can only create the conditions where the moment becomes possible and then trust the kids enough to let it unfold.

Learning Across Cultures

A few years before Joseph’s summer, I ran a circle that I was pretty sure had failed.

A group of Black kids from inner-city Rochester had come to camp. It was their first time in the woods, so they were apprehensive at first, finding their footing as the week went on. The way they asserted their belonging involved language that felt second nature to them and was devastating to a camper named Marcus, whose two moms are lesbians.

I called a circle. I brought in my Black male staff. I got on the phone with Marcus’s moms. I sat in the impossible middle of it. I wanted the Rochester kids to belong, knowing how much Marcus was hurting, trying to hold space for everyone, and I felt, by the end, like I had failed every single person in that room. The staff who had to over-explain their culture. Marcus, who deserved more. My own ideals about what a circle is supposed to do.

Marcus is on staff now. A few years ago, he wrote his college application essay about that circle. He got into Columbia.

He wrote: “I felt vengeful and wanted the other kids to be punished. But rather than retribution, the founder of the camp organized a circle where all of us discussed our perspectives on what happened. The other kids came from communities that normalized that kind of language, and they didn’t understand the serious history behind the words they used. Learning to empathize and communicate across differences is one of the most valuable skills I’ve ever learned, and I learned it from camp.”

He didn’t realize it at the time, he wrote. The learning snuck up on him.

After reading his essay I knew, for the first time after all these years, that the conflict circle had worked.

And Now, Your Thoughts and Questions

Thank you, Laura!

And now, readers, I’m interested in your thoughts and questions about anything relevant to this letter. Laura has kindly agreed to respond to any questions that are directed toward her. This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion, and your questions, thoughts, stories, and agreements or disagreements add to its value for me and other readers.

Leave a comment

If you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. I use all funds that come to me from paid subscriptions to help support nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children. Paid subscribers are also invited to join me for monthly online discussions.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

As some of you know, I have long been an advocate of opportunities for children to mix freely across wide spans of ages. See, for example, my Substack Letters #10, #11, and #12 and my review of research on mixed-age interactions in The American Journal of Play. So, naturally, I was delighted when Laura Kriegel offered to share, with you and me, some of her observations about mixed age play at the camp she co-founded.

Laura and I became acquainted more than 10 years ago, when we were both on the organizing team managing the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) in its early startup days. Laura is, among other things, the artist who created the illustrations that still adorn some of the pages of the ASDE website (e.g. here). Laura went on to co-found and serve as executive director of a remarkable, sliding-scale tuition, summer camp, Camp Stomping Ground, in Middle Grove, NY, based on principles advocated by ASDE. It is a place where children of a wide range of ages play freely, where children’s rights are respected, and where the major lessons—learned largely in play—are lessons of personal responsibility, empathy, and conflict resolution.

Laura’s Post

I want to tell you about two kids who couldn’t speak the same language and became best friends anyway.

Alannah and the seven-year-old boy

Last summer at Stomping Ground, a twelve-year-old named Alannah started spending time with a seven-year-old boy who had just arrived at camp speaking only Spanish. No shared words. Wide age gap. Different backgrounds. And for two weeks, they were inseparable: exploring, playing, figuring each other out through gesture and laughter and whatever universal language kids speak when no adult is managing the interaction.

On pickup day, both kids pulled their parents over to meet each other. Both sets of parents were surprised: different genders, five-year age gap, no common language. And yet there it was. A real friendship. Born entirely from free time and proximity and the simple fact that we didn’t assign it.

This is what Peter Gray’s research predicted. And it’s what I watch happen at camp every summer.

At Stomping Ground, kids ages 6 to 16 share the same space and make their own choices about how to spend their time. We don’t sort them by age for activities. We don’t engineer friendships. We trust the kids, and then we try to get out of the way.

What we’ve learned, summer after summer, is that when you remove the age-sorting that defines almost all other environments kids live in--school, sports, most organized activities--something opens up. Kids gravitate toward exactly who they need. And it’s almost never who you’d expect.

Max and the kid who was driving everyone a little crazy

There’s a camper named Max. He’s fifteen now, a big presence at camp, one of those kids who fills a room. A few summers ago, Max noticed a younger kid who was driving everyone a little crazy. He was pushing limits, using bully language, cursing, looking for reaction anywhere he could find it. The kind of kid who, in most environments, gets isolated or managed or sent somewhere else.

Max didn’t manage him. He just... became his person.

They’d hang out. When the younger kid was dysregulating, staff would quietly ask if Max wanted to take a bike ride with him. And Max always said yes. He was proud of that kid. He talked about him. He watched him settle.

At the end of the session, Max’s mom wrote to tell me it had been his favorite part of camp.

I think about that a lot. What Max got from that relationship wasn’t just the satisfaction of helping someone younger. He got to see himself differently. Somewhere in being that kid’s anchor, he found something about himself that structured mentorship programs, with their assigned pairs and adult supervision, tend to squeeze out.

