I don't think there is any doubt that screens, and particularly social media, are playing a huge role in the declining mental health of our children (the After Babel Substack is really great at laying out the evidence for that). However, I think many kids are driven to screens because it's the only place they are allowed to choose their own activities undirected by adults. If we make play more possible, we draw kids away from screens and social media again.
If we take away their screens while continuing to prevent them from getting together in person, then young people will have NO way to communicate with one another outside of adult interference. We will have totally imprisoned them.
I totally agree! That's one reason that I'm so glad that we've opted for homeschooling our kids. The other week we were at our homeschooling co-op, with the parents sitting down on the grass attending to the littlest children, while the older ones ran around paying tag, making up ball games, and rolling around on the grass. While I watched I thought to myself, this is what childhood should be. Kids free to play, outside, with other kids, gently supervised, with adults stepping back to allow for play to occur naturally.
I am "a baby boomer" - a very lucky generation in most ways. But we have seriously messed up so many things we inherited - playtime, schooling, self reliance, minding one's own business..... the list goes on...
Good luck with the home schooling. If I still had young kids it's what I'd do.
Getting together in person, just because, never happens. That is the problem. Kids today commune after school only in between activities while waiting to be picked up to go to the next activity. That space provides very little opportunity for socializing.
Ape is a verb. "To ape someone" is to mimic them. See Piaget in RIGHTEOUS MIND. Is anyone researching stages of play? Research Role Play as an advanced subset of Play, and research Role Reversal as an advanced subset of role play. Drama Therapy role reversals seem to be a "watered down version" of the more intense Psychodrama. Ask Dr "Magic Button" Burns how many clients have burst into tears after hearing one word:"Reverse"...?😁😁😁
I made a wild claim to him:"the most powerful word in Psychotherapy is "Reverse." His next six podcasts were about Role Reversal. Monthly for decades he's challenged his CME workshops to do an anger role reversal exercise: THEY ALL FAILED...? see pp210 "Feeling Good Together."
If a group of playless kids asked me WTF is Gray about... I'd show them page 210:"Ace this then you can spend the rest of your life KICKING QUACK ASS!"... and I'd show them how to sue the government on TV to do it:
I mentored an 18 year old who feared speaking in a speech class. Fear became love. As Mayor of Delano CA he loves to speak at government meetings. So much that he ran for US Congress.
First Do No Harm: includes Stop the Lying... includes The 3 Great Untruths... includes "Don't Sweat It"... AVOIDANCE FEEDS ANXIETY.... Both exercise and fear cause sweat and are essential. Both enhance the immune system. In the spirit of the kids I hang out with at the UC Berkeley skateboard park, who constantly challenge themselves to riskier acrobatics on concrete without protection, I'd ask your "playless kids": which comes first, Action or Motivation. "Everyone" gets this wrong.
What are the effects of social media in a noncompulsory environment? When you're compelled to go to school, you can suffer ostracism and bullying. But what if you have the power to choose the company you keep? I sometimes get annoyed by people on Youtube, but I dont generally attempt to engage with people there, unless I sense they are "good faith" participants. And I don't do Facebook or Twitter at all. I suppose my mental health could be debated, but I don't think its suffering as a result of my use of screens. More so just from my knowledge of the sad state of affairs in the world.
