#11. Age-Mixed Play II: Its Benefits for Social Development

Age mixing among children and teens reduces bullying, promotes empathy, helps socially inhibited kids overcome inhibitions, provides extra care for little ones, and provides parenting practice for old

Dear friends,

This is the second of what will be three letters on the value of providing opportunities for children to play and otherwise interact in age-mixed groups. I’m convinced that one of most harmful practices of our society today is segregation of children by age. Throughout history, children grew up in age-mixed groups. They learned from one another and cared for one another, and thereby developed skills and confidence that are far more difficult to develop when your only social world consists of agemates and adults.

In my previous letter, I focused on the idea that older children boost younger ones to higher levels of play without reducing their own levels, which results in valuable learning for both. In this letter my focus is on the social benefits of age mixing. Of course, social benefits are not separate from learning benefits. Perhaps the most important thing children must learn to live happy and productive lives is how to get along well with other people

The headings below are my list of the major social benefits of enabling children and teens to play in age-mixed groups.

Age Mixing Reduces Bullying.

Lenore Skenazy (author of the book Free-Range Kids) and I initiated, a few years ago, a program of age-mixed free play into public elementary schools. We initiated and continue to promote this through the nonprofit organization Let Grow, of which Lenore is president and I am one of the other founders. The first schools to adopt the program referred to it as Play Club, and that is the term we use for it now, as it has spread to many schools over the years.

Play Club is a program involving hour-long periods, usually before school but in some cases after, of free play at school, in which kids in all grades (usually K-5) play together. Sometimes there are as many as 150 kids playing at once. In such cases the school may open not just the outdoor playground but also the gymnasium, some hallways, an art room, and sometimes another room with games, blocks, and the like. Children are then free to play in whatever way they wish.

The only rules at Play Club are don’t hurt anyone and don’t break anything valuable. The teachers who monitor it are instructed that during Play Club they are not teachers. Their job is to be like a lifeguard on an ocean beach, that is, to intervene only in cases of obvious danger. A major purpose of play is for children to learn to initiate their own activities and solve their own problems, including whatever disputes arise among them. My suggestion to monitors (by way of the principals) is if they feel tempted to intervene, they should at least count to ten first and see if the kids don’t resolve the problem themselves. A result is that the teachers are often surprised at how capable the children are at solving their own problems when they realize that no adult is going to do that for them and how helpful the older ones are to the younger ones.

A common concern of teachers and parents when a school first initiates Play Club is that the older kids will bully the younger ones. I was confident from the beginning that this would occur rarely and that, if it did occur, the kids would usually resolve the problem without adult intervention My confidence was based in part on many previous observations of children in age-mixed settings and on research revealing that age mixing reduces bullying and enhances compassion. The presence of younger children brings out the nurturing instinct in older ones; they become protective of the younger one and even become nicer to one another when younger ones are around.  

In our report on systematic observations at the age-mixed democratic school that I mentioned in Letter #10, Jay Feldman and I described examples of ways that older children promoted peaceful interactions among younger ones (Gray & Feldman, 2004). More recently, in a systematic survey of former students at another age-mixed democratic school, most respondents commented on how supportive the students were of one another, and some explicitly attributed this in part to the age mixing at the school (Gray, Riley, & Curry-Knight 2021). A few of the alums said they had left their previous, age-segregated school largely because of having been regularly bullied there but found great social acceptance in the democratic school, by students of all ages.

Other evidence comes from various sources. In a review of cross-cultural anthropological studies of children’s social interactions, Beatrice Whiting (1983) concluded that boys and girls everywhere demonstrate more kindness and compassion toward children who are at least three years younger than themselves than they do toward children closer to their own age. In a study in a subsistence farming community in Kenya, Carol Ember (1973) found that boys, age 8 to 16, who had regular experience caring for and playing with younger siblings were, on average, kinder, more helpful, and less aggressive in their interactions with peers than were boys who did not have such experience. More recently, a large study of bullying involving data from many classrooms, at many schools, revealed that bullying occurred significantly less often in mixed-grade classrooms than in single-grade classrooms (Oldenburg et al, 2015).