The natural advantages of age mixing

Peter Gray writes about the way mixed-age play used to be the default of childhood: the neighborhood, the backyard, the street. Older kids naturally scaffolded younger ones. Younger kids stretched themselves to keep up. The age range itself was the curriculum.

What we’ve built at camp isn’t really a program. It’s more like a restoration of conditions. We give kids unstructured time and a diverse community, and we watch what they build together.

We see older kids unconsciously soften their language around younger ones. They do this because they feel the responsibility, not necessarily because we asked. We see six-year-olds run with teenagers in night games, holding their own in ways that genuinely astonish us.

We see it most vividly in the places where skills get passed around. In our Makerspace and Adventure Playground, kids teach each other how to use hot glue guns, how to hold a hammer, how to drive a nail without bending it. Nobody assigned this. It just happens: an older kid noticing a younger one struggling, a younger kid watching and then trying, a small moment of mastery that wouldn’t have occurred in a sorted, same-age group.

Sometimes a camper will offer an Option (our word for a facilitated activity) and it turns the whole age hierarchy on its head. Last summer a ten-year-old who crochets tiny animals ran a workshop. Kids signed up who were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. They sat with her and learned. She was the expert. She knew it. They knew it. And something important happened in that room that had nothing to do with crochet: a kid found out where she fits. What she brings. Why the community is better because she’s in it.

The importance of mattering and belonging

That sense of belonging, not just being included, but being needed, is, I’d argue, one of the deepest things free play in a mixed-age community can offer. Researchers who study happiness keep arriving at the same conclusion: humans thrive when they feel part of something bigger than themselves. Kids are no different. The ten-year-old teaching crochet isn’t just learning a social skill. She’s experiencing herself as someone who matters to a group. That’s not a small thing. That might be the whole thing.

In our all-gender cabins, we tend to have wider age ranges because fewer families opt in (though that’s steadily changing). That means in these cabins, there’s a diversity of wants, needs, and preferences all under the same roof, and they have to work together to decide what’s best for everyone. And they do. We consistently see something different from the same-age, same-gender groups. Less conflict. More of what I can only describe as family. Something shifts when the group stops being a peer cohort and starts being something more heterogeneous, more like the world.

Young counselors as extensions of the age range

There’s also what happens between our counselors and our oldest campers.

Our staff tends to be only a few years older than the teenagers at camp. That age gap, close enough to be relatable, wide enough to matter, is its own kind of magic. Counselors remember being fifteen at camp, remember finding their voice in a circle or their confidence on a stage, and they watch younger kids working through the same things. The learning runs in both directions. The counselors grow too.

Campers remember specific things staff said to them for years. They come back as counselors and reference moments from when they were twelve. There’s a thread that runs through this age-mixed community that I think is genuinely rare in modern childhood.

Autonomy and empathy

A 2024 study published in Conflict Resolution Quarterly tracked empathy and perspective-taking in adolescents during a two-week session at Stomping Ground. Researchers found that both emotional empathy and perspective-taking increased significantly over the course of the session. They also found that on days when campers felt more in control of their choices (more autonomous) they reported higher empathy

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. When kids choose who they spend time with, they’re practicing something real. They’re navigating differences, negotiating needs, figuring out how to be in relationship with people who aren’t their mirror.

Alannah and her Spanish-speaking best friend didn’t need a translation app or a structured activity. They needed time, space, and enough trust from the adults around them to let something unexpected happen.

That’s the whole thing, really. Get out of the way. Let them find each other.

Concluding Thought

Thank you, Laura!

I know from speaking with Laura that she would welcome qualified researchers who would like to conduct observational studies of children’s natural interactions in an age-mixed setting, also demographically mixed in other ways, that optimizes freedom and respect for one another.

And now, I’m interested in your thoughts and questions about anything relevant to this letter. Laura has kindly agreed to respond to any questions posed here that are directed toward her.

Leave a comment

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

In Letter #110, I describe Robert Epstein’s idea that teens in the U.S. and other modern nations are suffering because we fail to welcome them into the adult world. We treat them as children, when biologically they are young adults and in traditional societies would be treated as young adults. Epstein has been researching and writing about teens for many years, and I am convinced that our teens would be better off if more people were aware of what he has to say and the evidence he has provided.

Recently, Epstein and his colleagues have created a list of what they call “parenting competencies” for the effective raising of teens. They created the list by reviewing extensively the research literature relating parental behaviors to teen wellbeing. If you are interested in the research evidence, and in a questionnaire they developed to assess parental competencies, I refer you to their still-to-be-published article here.

In this letter, I simply list, with brief elaborations, the competencies that Epstein and his colleagues have described, for you to think about. When I am quoting verbatim (or close to verbatim) from their article, I use quotation marks. Other comments are in my words and to some degree my interpretation.