So excited to find, via Prof Haidt, that you’re on substack. Thank you for all your work! As a pediatrician, I have been recommending your book and trying to spread the free play gospel in my community for years. See here:
Sad we need a body of work to emphasize what is normal and was so until a bit of FOMO hit every parent across the country, leading to hobbies that populate a college app rather than actually fulfill a children’s desire to express themselves. It also makes for unappreciative, needlessly competitive mannered bunch of kids who think they need to perform everything every other Tom, Dick or Harry has done so - because everybody is expected to spec a certain way on paper and meeting minimum requirements on that metric passes for a check the box on it! As a parent, I am in the minority with “just” one child, an attorney who stays home to care for that “just” that one child. It has however allowed us - ie the kid and I to eschew a bunch of things that pass for enrichment or a benchmark of intelligence and pursue what he wants and just that. Today at 15, he is homeschooled for high in an atheistic environ, just because it makes no sense to run to every prep class to make up for what is NOT taught in school, play a sport to have an edge in college or take up an instrument to play in an orchestra just to plop it on the college app. He took the violin when he was in grade 3 only to find violin instruction is tailored for orchestra candidates and not for the musically inclined. He took to you tube and has his own channel now - NikNatViolin where he arranges, plays and produces his own music - just smelling his way through. Classical violin continues with his nth teacher as we navigate the general lack of sincerity in teaching across the board. All he wanted to do was hang out with his peers at home when he was little but they were in piano, math and soccer classes every day. A lot of them are now in SAT prep which we have decided will happen not from Grade 6 but the year he decides to take his SATs. Because we trust he is capable and does not need to monkey it! He is not keen on a professional musical career but may stumble into it and get carried away. It has been a sorry childhood where community has been conflated with attending soccer, math class and prep classes. Hosting playdates was considered the preserve of parents who have time and happened only at our house. The cost of pulling away from the madding crowd is more sleep and time to make music - just because. And of course watching West Wing and Madam Secretary instead of unnecessary prep classes in summer. He plays tennis for exercise - not to get into college and will get into college someplace and make the best of it. Life is not a zero sum game like his peers have been led to believe. It happens with appreciation and growth - at this time, in light of Tony Bennett’s death ( he has watched Tony at the Wolf Trap twice as a child) he is gearing his violin with cello strings to belt out The Boulevard of Broken Dream - he plays the violin by ear - did so after 8 months of instruction and it has pissed off every violin teacher sooner or later. He plays on hoping college will be more collegial and fun. We tried a few schools - public and private before we decided to homeschool - none of them had community or proper academics.
Peter, it is understandable that you focus so much on play, as it is the most discounted and devalued.
Yet I was struck by a phrase you used early in "Free to Learn" (p.xi):
The biggest, most enduring lesson of school is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible." And somewhere else you refer to turning play into work; Neil Postman even had that as the cover for a magazine in which he had an article, as I remember.
But Peter, the reality is that the schools have done a pretty good job of stealing from us the very concept of work, so that it is generally understood as something that is done for others or to please or impress others, or possibly to make oneself wealthy (and then retire from having to work!). Perhaps only among Objectivists will you see people talking about productive work, done for one's own purposes, in fulfillment of one's own values, as being good for the soul.
So the coercive school culture does not turn play into work; it deprives children of opportunities for either.
Mark, in some of my writings I point out that the word "work" can have several different meanings. A better term than "work," in the quotation above, would have been "toil." Toil is activity that we are compelled to do but don't want to do. "Work" can also mean anything we do that is productive. That's closer to the third meaning, which is the physics meaning of the term--anything that moves mass.
I am a retired pediatrician and agree with the authors' main point. However, I do object to the common inclusive term in the media of "children" to represent infants, children, and adolescents. When it comes to immigrants and street violence, we really need to demand differentiation of adolescents from children with puberty or roughly age 12 years as the dividing line. The play needs of 2, 5, 10 and 15 year olds are profoundly different but perhaps equally vital. COVID clearly led to social isolation of children and adolescents. Thanks for your good work.
Thanks for this comment. I normally do use different terms for the different age groups, but in this case I am talking about the overprotection of the whole range of kids of school age. I could have used the less formal term "kids," as I sometimes do, but chose to use children and made sure I was defining it for this article.
Can you flesh out why we specifically need to demand differenciation "when it comes to immigrants and street violence" - I didn't understand that. To me an immigrant child is still a child, and it is perhaps even more important to realise that whether they are 5 or 15 we need to be recognising and valuing their childhood, and that they have substantial growing up to do (or better yet, they have substantial Childhood to do).
I nearly always refer to the teens in my care as "children" to other adults, as a subconscious reminder that these are NOT small adults or "young adults), they are learning, midstake-making, infuriating, magical children, and they have drives to explore, take risks and play that they biologically experience in a very visceral way. We have to make space for them to do so.
Adolecents can be tried as adults in US courts. Children cannot. How many of the 17 year old young men are really 25 and future gangbangers? The implications are huge. Most 17 year olds can fend for themselves. Five year olds cannot.
Is there research on national differences in children's mental health? Do other developed countries show similar trends and do less developed countries have different trends? Would be interesting!
It would be good to have systematic data on this, but I don't think there have been any studies with comparable measures of mental health across cultures. I met a woman some years ago who came from Kenya at age 16. She told me that her first impression of America was how unhappy and unfree the children are. I've also heard from others coming so-called "undeveloped" or "developing" countries that children are much happier there than in the US and many other developed countries. Research by Suniya Luthar in the US has revealed that the most unhappy, stressed kids are those attending "high-achievement schools." These are often kids from wealthy, high-achieving families.