Age Mixing Promotes Appreciation of Individual Differences.

I don’t know of any systematic research on this, but observation and theory suggest that age-mixed play leads children to appreciate and enjoy, rather be scornful or frightened of, people who are different from the presumed norm or from themselves.

In an age-mixed group, difference is normal. Some are big, some are little, some highly competent in ways that others aren’t. Some are energetic and noisy; some are more sedate. These obvious differences make it easier to be different in other ways. I’ve heard this from people who described themselves as gay, or transgender, or on the autism spectrum who said they were socially rejected in age-segregated public school but fit in well in the age-mixed democratic school to which they transferred. In an age-mixed environment differences become interesting rather than threatening. As one democratic school alum said, in response to our question about the value of age mixing (Gray, Riley, & Curry-Knight 2021), “I learned how to interact with all sorts of people, alike to me and not alike, and I think that trumps everything else.”

I have also heard from some of the teachers who monitor Play Club that one of the benefits they see is that children who are different in ways that often lead to rejection in other settings are well accepted in age-mixed play. That doesn’t happen at standard, age-segregated recesses, where they are likely to be rejected as much as anywhere, or more.

Age Mixing Enables Socially Fearful Children to Overcome Their Fear.

In the early 1970s, Harry Harlow and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin performed a series of experiments aimed at helping socially damaged young macaque monkeys gain social skills (Suomi & Harlow, 1972). The damaged monkeys were youngsters that had been raised just with their own mothers, in the complete absence of other young monkeys with whom to play. When they were finally allowed to interact with monkeys their own age, they were social misfits. They did not know how to play. In the presence of one or more age-mates, they would sit alone in a corner, clasping themselves and rocking. Their strange actions and inability to respond to play invitations caused them to be attacked mercilessly by the others.

Experiments with different groups of such isolates showed that time by itself did not cure them, nor did prolonged exposure to other previously isolated monkeys, nor did attempts to expose them gradually to normal age-mates. The only intervention that helped was exposing them to monkeys much younger than themselves. The damaged monkeys were less afraid of the little ones, and the little ones offered continuous invitations to play. Gradually, the isolates began to respond to these invitations. After weeks of such therapy, the previously isolated monkeys were able to play and in other ways interact socially in a near-normal way, not just with younger monkeys but also with with those their own age. The little ones had taught the isolates how to play and imparted a sense of social confidence.

A few years later, researchers at the University of Minnesota performed an experiment with preschool children that was inspired by the monkey experiments (Furman et al., 1979). Through observations in preschool classrooms, they identified children, 4 to 5 years old, who spent large amounts of time alone rather than playing with other children. In the experiment, some of these socially withdrawn children were paired with a same-sex, normally playful child and allowed to play with that child, in a separate room, with toys designed to encourage cooperative play, over a course of ten 20-minute sessions. For some, the assigned playmate was nearly the same age as the socially withdrawn child, and for others the playmate was 12 to 20 months younger. An additional group of socially withdrawn children served as an untreated control group. Both treatment groups exhibited increased rates of social interaction in the daycare classrooms, but those who had been paired with younger playmates increased the most. I suspect that those who played with younger children improved the most because the pleasure and exuberance of the younger children, who were thrilled to be playing with an older child, allowed the older ones to gain confidence in their social interactions.

I wish there were more formal research to report on the therapeutic benefits of age mixing for socially fearful children, but here’s an anecdote. A boy who enrolled in a democratic, age-mixed school at age 10, after having been socially rejected for years in the conventional public school he had attended, appeared to be afraid of children his age, unable to respond well to them even when they were kind. He began by playing with the very youngest children at the school and, to some extent, with several teens who were much older than him but shared some of his interests and were not frightening to him. Then, over the course of months, he gradually expanded his realm of social interactions, upward from the 4-year-olds and downward from the teens, until he felt comfortable with everyone. Nobody prescribed this course of therapy to him, and I doubt if he consciously thought it out; it just occurred naturally. He began by playing with those with whom he felt most comfortable, and, through that, he gained confidence and skills that enabled him to feel comfortable with children ever closer to his own age.