Epstein’s List of Competencies

1. Don’t Infantilize Your Teen. “Treat your teen like a young adult.” Research indicates that infantilizing teens is a major cause of their anger, defiance, and depression (see Letter #110). Your teenage “child” is no longer biologically or psychologically a child, and successful parenting requires that you adjust your manner of interacting with them accordingly.

2. Give Your Teen Meaningful Responsibilities. “Encourage your teen to make their own decisions and support those decisions even when you don’t entirely agree with them.” Recognize your teen’s need to take increased responsibility for their own life. Expect and encourage them to manage their own schedules, manage their own money, and take on increasingly responsible roles at home and in society more generally.

3. Love, Support, and Listen to Your Teen. “Try to maintain emotional closeness with your teen by offering them support, asking how they’re feeling, listening to them closely when they talk about personal matters, and reminding them that you love them.” The advice here is not unlike advice about how to maintain a loving relationship with your spouse. Be attentive, understanding, and supportive, not distant or authoritarian.

4. Nurture Your Teen’s Competence. Recognize and encourage your teen’s interests, strengths, and abilities, even when they are not what you would choose for yourself. Encourage your teen to do for themselves what they can rather than offering help they don’t need.

5. Support Your Teen’s Relationships. “Teach your teen about how to maintain positive and constructive relationships with other people and support the relationship choices they make.” Be welcoming of your teen’s friends. Make yourself available to support your teen in helping them solve relationship problems, including problems in romantic relationships, without dictating solutions, prying into their private lives, or being unnecessarily judgmental.

6. Manage Your Own Relationships. “Maintain a positive and constructive relationship with your teen’s other parent.” It can be harmful to burden your teen with your own relationship problems. Set a good example.

7. Help Your Teen Manage Risky Behavior. If your teen is engaged in seriously risky activities, help them make better choices while maintaining a positive relationship with them.

8. Manage Your Stress Effectively. “Take steps to reduce stress for yourself and your teen, practice relaxation techniques, and try to interpret challenging events positively. Take a proactive approach to stress management.” Your own stress can infect your teen.

9. Manage Your Teen’s Troublesome Behavior Effectively. “Manage your teen’s troublesome behavior effectively by acknowledging that they are not a child, allowing them to choose their consequences.” While encouraging a change in behavior, maintain empathy and remain on your teen’s side by seeing the problem from their point of view. Laying down hard and fast rules may work with young children, but is unlikely to work with teens. To be effective, you need to help them understand reasons for behaving in certain ways and not others so they make better choices. In cases of seriously troublesome or illegal activities, enlist professional help when needed.

10. Practice Effective Life Skills. “Practice effective life skills such as good hygiene, healthy diet, responsible money management, and getting adequate sleep and exercise.” You impart good adult habits to your teen best by modeling them in your own life. What you do is far more powerful than what you say.

11. Teach Your Teen Effective Life Skills. In addition to practicing effective life skills, it can be helpful to talk with your teen about those skills and why they promote health and happiness.

12. Support Your Teen’s Spiritual Development. “Support your teen’s moral, spiritual or religious development by manifesting these values in your own life and encouraging them in your teen’s life.” [I, Peter, would put the emphasis here on the moral. Research suggests that the most positive effect parents can have on teens has to do with moral values, the recognition that life is not all about the immediate, material here-and-now and that we have duties to others, including future generations, not just to ourselves.]

Further Thoughts

I offer Epstein’s list not necessarily as the best list one could come up with. I think some of these competencies are redundant with others and a shorter, more elegant list could be created. However, I offer it as something for you to think about. I think these are all good practices.

And now, I’m interested in your thoughts. Do you agree or in some ways disagree with the guidelines suggested by Epstein’s list? What has worked, or not, in your experiences as a parent to a teen; or what worked, or not, in your parents’ behavior toward you when you were a teen? I personally am very grateful that my parents began treating me essentially as they would treat an adult beginning even before I was a teenager. They assumed I was a reasonable person, capable of thinking rationally and controlling my own behavior, and I think that assumption helped to create reality.

Leave a comment

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Dear friends,

Our next meeting for paid subscribers will begin at 3:00 pm Eastern time, Saturday, April 25. This will be an “Ask Me Anything” meeting. I will be online from 3:00 to 4:30 pm Eastern time, and you can join me for as long or as little as you would like during that period, to ask whatever you would like. I can make no promise, of course, that I will have a good answer, but it will be fun to hear what you have to ask and, if I have thoughts, to share them.

It would be great to see you there, whether you have a question or not.

If you would like to pose a question in advance of the meeting, so I can think about it beforehand, feel free to do so in the comments section to this post available to paid subscribers.

The rest of this letter (below my name), which includes the link necessary to register for the meeting, is open to paid subscribers only. You can unlock that porstion, and register for the meeting, by becoming a paid subscriber (for just $50 a year, or $100 for a “founding subscription”) now. I donate all funds that come to me for paid subscriptions to nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives, so the money goes to good causes.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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Dear friends,

Teenagers in the United States and many other modern nations are suffering psychologically at tragically high rates. In the most recent National Comorbidity Survey, 49.5% of U.S. teens met the criteria for diagnosis of at least one psychological “disorder” using the official diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

I put “disorder” in quotation marks in the above, as an implied objection to the APA assumption that the psychological disturbances, like physical diseases, lie in the person. People following the APA manual speak about a person as having Major Depressive Disorder or Oppositional Defiant Disorder or ADHD much as they might speak about a person as having measles or diabetes. This is the medical model of psychological distress.