Indeed, the kids that John Holt wrote about in "How Children Fail" were bright kids in a private "progressive school" that did not use punishment, just relying on communicating a sense of disappointment in the kids who couldn't or wouldn't perform as expected. That simple way of taking ownership of them was enough to cause serious distress to some of them.
I understand that there is a substantial difference between being in charge and experiencing freedom. It's the difference between being the manager and being the subordinate - being the manager is generally more responsibility and more stress, and if you're not seeking that kind of role you're probably unhappy in a manager's role.
Let's make the subordinate analogous to the child, and the manager analogous to the parent...
Whether you're actually happier in the subordinate role depends (in part) on whether your manager is micromanaging or enables you to have freedoms in your work; permits minor risk-taking, self efficacy, self management, allows mistakes, and acts as a helpful guide. That's a happier subordinate.
To me, that's the parents practical role, make sure everyone gets resources, breaks and sick leave, scaffolds, provides emotional support, signposts, actively provides training when needed - but doesn't watch and judge and criticise.
Likewise play should be just that. The grown up is still in charge, they're making the big decisions kids are still struggling to make - we decide vegetables are on the dinner table, we decide bedtime is absolute, we decide what can't be on screens - we don't leave difficult self-management to immature brains (doing so would be being a rubbish "manager" which is maybe even more stressful to the subordinate because we have to step into their role) - we don't ask the child to parent or "to adult" - we do the "adulting" - but we sure as hell let the kids do the "kidding".
Not quite sure how this relates to what I said about John Holt, but since youre addressing me, and since I observe you are " training to be an educational psychologist", I'd be inclined to ask: besides giving children an opportunity to play, do you believe they can be allowed, to a significant extent, to choose what their interests are, and how to go about exploring them and developing their skills and abilities in a self- directed way, vs. being directed to acquire the skills and knowledge assigned as part of someone else's curriculum? I'd also be curious if there is even any mention of authors such as John Holt and Peter Gray, or of such alternatives as unschooling or the Sudbury model - or Peter Gray's idea for adopting and expanding upon the use of libraries as resources for self-directed learners - in the education program you have enrolled in.
I am not here to convince you of the value of these alternatives, mind you; if you're interested you can simply read John Holt's and Peter Gray's books. But I can say that for myself, being an unschooler has not meant rejecting legitimate authority. In fact my idea of the ideal human society, or the best representation I know of, is found on Star Trek TOS, the original with Captain Kirk. This group of people freely chose to serve on this ship, and to contribute what their talents are able, while accepting the authority of those in command (and not merely because they are in command; they continually demonstrate, within the limits of human fallibility, that they have earned that role, and know what they are doing). I also like that the people on the bridge crew separate their personal from their professional lives while on the bridge, and do not gossip or get into each others business (ie no boundaries) unlike later versions.
Oh, the last thing I was going to say, haha, we watched an episode of TOS literally last night. It's a great ideal model - although they are adults, and it is fiction.
The most pleasant to read is How Children Learn, because it is his experiences watching children learn (mostly how to walk and talk) before they are in school; examples of "children using their minds well" as he puts it. How Children Fail is less pleasant to read, because it is his journal of how he himself stressed out his students, until he realized what he was doing. But his conclusion (in his revised edition) was that no changes in his behavior could significantly alter that; it was the nature of a relationship built on compulsion. Instead of Education comes closest to Peter Gray's arguments in Free to Learn, about how we can create healthy environments for children that are not schools.
There is another author I equally recommend, James Herndon, who wrote of his experiences teaching middle school: Way It Spozed to Be, and How to Survive In Your Native Land. I would really like to see Way It Spozed to Be made into a film.
I'll be interested to know if we go into alternative models too, my expectation is not, but I'm self-educating in these subjects are I think they are very compelling and I plan to bring them into discussion. I rather see getting the EP PhD as a way of springboarding the evidence-based models discussed by eg Gray - I think many children would benefit from eg part-time homeschooling - and while I can't say I'm wholly convinced by unschooling for all (because of the topic exposure limitations discussed, and parental limitations) there is so much merit in personalised education and self-directed learning. Was it Mark Twain who said "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education?" He makes a valid point, we school children into obeisance, we school children out of their natural curiosity - that has to be reversed!