Age Mixing Provides Practice for Parenting.

In our systematic observations at the democratic school, Feldman and I recorded many instances of teenagers interacting with 4- and 5-year-olds (Gray & Feldman, 2004). They read to the little ones, gave them piggy-back rides, and rough and tumbled (in a manner that might better be called “gentle and tumbled”). Sometimes we observed cases where little ones were just sitting contentedly on teenagers’ laps as the latter played a game or engaged in conversation.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that teenagers would want to interact with young children, to get to know their ways, to learn how to comfort and please them. After all, historically, by the late teenage years or soon after, people were likely to become parents. In Letter #s 4, 5, and 6, I focused on the idea that a major function of play is to provide practice in skills that will be valuable throughout life. Here I suggest that knowing how to interact with and please little children, eventually one’s own children, is one of those skills.

Age-Mixing Provides Care for Younger Children and Relief for Adults.

Throughout most of human history, and still today in many places, children are major caregivers for younger children. In traditional societies children as young as 5 or 6 are regularly expected to care for their younger siblings or cousins, and they do so partly by taking them along, into adventures with their playmates and integrating them into their play (Lancy, 2022).

Observations at age-mixed democratic schools make it clear that one reason they can operate with a relatively low ratio of staff to students is that the students look after one another. Feldman and I observed many instances of older children helping younger children, cautioning them about activities that seemed dangerous, and in other ways caring for them.

A similar point was made in a recent report on the results of a survey of childminders in Ireland (O’Regan, M. 2022). Childminders are people who, in their own homes, care for other parents’ children (as well as their own children) while those parents are away at work. In most cases the children vary widely in age—from infants up to as old as 11 or 12. The survey revealed that childminders value the age mixing because of the joy it provides for the kids and also because the older children naturally, without encouragement, provide care for the younger ones.

Here's how one childminder put it: “They’re holding hands at the playground, they’re looking after each other, they’re pushing the other on the swing, they just play. It works really well.” And here’s a quote from the researcher: “Not unlike cousins within an extended Irish family, who are connected through a family network within a community, the children develop close relationships with each other, with deep bonds of mutual affection between older and younger children, despite occasional personality clashes.”

Final Thoughts

What are your memories of age-mixed play? Are they congruent with what I have described here or not? If you have children or work with children, do they have as much opportunity for such play as you did? I invite you to share your stories here.

If you like this this series of letters, please subscribe if you haven’t already, and please let others know about it.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Ember, C. R. (1973). Feminine task assignment and the social behavior of boys. Ethos 1, 424-439.

Furman, W., Rahe, D. F., & Hartup, W. W. (1997). Rehabilitation of socially withdrawn preschool children through mixed-age and same-age socialization. Child Development, 1979, 915-922.

Gray, P., & Feldman, J. (2004). Playing in the zone of proximal development: qualities of self-directed age mixing between adolescents and young children at a democratic school. American Journal of Education, 110, 108-145.

Gray, P., Riley, G. & Curry-Knight (2021). Former students’ evaluations of experiences at a democratic school: Roles of the democratic processes, staff, and community of students. Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives, 10, 4-25.

Lancy, D.F. (2022). The anthropology of childhood: Cherubs, chattel, changelings, 3^rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oldenburg, B., et al. (2015). Teacher characteristics and peer victimization in elementary schools: A classroom-level perspective. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 43, 33-44.

O’Regan, M. (2022). Childminders and mixed age groups in Ireland. Childlinks, 1, 23-28.

Suomi, S. J., & Harlow, H. F. (1972). Social rehabilitation of isolate-reared monkeys. Developmental Psychology, 6, 487-496.

Whiting, B. The genesis of prosocial behavior. In D. L. Brigman (ed.) The nature of prosocial development: interdisciplinary theories and strategies. pp 221-242.