This way of thinking leads to the assumption that the route to solving the problem is to fix the person, perhaps with drugs or therapy or both. Drugs and therapy have their place and can be helpful, but the harm of this way of thinking is that it deflects attention away from the ways that social structures create problems for people. The focus of the medical model is on changing people to fit society as it is, when society as it is may be the larger part of the problem. I have previously discussed this in relation to the high diagnostic rates of dyslexia, ADHD and anxiety and depression in schoolchildren.

Recently I came across a 2025 article by Robert Epstein and his colleagues proposing a new diagnostic category to help explain teenagers’ suffering. They call it “extended childhood disorder” (ECD). Although they use the APA term “disorder,” they make it clear that they are describing something that lies not in teens themselves but in the interaction between teens and the social world we have created, a world that does not allow teens to transition smoothly into adulthood. They are proposing an alternative way of understanding the concept of “disorder,” liberating it from the medical model. In what follows I summarize some of the information and ideas presented in that article. For references to each of the points I make below, I refer you again to the article.

We have a long tradition of attributing teenage problems to their biology.

In 1904, G. Stanley Hall, an American pioneer of developmental psychology, published a highly influential book on adolescence. In line with the mistaken belief at the time that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (i.e. that humans develop in a way that mirrors our evolutionary history), he claimed that the teenage years reflect the time when our distant ancestors were “barbaric and tribal.” The psychobiological dissing of teens had begun!

As time went on and the recapitulation theory lost favor, attention turned to hormones. Raging hormones cause raging teens. It’s biologically inevitable. All we can do is try to direct all that hormonal energy in more positive directions. More recently, of course, with the advent of neuroimaging technology, attention has turned to the brain. Adolescents are accused of having immature brains, lacking appropriate connections from frontal lobes to more primitive areas, which leads them to lack impulse control. In a recent incarnation of this argument, the immature brain has become a reason to deny teens access to social media; the teenage brain just can’t handle it the way the adult brain presumably can.

[I find the brain deficit view to be especially odious. It is the same argument that not long ago was used to contend that women and Africans lack the mental capacities of white males. Whenever someone wants to deny basic human rights to a category of human beings, a common route is to point to brain anatomy. I plan to write about this before long in a future letter.]

Cross-cultural and historical evidence refute biological explanations.

The strongest evidence against all biological explanations of teen problems is that the problems are culturally dependent. Anthropologists report no apparent moodiness or other psychological problems associated with the teen years in traditional, pre-industrial cultures. Moreover, the historical record suggests that even in Europe and America teens transitioned rather smoothly from childhood to adulthood prior to the industrial age.

Epstein and his colleagues suggest that the primary cultural shifts that led to teen problems are those that cut them out of adult society and meaningful adultlike activity. In farming communities, where teens take on ever more responsibility for the family farm, or in craft communities where teens become apprentices, working along with adults, there is little if any evidence that the teenage years are more problematic than any other years. The problem, according to Epstein, is that we continue to treat teens as children long past the time when they are ready to be treated more like adults and be integrated into the adult world. We hold them back.

As a society we infantilize teens, preventing them from moving smoothly into adulthood.

Epstein et al. suggest that the cultural shifts in the U.S. leading to teen problems occurred most sharply near the transition from the 19^th to the 20th century, resulting from three large, legally mandated societal changes: (1) creation of a juvenile justice system distinct from the adult system; (2) child labor laws; and (3) mandatory schooling.

All these mandates were aimed, ostensively at least, toward improving the welfare of young people, but they had the consequence of stripping rights and choices away from teens, distinguishing them from adults as a separate category of human, and placing them increasingly under adult surveillance and control. The juvenile justice system effectively denied teens many of the same rights that adults enjoyed. The child labor laws made it increasingly difficult for teens to enter the adult work world when they were fully ready and desirous of doing so. And compulsory schooling locked them up, isolated from the adult world. Young people, ready and capable of more freedom, were increasingly denied freedom. They were increasingly treated as if they were young children (infants), incapable of taking on meaningful, responsible social roles.

In a previous letter I wrote about the value of a culture of childhood, in which children learn to get along with peers away from adult authority. I should have added there that by the time they are teens young people are ready to transition gradually out of that into the culture of adulthood. In traditional societies they do that. But over time, in our society, we have increasingly prevented them from that. We have stifled the biological imperative for young people, who have reached sexual maturity and are in many ways at the pinnacle of physical and mental ability, to transition into the world of adults.