I personally absolutely believe children can (and should!) be allowed to choose their own interests - I'm a huge fan of self- directed learning (partly from reading Gray and Kohn). I simultaneously believe in exposure to a wide curriculum so that children can work out what does interest them - I found all kinds of interest in stuff I was "made" to learn - and how we square that circle is something I'm open to suggestion on. For instance - I part-time homeschooled because I wanted my kids to experience other interests/knowledge to my own, but that has meant exposure to methods I entirely disapprove of (and lead me into training to be an Ed Psych to address those methods in schools).
I also don't see much merit in forcing children to take subjects they entirely reject, I'm always coming up against teachers wanting kids to be sat in their class learning the way they want to teach - I think many of our children would be happier and more willing/able to learn if we could give them autonomy over how they approach that subject in the first place - and indeed let them entirely reject s subject if they can't abide it (although I do find with the approach of self-directed genuine choices about how to approach the material many children choose to learn a subject they had previously rejected.l
Well, good luck on your journey. All I can say is that I used to browse the texts being used in the education department at UCSC, and they were all about either classroom control or else about shaping society, and nothing about how children actually experience school. And definitely nothing about letting them make their own decisions. It would have been interesting to hear of an education department that was different.
I think I misunderstood your point, I thought you were talking about models Gray discusses where children are put in control of their the entire school and their entire education ("democratic" schools?) where children are in complete control, and I thought you were saying this model had been found to be distressing for the children. For me, that would suggest the level of transfer of responsibility in this (I now realise theoretical school) was "too much too soon", rather than a sign that the model should be thrown away altogether - that the children needed more adult guidance at that stage of development.
I see that what you were referring to was some self-styled progressive school" that transfers punishment from "taking away the goody" type punishment to a mental/social disapproval punishment - which is naturally just as ineffective and distressing. (From what I know of schools I'll bet they simultaneously have a "reward/praise for effort" type system to - with equal distress and lack of efficacy... *sigh*)
I'll go to another post to answer your other points.
Similarly for differences between ethnic groups in the U.S. , and between the documented and undocumented. I would actually expect the undocumented, with typically larger families (more opportunities for play) and less (I think) pressure to perform, to have lower rates of suicide.
Another thing that would get explained away by less access to screens, though.
Thank you for this - I am a Play and Nature Facilitator in Gatineau Quebec - I brought traditional children’s games and songs back into the playground based on the work of the Opies in the UK - skipping, hand clapping songs, four square, catch and chase games and rhymes.
I work with older grades 5 and 6, give them ropes, balls, book of games. They are called Playmakers and devote a couple of hours a week to play with early grades.
The school Principal has noted a distinctly positive change in behaviour.
I work with teen-aged children at a specialist Social Emotional and Mental Health school, and an overwhelming number of them are simply play-deprived. All our kids have behaviour/learning differences that saw them ostracised by the others, singled out, picked on (by school staff), and ultimately denied the opportunities to learn, socialise and play with other children their age. Then they come to a school like ours where they are surrounded by other kids with functional ASD (ie with similar behaviour differences to each other) and they so want to play, but often adults tell them off for rough housing or horsing around... When ACTUALLY - I've read the Peter Gray Psychology textbook - I know it's vital for healthy bonding among children! I look out for "playface" and let them get on with it!
I also think it's really vital to enable kids to continue playing when they are teenagers. We often expect "better" behaviour, accuse them of being childish, effectively force them to grow up sooner than they should - when growing up isn't linear at all. I have (undiagnosed) traits of ASD myself, I often think of Youth Theatre when I think about play - Youth Theatre was effectively for 14-19 year olds who loved role play, and when I look back from my MSc Psychology perspective I realise loads of us had ASD traits, and all of us had a deep need to keep playing! And we were SO HAPPY when we got to play - those 2 hours were the happiest of my life, and so vtal for my wellbeing!
Perhaps we're also somewhat neglecting play in the adult. I think I'm right in thinking most other social animals play too. Where is the space in our lives for play? How do we play? Would we all be happier with more play?
Modern day public school is child abuse. We are homeschooling and always will. I don’t understand how parents are sending their children into these buildings of horror for 7 plus hours every day.
I don't think there is any doubt that screens, and particularly social media, are playing a huge role in the declining mental health of our children (the After Babel Substack is really great at laying out the evidence for that). However, I think many kids are driven to screens because it's the only place they are allowed to choose their own activities undirected by adults. If we make play more possible, we draw kids away from screens and social media again.
If we take away their screens while continuing to prevent them from getting together in person, then young people will have NO way to communicate with one another outside of adult interference. We will have totally imprisoned them.
I totally agree! That's one reason that I'm so glad that we've opted for homeschooling our kids. The other week we were at our homeschooling co-op, with the parents sitting down on the grass attending to the littlest children, while the older ones ran around paying tag, making up ball games, and rolling around on the grass. While I watched I thought to myself, this is what childhood should be. Kids free to play, outside, with other kids, gently supervised, with adults stepping back to allow for play to occur naturally.
I am "a baby boomer" - a very lucky generation in most ways. But we have seriously messed up so many things we inherited - playtime, schooling, self reliance, minding one's own business..... the list goes on...
Good luck with the home schooling. If I still had young kids it's what I'd do.
Getting together in person, just because, never happens. That is the problem. Kids today commune after school only in between activities while waiting to be picked up to go to the next activity. That space provides very little opportunity for socializing.
Ape is a verb. "To ape someone" is to mimic them. See Piaget in RIGHTEOUS MIND. Is anyone researching stages of play? Research Role Play as an advanced subset of Play, and research Role Reversal as an advanced subset of role play. Drama Therapy role reversals seem to be a "watered down version" of the more intense Psychodrama. Ask Dr "Magic Button" Burns how many clients have burst into tears after hearing one word:"Reverse"...?😁😁😁
I made a wild claim to him:"the most powerful word in Psychotherapy is "Reverse." His next six podcasts were about Role Reversal. Monthly for decades he's challenged his CME workshops to do an anger role reversal exercise: THEY ALL FAILED...? see pp210 "Feeling Good Together."
If a group of playless kids asked me WTF is Gray about... I'd show them page 210:"Ace this then you can spend the rest of your life KICKING QUACK ASS!"... and I'd show them how to sue the government on TV to do it:
https://youtu.be/_RDMs54d8mA
I mentored an 18 year old who feared speaking in a speech class. Fear became love. As Mayor of Delano CA he loves to speak at government meetings. So much that he ran for US Congress.
First Do No Harm: includes Stop the Lying... includes The 3 Great Untruths... includes "Don't Sweat It"... AVOIDANCE FEEDS ANXIETY.... Both exercise and fear cause sweat and are essential. Both enhance the immune system. In the spirit of the kids I hang out with at the UC Berkeley skateboard park, who constantly challenge themselves to riskier acrobatics on concrete without protection, I'd ask your "playless kids": which comes first, Action or Motivation. "Everyone" gets this wrong.
What are the effects of social media in a noncompulsory environment? When you're compelled to go to school, you can suffer ostracism and bullying. But what if you have the power to choose the company you keep? I sometimes get annoyed by people on Youtube, but I dont generally attempt to engage with people there, unless I sense they are "good faith" participants. And I don't do Facebook or Twitter at all. I suppose my mental health could be debated, but I don't think its suffering as a result of my use of screens. More so just from my knowledge of the sad state of affairs in the world.
So excited to find, via Prof Haidt, that you’re on substack. Thank you for all your work! As a pediatrician, I have been recommending your book and trying to spread the free play gospel in my community for years. See here:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/16/let-your-kids-go-without-adults-and-shoes-this-summer/
Hope you like it! And thank you again!