Epstein and his colleagues suggest, with some evidence, that the underlying causes of teen anger, depression, and anxiety have to do with adult control and societal gates preventing them from becoming adults. In a preliminary study they found evidence that young people’s negative feelings about being controlled by adults and locked in with peers are sufficiently strong to potentially account for most of the high levels of anger, depression and anxiety they experience.

Further Thoughts

In their article, Epstein and his colleagues don’t discuss the changes in teen suffering that have occurred in the U.S. since about 1950, but I think their theory applies reasonably well to those changes. I won’t attempt it now, but an interesting exercise would be to go back to the explanations I offered in previous posts for the increased suffering of teens from 1950 to 1990, the significant decrease in suffering from 1990 to 2010, and the renewed increase in suffering after 2010 and describe them in terms of reduced, then somewhat increased, and then again reduced opportunities of teens to have adult-like freedoms, be recognized as having adult-like abilities, and be in some ways part of the adult world.

The theory is also consistent with observations I and others have made in studies of adults who grew up outside of traditional schooling, in homeschooling or unschooling families or as students at schools for Self-Directed Education (here and here). Such people regularly report that their transition from childhood to adulthood was gradual, continuous, and not stressful. Many began actively developing real-world interests that led to careers beginning in their early- to mid-teens, and a common advantage cited is that even as children, but especially as teens, they had adult friends who were actually friends, not managers of their lives. Conventional schooling is the major institution that separates teens from adults and infantilizes them.

And now, what do you think of Epstein’s theory? Does your experience mesh with it or not? This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your thoughts, including disagreements, are treated with respect by me and other readers.

Leave a comment

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Note: For reference citations to the information presented in this essay, see Epstein et al (2025).

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Dear friends,

Every state and country where school is compulsory is faced with the problem commonly labeled school refusal. Everywhere, a significant number of kids strongly resist going to school and manage to skip school frequently. From a legal perspective, refusal to attend school is a crime, and, if prolonged, it may be treated as a crime, even today. Psychologists, however (no surprise), are inclined to think of school refusal not as a crime to be punished, but as a psychological disorder that needs to be corrected through some form of therapy. Yet, as I read the psychological literature on treatment for school refusal, I can’t help but think of some of the treatments as punishment.

How Psychologists Describe and Attempt to Treat School Refusal

If you enter “school refusal” as a search term in any database that covers the academic journals in psychology, you will come up with countless articles devoted to the topic. If you read any set of them, you will find much redundancy. Most begin with some sort of statement about how damaging it is for a child not to attend school, with statistics showing that school dropouts have all sorts of problems throughout life. The phrase “normal developmental pathway” is used to describe the school pathway, and not going to school then becomes abnormal, pathological. Then the typical article goes on to define “school refusal” (sometimes with capital letters) in some more or less objective way.

The primary symptom is that the child fails to attend school at least a certain number of days per month, with no excused absence, even though the parents are trying to get the child to attend. The definition also includes an emotional component—most commonly anxiety—related to the child’s refusal. Most children who receive the “school refusal” label experience high levels of anxiety in school and when thinking about school (Tekin & Aydin, 2022; Snegaroff et al., 2025). Indeed, some researchers use the term “school phobia” as an alternative to “school refusal.”

Having defined school refusal, psychologists then go on to treat it as a diagnostic category. It is not, at least presently, an official mental disorder in the diagnostic manual of either the American Psychiatric Association or the World Health Organization, but it is routinely treated as if it were. In the articles one regularly comes across such phrases as “patients who have school refusal,” as if school refusal were something like measles that one “has” or “doesn’t have.” It’s not an act but a disease. Perhaps I should start referring to my vegetarian wife as someone who “has meat refusal.”

Treatments for school refusal run the gamut of typical psychological and pharmacological therapies. The most common treatment is cognitive behavior therapy, which attempts to get the child to think differently about school and to desensitize the child to those aspects of school that provoke fear, but drugs to reduce anxiety are also commonly used (Elliott & Place, 2019; Fernandes et al, 2024). Another approach involves family therapy, centered on the idea that this is a family problem (Snegaroff et al., 2025).

In a few cases, psychologists, with the parents’ permission, have resorted to inpatient therapy. For example, Ozger Oner and colleagues (2014) describe the case of an eight-year-old girl who refused to attend third grade because she was “afraid of the teachers, headmaster, and other children.” The treatment involved her incarceration in an inpatient facility where she received therapy and was dosed with increasing amounts of forced time in school, accompanied by a therapist. Only when she was willing to go to school on her own, after three weeks, was she allowed to go back to living with her parents.

Relation of School Refusal to Belief in a Just World

One research study, which I find especially interesting and telling, examined the relation between Belief in a Just World (BJW) and school refusal (Donat et al, 2018). The BJW construct is measured by a questionnaire getting at the degree to which a person feels that the world is fair and that people deserve what they get. In much of the psychological literature this construct is understood as negative. It is described as the just-world fallacy and a cause of blaming the victim, which is the tendency to blame people who are poor, or discriminated against, or are suffering from a disease or some other malady, for their own condition. If the world is just, then it must be something that they did, or failed to do, that led them to this condition. By thinking this way, people maintain their belief in a just world despite seeing what others of us interpret as injustice.