Sad we need a body of work to emphasize what is normal and was so until a bit of FOMO hit every parent across the country, leading to hobbies that populate a college app rather than actually fulfill a children’s desire to express themselves. It also makes for unappreciative, needlessly competitive mannered bunch of kids who think they need to perform everything every other Tom, Dick or Harry has done so - because everybody is expected to spec a certain way on paper and meeting minimum requirements on that metric passes for a check the box on it! As a parent, I am in the minority with “just” one child, an attorney who stays home to care for that “just” that one child. It has however allowed us - ie the kid and I to eschew a bunch of things that pass for enrichment or a benchmark of intelligence and pursue what he wants and just that. Today at 15, he is homeschooled for high in an atheistic environ, just because it makes no sense to run to every prep class to make up for what is NOT taught in school, play a sport to have an edge in college or take up an instrument to play in an orchestra just to plop it on the college app. He took the violin when he was in grade 3 only to find violin instruction is tailored for orchestra candidates and not for the musically inclined. He took to you tube and has his own channel now - NikNatViolin where he arranges, plays and produces his own music - just smelling his way through. Classical violin continues with his nth teacher as we navigate the general lack of sincerity in teaching across the board. All he wanted to do was hang out with his peers at home when he was little but they were in piano, math and soccer classes every day. A lot of them are now in SAT prep which we have decided will happen not from Grade 6 but the year he decides to take his SATs. Because we trust he is capable and does not need to monkey it! He is not keen on a professional musical career but may stumble into it and get carried away. It has been a sorry childhood where community has been conflated with attending soccer, math class and prep classes. Hosting playdates was considered the preserve of parents who have time and happened only at our house. The cost of pulling away from the madding crowd is more sleep and time to make music - just because. And of course watching West Wing and Madam Secretary instead of unnecessary prep classes in summer. He plays tennis for exercise - not to get into college and will get into college someplace and make the best of it. Life is not a zero sum game like his peers have been led to believe. It happens with appreciation and growth - at this time, in light of Tony Bennett’s death ( he has watched Tony at the Wolf Trap twice as a child) he is gearing his violin with cello strings to belt out The Boulevard of Broken Dream - he plays the violin by ear - did so after 8 months of instruction and it has pissed off every violin teacher sooner or later. He plays on hoping college will be more collegial and fun. We tried a few schools - public and private before we decided to homeschool - none of them had community or proper academics.
Peter, it is understandable that you focus so much on play, as it is the most discounted and devalued.
Yet I was struck by a phrase you used early in "Free to Learn" (p.xi):
The biggest, most enduring lesson of school is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible." And somewhere else you refer to turning play into work; Neil Postman even had that as the cover for a magazine in which he had an article, as I remember.
But Peter, the reality is that the schools have done a pretty good job of stealing from us the very concept of work, so that it is generally understood as something that is done for others or to please or impress others, or possibly to make oneself wealthy (and then retire from having to work!). Perhaps only among Objectivists will you see people talking about productive work, done for one's own purposes, in fulfillment of one's own values, as being good for the soul.
So the coercive school culture does not turn play into work; it deprives children of opportunities for either.
Mark, in some of my writings I point out that the word "work" can have several different meanings. A better term than "work," in the quotation above, would have been "toil." Toil is activity that we are compelled to do but don't want to do. "Work" can also mean anything we do that is productive. That's closer to the third meaning, which is the physics meaning of the term--anything that moves mass.
I am a retired pediatrician and agree with the authors' main point. However, I do object to the common inclusive term in the media of "children" to represent infants, children, and adolescents. When it comes to immigrants and street violence, we really need to demand differentiation of adolescents from children with puberty or roughly age 12 years as the dividing line. The play needs of 2, 5, 10 and 15 year olds are profoundly different but perhaps equally vital. COVID clearly led to social isolation of children and adolescents. Thanks for your good work.
Thanks for this comment. I normally do use different terms for the different age groups, but in this case I am talking about the overprotection of the whole range of kids of school age. I could have used the less formal term "kids," as I sometimes do, but chose to use children and made sure I was defining it for this article.
Can you flesh out why we specifically need to demand differenciation "when it comes to immigrants and street violence" - I didn't understand that. To me an immigrant child is still a child, and it is perhaps even more important to realise that whether they are 5 or 15 we need to be recognising and valuing their childhood, and that they have substantial growing up to do (or better yet, they have substantial Childhood to do).
I nearly always refer to the teens in my care as "children" to other adults, as a subconscious reminder that these are NOT small adults or "young adults), they are learning, midstake-making, infuriating, magical children, and they have drives to explore, take risks and play that they biologically experience in a very visceral way. We have to make space for them to do so.
Adolecents can be tried as adults in US courts. Children cannot. How many of the 17 year old young men are really 25 and future gangbangers? The implications are huge. Most 17 year olds can fend for themselves. Five year olds cannot.
Is there research on national differences in children's mental health? Do other developed countries show similar trends and do less developed countries have different trends? Would be interesting!
It would be good to have systematic data on this, but I don't think there have been any studies with comparable measures of mental health across cultures. I met a woman some years ago who came from Kenya at age 16. She told me that her first impression of America was how unhappy and unfree the children are. I've also heard from others coming so-called "undeveloped" or "developing" countries that children are much happier there than in the US and many other developed countries. Research by Suniya Luthar in the US has revealed that the most unhappy, stressed kids are those attending "high-achievement schools." These are often kids from wealthy, high-achieving families.
Interesting! My partner is sudanese and she remembers her childhood as idyllic despite having very little. Funny how that works huh!