Some research—which is the springboard for Donat’s study—indicates that believing in a just world can be psychologically adaptive. People with this belief are less likely than the rest of us to get upset by injustice, because they don’t see it as injustice. Belief in a just world may even help them deal with their own hardships in life, because that belief may lead them to think that the pain they are suffering is ultimately for their own good.

(I can’t help interjecting here that high BJW may be good for the temporary psychological ease of the individual person, but not for society or the long-term welfare of individuals. If we all believed that the world is just, just as it is, we would still have slavery and ___ … fill in the blank.)

So, here’s what Donat and his colleagues found. Children who refuse school score lower on BJW than do those who don’t refuse school. This should not be surprising. If you believe that you are being treated unjustly in school, then you are not likely to believe that the world is just. Conversely, if you don’t believe that the world is just, you are less likely to believe that the seemingly bad things happening to you at school are for your own good. So, your beliefs about the injustice of the world and the injustice of school feed upon one another.

Donat’s takeaway from this research is that an underlying problem of children who refuse school is that they don’t believe in a just world. Donat, like almost everyone, begins with the assumption that school, though it entails some hardships, is good, even necessary, for children’s development. He goes from there to say that children who believe in a just world recognize that school is good for them and children who don’t hold that belief fail to recognize that school is good for them. So, if children were brought up in such a way as to believe the world is just, we wouldn’t have this problem of school refusal. Wow! (He doesn’t mention that we would still have slavery.)

Does School Refusal Imply that Something is Wrong with the Child, or with School?

The great bulk of research on school refusal assumes that the problem lies in the child. The assumption is that school is good, natural and normal, so there must be something wrong with a child who resists it. It is the child that needs fixing, not the school. This is the same reasoning that leads to the assumption that ADHD is a problem located in the child, not the school (see Letters #87 & 88).

While only a minority of children manifest anxiety about school to a level that leads them to refuse it, school is a source of considerable anxiety for most children. Indeed, in every study I have found in which children are asked about the causes of their anxiety, school is by far the most frequently cited cause (see Letter #51).

Research has shown consistently that schools can decrease the amount of anxiety they create by improving school climate, that is, the extent to which school personnel take students’ needs into account and make students feel at home, appreciated, and respected (see Letter #82). Not surprisingly, the few studies that have looked at factors outside of the child that correlate with school refusal have identified school climate as a major factor (Secer et al., 2025; Sorrentini et al., 2025). Children who feel such strong anxiety about school that they refuse to attend are, largely, those who feel least free, least respected, least appreciated by their teachers and others at school.

Perhaps the first thing we should ask when a child refuses to go to school is not how can we correct the child but how can we correct the school. What can be done to make this child, and all children, feel more comfortable and respected at school, whoever they may be?

School Refusal as a Human Right

Those who are regular readers of my Substack and other writings know where I am going from here. Compulsory schooling truly is unjust. It is involuntary incarceration. It runs completely counter to the nature of childhood and to children’s real needs to play and explore freely. And it is not necessary for normal development. That has been proven repeatedly by the thousands of families that have had the knowledge, resources, and legal opportunity to provide Self-Directed Education for their children (for some of the evidence, see Gray, 2013; Gray, 2023).

Many of the families that have chosen unschooling or a school designed for self-direction of their children chose that route precisely because their children were in one way or another refusing school (Gray & Riley, 2013). In fact, resources for Self-Directed Education can be provided with much less expense than standard public schooling and WAY less expense than incarceration in a juvenile detention center or a psych ward.

In a book entitled The Scarred Heart, published many years ago, Helen Smith described the case of a school-refusing 13-year old who was given the choice of returning to school or going into a juvenile detention center. In Smith’s words, “She decided that the better alternative was to go into her bedroom and hang herself with a belt. … In times past, she could have just dropped out of school, but now kids like her are trapped by compulsory education.” What a shame that this girl was not given the option of home education or a school for Self-Directed Education, where every child can learn in their own way and bullying is almost unheard of (see here).

One clinical psychologist who came to a similar conclusion to mine is Naomi Fisher, who published an article in The Psychologist, the journal of the British Psychological Society, called School’s Out. Here’s how she began the article:

In my early career as a clinical psychologist, I worked with several young people who had stopped attending school. I understood this as anxiety-driven school refusal. I devised graded-exposure programmes, and wrote letters making it clear that in my view a successful outcome would be a return to school. It seemed the reasonable thing to do. One girl, Nina, didn’t want to go back. When I made my perspective clear, she and her family disengaged... they stopped coming. … As I continued to work with children in different contexts, I found myself feeling more uncomfortable with my focus. For some of them school was a positive place, and the problem was indeed anxiety. But for some, school was a painful experience, where they felt like they weren’t learning and weren’t able to be themselves. One boy showed his mum a picture of a caged animal and said ‘That’s how I feel at school’. I felt ill at ease with locating this problem in the child, and assuming that the school itself was fine. What alternative environments were possible? How might they impact the child psychologically?