Indeed, the kids that John Holt wrote about in "How Children Fail" were bright kids in a private "progressive school" that did not use punishment, just relying on communicating a sense of disappointment in the kids who couldn't or wouldn't perform as expected. That simple way of taking ownership of them was enough to cause serious distress to some of them.
I understand that there is a substantial difference between being in charge and experiencing freedom. It's the difference between being the manager and being the subordinate - being the manager is generally more responsibility and more stress, and if you're not seeking that kind of role you're probably unhappy in a manager's role.
Let's make the subordinate analogous to the child, and the manager analogous to the parent...
Whether you're actually happier in the subordinate role depends (in part) on whether your manager is micromanaging or enables you to have freedoms in your work; permits minor risk-taking, self efficacy, self management, allows mistakes, and acts as a helpful guide. That's a happier subordinate.
To me, that's the parents practical role, make sure everyone gets resources, breaks and sick leave, scaffolds, provides emotional support, signposts, actively provides training when needed - but doesn't watch and judge and criticise.
Likewise play should be just that. The grown up is still in charge, they're making the big decisions kids are still struggling to make - we decide vegetables are on the dinner table, we decide bedtime is absolute, we decide what can't be on screens - we don't leave difficult self-management to immature brains (doing so would be being a rubbish "manager" which is maybe even more stressful to the subordinate because we have to step into their role) - we don't ask the child to parent or "to adult" - we do the "adulting" - but we sure as hell let the kids do the "kidding".
Not quite sure how this relates to what I said about John Holt, but since youre addressing me, and since I observe you are " training to be an educational psychologist", I'd be inclined to ask: besides giving children an opportunity to play, do you believe they can be allowed, to a significant extent, to choose what their interests are, and how to go about exploring them and developing their skills and abilities in a self- directed way, vs. being directed to acquire the skills and knowledge assigned as part of someone else's curriculum? I'd also be curious if there is even any mention of authors such as John Holt and Peter Gray, or of such alternatives as unschooling or the Sudbury model - or Peter Gray's idea for adopting and expanding upon the use of libraries as resources for self-directed learners - in the education program you have enrolled in.
I am not here to convince you of the value of these alternatives, mind you; if you're interested you can simply read John Holt's and Peter Gray's books. But I can say that for myself, being an unschooler has not meant rejecting legitimate authority. In fact my idea of the ideal human society, or the best representation I know of, is found on Star Trek TOS, the original with Captain Kirk. This group of people freely chose to serve on this ship, and to contribute what their talents are able, while accepting the authority of those in command (and not merely because they are in command; they continually demonstrate, within the limits of human fallibility, that they have earned that role, and know what they are doing). I also like that the people on the bridge crew separate their personal from their professional lives while on the bridge, and do not gossip or get into each others business (ie no boundaries) unlike later versions.
Oh, the last thing I was going to say, haha, we watched an episode of TOS literally last night. It's a great ideal model - although they are adults, and it is fiction.
What of Holt do you recommend I read first?
The most pleasant to read is How Children Learn, because it is his experiences watching children learn (mostly how to walk and talk) before they are in school; examples of "children using their minds well" as he puts it. How Children Fail is less pleasant to read, because it is his journal of how he himself stressed out his students, until he realized what he was doing. But his conclusion (in his revised edition) was that no changes in his behavior could significantly alter that; it was the nature of a relationship built on compulsion. Instead of Education comes closest to Peter Gray's arguments in Free to Learn, about how we can create healthy environments for children that are not schools.
There is another author I equally recommend, James Herndon, who wrote of his experiences teaching middle school: Way It Spozed to Be, and How to Survive In Your Native Land. I would really like to see Way It Spozed to Be made into a film.
I'll be interested to know if we go into alternative models too, my expectation is not, but I'm self-educating in these subjects are I think they are very compelling and I plan to bring them into discussion. I rather see getting the EP PhD as a way of springboarding the evidence-based models discussed by eg Gray - I think many children would benefit from eg part-time homeschooling - and while I can't say I'm wholly convinced by unschooling for all (because of the topic exposure limitations discussed, and parental limitations) there is so much merit in personalised education and self-directed learning. Was it Mark Twain who said "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education?" He makes a valid point, we school children into obeisance, we school children out of their natural curiosity - that has to be reversed!
I personally absolutely believe children can (and should!) be allowed to choose their own interests - I'm a huge fan of self- directed learning (partly from reading Gray and Kohn). I simultaneously believe in exposure to a wide curriculum so that children can work out what does interest them - I found all kinds of interest in stuff I was "made" to learn - and how we square that circle is something I'm open to suggestion on. For instance - I part-time homeschooled because I wanted my kids to experience other interests/knowledge to my own, but that has meant exposure to methods I entirely disapprove of (and lead me into training to be an Ed Psych to address those methods in schools).
I also don't see much merit in forcing children to take subjects they entirely reject, I'm always coming up against teachers wanting kids to be sat in their class learning the way they want to teach - I think many of our children would be happier and more willing/able to learn if we could give them autonomy over how they approach that subject in the first place - and indeed let them entirely reject s subject if they can't abide it (although I do find with the approach of self-directed genuine choices about how to approach the material many children choose to learn a subject they had previously rejected.l
Well, good luck on your journey. All I can say is that I used to browse the texts being used in the education department at UCSC, and they were all about either classroom control or else about shaping society, and nothing about how children actually experience school. And definitely nothing about letting them make their own decisions. It would have been interesting to hear of an education department that was different.
Wow. That was a lot of tangents.
I think I misunderstood your point, I thought you were talking about models Gray discusses where children are put in control of their the entire school and their entire education ("democratic" schools?) where children are in complete control, and I thought you were saying this model had been found to be distressing for the children. For me, that would suggest the level of transfer of responsibility in this (I now realise theoretical school) was "too much too soon", rather than a sign that the model should be thrown away altogether - that the children needed more adult guidance at that stage of development.
I see that what you were referring to was some self-styled progressive school" that transfers punishment from "taking away the goody" type punishment to a mental/social disapproval punishment - which is naturally just as ineffective and distressing. (From what I know of schools I'll bet they simultaneously have a "reward/praise for effort" type system to - with equal distress and lack of efficacy... *sigh*)
I'll go to another post to answer your other points.
Similarly for differences between ethnic groups in the U.S. , and between the documented and undocumented. I would actually expect the undocumented, with typically larger families (more opportunities for play) and less (I think) pressure to perform, to have lower rates of suicide.
Another thing that would get explained away by less access to screens, though.
And more community
Loved this. This particular post and the referenced paper, inspired me to write this poem. Hope the readers like my effort to raise awareness in this direction: https://thefoolsquest.blogspot.com/2023/09/letting-them-play.html
Thank you for this - I am a Play and Nature Facilitator in Gatineau Quebec - I brought traditional children’s games and songs back into the playground based on the work of the Opies in the UK - skipping, hand clapping songs, four square, catch and chase games and rhymes.
I work with older grades 5 and 6, give them ropes, balls, book of games. They are called Playmakers and devote a couple of hours a week to play with early grades.
The school Principal has noted a distinctly positive change in behaviour.
I also run a FB page called - Focus on Play and Nature
Yes. I couldn't agree more.
I work with teen-aged children at a specialist Social Emotional and Mental Health school, and an overwhelming number of them are simply play-deprived. All our kids have behaviour/learning differences that saw them ostracised by the others, singled out, picked on (by school staff), and ultimately denied the opportunities to learn, socialise and play with other children their age. Then they come to a school like ours where they are surrounded by other kids with functional ASD (ie with similar behaviour differences to each other) and they so want to play, but often adults tell them off for rough housing or horsing around... When ACTUALLY - I've read the Peter Gray Psychology textbook - I know it's vital for healthy bonding among children! I look out for "playface" and let them get on with it!
I also think it's really vital to enable kids to continue playing when they are teenagers. We often expect "better" behaviour, accuse them of being childish, effectively force them to grow up sooner than they should - when growing up isn't linear at all. I have (undiagnosed) traits of ASD myself, I often think of Youth Theatre when I think about play - Youth Theatre was effectively for 14-19 year olds who loved role play, and when I look back from my MSc Psychology perspective I realise loads of us had ASD traits, and all of us had a deep need to keep playing! And we were SO HAPPY when we got to play - those 2 hours were the happiest of my life, and so vtal for my wellbeing!
Perhaps we're also somewhat neglecting play in the adult. I think I'm right in thinking most other social animals play too. Where is the space in our lives for play? How do we play? Would we all be happier with more play?
Modern day public school is child abuse. We are homeschooling and always will. I don’t understand how parents are sending their children into these buildings of horror for 7 plus hours every day.