From this beginning, Fisher went on to describe her discovery of Self-Directed Education. Subsequently, she authored a book entitled, Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of Their Own Learning. Currently she authors a Substack, which I recommend, titled Think Again.

We need more Naomi Fishers—clinicians who are willing to listen to children with open ears and willing to question a system that demands that every child must get educated (or go through the motions of getting educated) in the same, standard, forced way.

Further Thoughts

Maybe, at least to some degree, the school refusers are the courageous ones. Refusing school takes more than a recognition that the world is unjust and that you are being treated unjustly in school and that you experience anxiety at the thought of it. It also takes courage, especially when the injustice that you see is viewed as normal and reasonable by everyone around you. Think, for example, about times and places when the decision as to whom a young woman would marry was made by her father. Refusal to follow the father’s orders was in some cases a crime and in others a psychological disorder. Women were sometimes put in mental hospitals because of it. It takes courage to say, “Hell no, I won’t go,” when everyone else operates on the assumption that going is necessary and not going is crazy.

And now, what do you think? Do you know people who would have fit the “school refusal” diagnosis? What happened with them? This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your thoughts, including disagreements, are treated with respect by me and other readers.

Leave a comment

References

Donat, M., Gallschütz, C., & Dalbert, C. (2018). The relation between students’ justice experience and their school refusal behavior. Social Psychology of Education, 21, 447-475.

Elliott, J. G., & Place, M. (2019). Practitioner review: School refusal: developments in conceptualization and treatment since 2000. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 60, 4-15.

Fernandes, C-S. F., et al (2024). Systematic review of interventions with some school involvement for school refusal in high-school age adolescents. Children & Schools, 46: 85-95.

Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Basic Books.

Gray, P. (2023). Self-directed education—unschooling and democratic schooling. In G. Noblit (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of education. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gray, P., & Riley, G. (2013). The challenges and benefits of unschooling according to 232 families who have chosen that route. Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, 7, 1-27.

Ingul, J. M., Havi, T., & Heyne, D. (2019). Emerging school refusal: A school-based framework for identifying early signs and risk factors. Cognitive and behavioral practice, 26, 46-62.

Isil Tekin & Salami Aydin (2022). School refusal and anxiety among children and adolescents: A systematic scoping review. Child and Adolescent Development, 2022, 43-65.

Oner, O.,et al., (2014). The inpatient treatment process for severe school refusal, Klinik Psikofarmakoloji Bülteni—Bulletin of Clinical Psychopharmacology, 24, 176-179.

Secer, I., et al (2025). School refusal and its underlying mechanisms: A network perspective on individual and environmental determinants. School Mental Health, 17, 1283-1299.

Snegaroff, C., et al (2025). Does multifamily therapy help parents of adolescents with anxiety-based school refusal? A qualitative approach. PloS One, 20: e0334037.

Sorrentini, L., et al (2025). The mediation role of school alienation between perceptions of school atmosphere and school refusal in Italian students. Education Science, 15, 766.

I’m always interested in people who choose, very deliberately, to live quite differently from the societal norm. They epitomize, in a way, the theme of this Substack—Play Makes Us Human. They have chosen to maximizes their control over their own life, their own way of finding enjoyment and meaning. Each such story is unique, not something to be mimicked, but something that can inspire one’s own thinking about how one wants to live. I was delighted, therefore, to read a prepublication draft of Blake Boles’s new book, Dirtbag Rich, about the life he has chosen. After reading it, I invited him to write a précis of it for Play Makes Us Human, and here it is. If what you read here intrigues you, you should read the book. Here are some places where you can purchase it.

Blake’s Story

Hi, I’m Blake.

I’m not wealthy or famous.

I don’t have a house, car, spouse, child, advanced degree, or prestigious title.

I lack many things that others my age possess.

What I do have is my own little version of the good life: one overflowing with freedom, nature, travel, adventure, romance, and friendship.

For almost two decades now I’ve worked just a few months each year. The rest of the time I spend reading, writing, hiking, biking, dancing, thinking, traveling, dreaming, and conversing.

I’m not subsidized by my family or the government. Nor did I sell a company, ride the stock market, go viral, traffic human organs, or take an online course revealing the one secret that will make all your financial dreams come true.

Rather, I found a form of work that I genuinely enjoy. Work that does good, pays well, and doesn’t monopolize my life.

“Found” isn’t really the right word. I stumbled, tinkered, and charmed my way into this work. Year after year, I do it all again. Nothing is guaranteed, but this fact energizes me.

I don’t have a permanent residence. At various points, all of my possessions have fit into a small storage unit, the back of a car, or a few plastic bins. When I tire of migrating, I settle down for a few months or longer. Then I pick up and move on, in pursuit of the people, nature, and activities I cherish most. No one place holds my heart. I am geographically polyamorous.

Relationships are my first safety net. Good health is my second. Savings are my third.

I may not earn much, but compared to how I spend, it’s a ton.

I’m not conventionally rich. I’m dirtbag rich.

To earn money, I take teenagers on international trips through my little travel company, give occasional talks for alternative schools and homeschool conferences, and publish books about self-directed learning.

Work is important to me. I never wanted to become a parasite or grifter. But a brutal, multi-year, quarter-life crisis showed me that normal employment simply wouldn’t suit me. Coming of age amidst the 2008 financial crisis, while my peers were happy to take any job, I found myself running hard in the other direction. Two decades later, I’m still running—but I’m running on a beautiful singletrack dirt trail, rather than a standard treadmill of wealth and status accumulation.

For me, becoming “dirtbag rich” is about finding a magical balance of time, money, and purpose:

• Time: I’m dedicated to remaining in control of my day, week, and year—which might look like working regularly but part-time, working intensely but seasonally, or having an otherwise normal job that allows significant breaks. The point is to remain flexible, autonomous, and far, far away from even the slightest whiff of eternal servitude.

• Money: I aim to earn a substantial amount relative to my efforts—whether through a high hourly wage, big payouts after big gigs, or some version of so-called passive income—in order to stay flexible. But this only works if I also keep my expenses low. By deliberately subsisting on a lower income, I can enjoy the spacious free time necessary to follow my passions. It feels paradoxical, but I’m “high pay” and “low income” at the same time.

• Purpose: Finally, I seek profound meaning in both my paid work and free time activities. I don’t make purpose wait for the weekend or retirement. I do what moves me, compensated or not, day in and day out. What better reason is there to carefully manage your time and money?

In a typical year I’ll run one or two programs, adding up to 4-8 weeks of intense, joyful face time with young people (plus a little laptop prep). I’ll spend two weeks working at Not Back to School Camp, give a few parent talks and teen workshops, and… that’s it! Averaged over the year, it’s something like 15 hours a week of dedicated “work.” (Here’s a full breakdown of how I’ve earned money, and how much.)

What do I do with the remaining hours of the day and weeks of the year?

• I go partner dancing, take long hiking adventures and bicycle tours, and go trail running.

• I read voraciously, write constantly, and learn more about history, economics, education, politics, psychology, sociology, and spirituality. (Sometimes this leads me to write books that earn money. Mostly it does not.)

• I visit family and friends, nurture new connections through dance and Couchsurfing, and generally assume the role of “the one who stays in touch.”

• I travel—no longer in search of novelty, but to revisit the places to which I’m deeply attached: the mountainous western USA, Argentina, New Zealand, and Western Europe. (It’s usually more about the people than the place.)

Not everything is rosy. Relationships are challenging without a fixed address. I love working with other people’s kids but have deeply conflicted thoughts about raising my own. My body isn’t fully reliable. And envisioning the far future isn’t as simple as “retire comfortably in the house I own outright.”

This is one big reason I wrote Dirtbag Rich: to explain the conflicting pressures, anxieties, and trade-offs inherent in living this way. I also wanted to document the lives of the other “dirtbag rich”—including those with children, those who don’t particularly love dirt, and those with challenging upbringings—who have found magical balances of time, money, and purpose, without relying upon family money or neglecting the practical challenges of paying for housing, healthcare, childcare, or retirement. (In case you’re wondering: “dirtbag” is a term of endearment in the outdoor community for those who pursue their bliss, live on a shoestring, and reject the rat race.)

But a bigger reason is this: there are so many different ways to become an adult, and young people need role models. In my early twenties, I found few honest brokers to emulate. I desperately sought the voices of those living genuinely “alternative” lives, those willing to talk openly and honestly about escaping the conventional narrative. Now that I’ve accomplished this in my own, weird, idiosyncratic way, I’m ready to contribute.

Books aren’t as flashy or viral as a polished YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram account, but they still earn respect in our culture. And if you’re a young person trying to convince your friends or family that you can live far outside the norm—in the name of joy, authenticity, and your mental and physical health—handing them a book is the best way to go.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter if you live “inside the box” or “outside the box.” What matters is the depth & quality of your relationships, how much good you do in the world, whether you can regularly pursue your bliss, and if you were hit by a bus today, you might die happily.

No matter which path you’re walking—happy trails.𖤓

Blake.

Final Thought

Thank you, Blake. It takes courage to live a life outside the norm. But then, living well—whether inside or outside the norm or on the edge—always takes courage.

And now, readers, I’m interested in your reactions. Are the basic principles of how Blake describes his life—in terms of work, time, money, and purpose—relevant to how you would describe your life, however different your life might be from his? To me, the biggest general moral of Blakes story has to do with going about life consciously, in charge, making decisions about how we want to live and then courageously doing it.

Again, for alternative ways of buying Dirtbag Rich, go here.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter